This mother-of-my-friend was the type of mother-of-a-friend who opened her home and refrigerator and cabinets and holiday get-togethers to all of her daughter's friends. She was kind and unique, a little salty, and always in good spirits when I saw her, despite ten years of chemo. She watched TV with us, and laughed at what we laughed at, but also at jokes we made about what we laughed at. And she was more.
The day after my grandmother's funeral, I visited my friend and her mother in the hospital. It was my first experience with the arbitrary cruelty of cancer, and I admit I was not prepared. Because, in my sadness about my own grandmother, I still had a sense of peace about it; she was loved and lived a loving life. Of course I didn't want her to die, but she was honored in her death by sons and daughters and grandchildren dedicated to helping her make that passage.
Peace is harder to come by when it's cancer, robbing years and good people of them. It's not fair.
The second night I went to the hospital, the cantor from the synagogue my friend's mother attended came to sing to her. My friend's family allowed all of the people who were there to surround her hospital bed while the cantor sang the song welcoming the sabbath, as it was Friday evening.
As I experienced this ritual, my thoughts went to a similar moment during the hospice care of my grandmother. Various members of my family surrounded her bed, and sang a hymn to her, somewhat together, somewhat on-key, somewhat desperately. The obvious and most artificial difference between these two moments is that my family is Christian and my friend's family is Jewish.
I hope and believe these songs brought some peace to my grandmother and my friend's mom, but I can guarantee they brought peace to those of us around them, trying to articulate the sadness, anger, and longing we felt at what was happening, at the gratuitous apathy and necessity of death. We (people in general) divide meaning and assign virtue to beliefs and actions, and it often seems very important to do so. I relished the opportunity to observe these distinctions fall away, and see them rendered meaningless.
The songs and their words didn't matter; they merely gave expression to the crying souls, the saying of goodbye-- the last, realest one.
