Wailing and the Work Upon Us

It’s all of a piece.

My father had recently returned from military service in WWII.  His service took him, eventually, to Germany.  He saw much. 

He saw roads lined with refugees, in line on one side of the road traveling in one direction and in line on the other side of the road traveling in the opposite direction.  Every day.  Every night people disappeared, somewhere, until the sun returned and the roads filled again.  Uprooted and displaced people, as far as he could see, all trying to get back to the places and, they hoped, to the people they had known and loved before, before the pain of forced separation and all that came with it.  They wanted to go home.

He saw survivors of the death camps.  He saw them in physical forms so incredibly depleted that one struggled to recognize them as human.

My father had also recently returned from visiting his father, my ‘posthumous grandfather’, a man I never met in person, only in tale, lots of tales.  My father’s father, a powerful man in body and spirit, lay in a nursing home, depleted, all but bed ridden, dying of colon cancer.

News of his death came soon, seemingly suddenly, after the visit.

My father, a lifelong New Englander, a land of many stonewalls, walked to one such wall in the rear of his sister’s property where he was staying temporarily.  He stood there and wailed.  He wailed about death.  He wailed that it came to one he loved and respected deeply.  He wailed that death had come to his father in a moment of aloneness. He wailed about loss.  He dug deeply into language he seldom used, visceral language, the language of pain and grief… and rage… a language likely enhanced by his recently completed military service.  He cursed in the very best of the King’s English, in the bluest of blue streaks. He stood alone, facing that wall as two of my aunts listened, watched and awaited his return to their house, their home.

I’ve visited that wall.  I’ve stood by it.  I’ve touched it.  I have also stood by its far older, bigger, and so much more prominent kin in Jerusalem.  The Western Wall. I touched it, not even a year ago.  I prayed there with my wife. We inserted our prayers—written and folded on transitory paper placed amidst seemingly timeless blocks of stone.

My thoughts and feelings over these past few days have taken me to both walls again. Walls of wailing.

May we share the work now upon us, the work that we need to do to recognize the human dwelling in our depleted forms, wherever and whenever we come upon them, in others… and in ourselves.  May we share the work of getting us home. All of us. Everywhere.