April, 2024 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
A couple of days from now, on March 27th, it will be Mickey’s second yarzheit.(I’ve decided to mark the Gregorian date for Mickey’s death, since that’s the one that all of his family and friends feel in our hearts. He died on 24 Adar II, so his yarzheit on the Jewish calendar will fall a week later, on April 3rd.) As the day comes close, I am struck by how near and yet how far away March 27, 2022 feels.Mickey and I were together for 33 years, married for 29 of those years, so of course he is deeply embedded in just about every memory I have for those years.
At the same time, I have been noticing lately that the quality of my memories feels different from how they felt closer to his death: more like stories, more like photographs, a little bit curated, not quite as immediate as they were a year or two, or 10 or 20 years ago. I remember thousands of things about him, but I have to work harder to conjure, say, the sound of his voice, or the way he looked in the morning when we woke up, or how he held a coffee cup.
My heart stopped for a minute a week or so ago to see someone walking by who looked stunningly like Mickey. But of course it wasn’t him. Just a couple days later I was standing in line at the grocery store behind a guy who was just Mickey’s size and build and wearing his exact Merrill shoes and beige Carhartt jeans. But his face was different. There was only one Mickey Chalfin, and he is no more.
Life somehow goes on without him. I am slowly taking hold of our—oops I mean “my”—house, changing a few things, fixing stuff. I have two rambunctious new kittens that know nothing of Mickey, though they would have delighted him. I’ve taken trips without him, and there were no FaceTimes with Mick in New York elevators or Prague trams or on Baja beaches. Two years ago, a year ago, six months ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that I could ever feel like an intact person ever again. But these days I often do.
A friend asked me the other day what I want to do this March 27th. And after some thought, I realized that what I really want to do is not so much to mourn him or to try to conjure him back to life through photos and stories and such. I want to honor him.
I hope that everyone has experienced deep love in their life, whether from a long-term partner or multiple partners, or from friends, family, animals. I know that whomever you love will be as beautiful to you as Mickey was to me. When someone shows you pictures of their grandchild or their dog, you smile and say, “Oh they are gorgeous. Now let me show you MINE.” Our own beloveds are larger than life to us, or large as life. Mickey feels that way to me.
There is something sacred about loving someone, even in the midst of all the mundane and sometimes maddening details. For 33 years Mickey welcomed me into his world and changed mine. I became part of his three beloved children, his friends, his stories, preoccupations, pleasures, and the occasional crisis. He absorbed my people and stories and passions as well. I became part of his body and he of mine. We turned gray together. We experienced each other’s illnesses, knew more about each other’s aches and pains than anyone else had to. Mickey was his own person, and I was and am my own as well. But we were also something together that was a bit different, and more, than either of us on our own.
It is, besides many other things, a great honor to occupy that place in another person’s heart. Unlike some couples, we started out kind of cool and cautious and fell more in love with each other over the years and decades. We had our stuff—everyone does—especially in the early years, and I had no idea when Mickey and I first got together how much I would come to love our life together. Nor how lucky and grateful I would feel to have lived half my life, almost exactly, with him. Nor how changed I feel—largely for the better I’m pretty sure—by our years together.
Even as I write these words I am thinking of those of you who may not have had a long love relationship, or who had one that ended badly, or who struggle in those intimate places. It was pure kismet that Mickey won my pie at the Hanukkah raffle back whenever that was and that there was a hailstorm so that he couldn’t drive home the night he came to collect it. And it was some bumbling luck that we two managed to stay together to the point where neither of us could imagine any other path. I have no idea how any of it happened.
During the months of Mickey’s illness, he said any number of times how very sorry he was for me, for what I would go through after his death. He was right about how completely wringing and excruciating that aftermath would be for me. A friend whose husband had died some years before Mickey said to me, “Your heart won’t heal. But you will grow a new heart.” I think I am starting to get that. There is a heart in me that will always be broken. But two years down the road, I feel some new tissue coming together inside me. It’s pretty fragile still. But my blood seems to be pumping in there at least sometimes.
When I started writing these notes I was thinking about honoring Mickey on the occasion of his yarzheit. I kind of thought I might write the eulogy I never gave, about that very specific, funny, loving, ecstatic, annoying, inspiring bolt of light that was Mickey Chalfin. But, as often happens when I sit down to write my column to all of you, what came out was different.
Fairly soon after Mickey and I got together I had a serious accident in my kayak and had to be rescued by the Mendo Fire Department. That evening I called Mickey, who lived an hour away, and I kept crying, “I almost drowned!” He answered very ardently, “You wouldn’t have drowned. I would have swooped down from the sky and rescued you.” It was an odd thing to say, and I’ve mulled it over now and then in the ensuing decades. What I hear in it now is the cherishing, that he would have become superhuman on my behalf, bent worlds for my wellbeing. In fact he couldn’t, and I couldn’t for him either. But I know he would try, because in a million ways over the years he did. His superpower was love. His memory is indeed a blessing. Thank you all for letting me remember him so vividly in your company.
PAIGE NOTES
April rolls in this year during the last week leading up to the Hebrew month of Nisan. The Torah refers to Nisan as Chodesh HaAviv “the month of spring,” or even “the month of flowers.”What beautiful alignment with the rhododendrons and trilliums blossoming all around us! I love thinking of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt/”the narrow place”/restriction, as a budded flower beginning to bloom. We often see flowers in bunches, yet each one has been on its own individual journey toward the sun. The Passover story, the heaviness of this past winter, and life in general constantly remind us of the delicate balance between our individual perspectives and the collective consciousness.
Some flowers don’t ever bud, whereas plants right next to them flourish. We often refer to the Israelites as if they were sharing one experience, but think about each of them in their individualexperience of the the Red Sea? What was it like for the mom trying to shepherd all her kids out the door? What was it like for the old man who didn’t want to leave his forever home? What was it like for the young kid who had just witnessed death for the first time, during the tenth plague? What was it like for the person who had always been jealous of Moses, so didn’t want to follow his lead?
The Buddhist monk Sensei Ogui teaches in Zen ShinTalksthat “a flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” It finds its own potential for growth, and bursts forth.As I watch the sun pour in on this glorious spring day, I am awed to know that wildflowers continue to bloom spring after spring and that Jews worldwide continue to have Pesach Seders Nisan after Nisan. We have each endured our own winter storms and now we get to come together, to cross the Red Sea under the full moon, to blossom.
with blessings for collective liberation,
rabbi paige
