Living a Life in One Day

Monday was one of those days that happens once in a lifetime. It was a day of joys and sorrows, of support and overwhelming love.

At 3:40pm, I left the house, left the kids with Keith, and went to a friend’s house for the bris milah of her son. As the only other Jewish mama there who had been present at her son’s bris, I held this friend of mine while she shook and teared up during the ceremony and celebrated with the family afterwards. She and I are joined by yet another link in a chain of holiness stretching back thousands of years – we are mothers of boys who will become Jewish men and we added another link in that chain in that little house by bringing another child into the covenant. I helped her wipe her tears, cooed over those sweet little feet, heard her birth story, poured wine for family, and ate too many peanut-butter cookies.

Around 5pm, I rushed out to teach b’nai mitzvah lessons to a few of my 12 year old students. I marveled at how accomplished they were, how confident yet how unsure. I laughed with one boy when his voice cracked. I commiserated with a girl who was complaining about a tennis injury. I gave a “tough love” speech to a kid who just started his lessons, emphasizing his independence and responsibility to practice and seek help if he needed it. I high-fived a young man who finished learning everything he needed to learn a month before his bar mitzvah, struggling weekly with a tutor between sports practices to get it all learned. He glowed with pride and I was proud for him. I was proud of all the young men and women I worked with in that hour and a half, those children on the cusp of adulthood, longing to dive right in.

At 7pm, I found myself back in the same neighborhood as I was at 4pm, in a very different house. Our host was a man mourning the loss of his mother, and I was one of many mourners reciting ancient words to comfort the living and honor the dead. I looked around her house, filled with people who loved her and loved her family, with mementos and books and remnants of her life here, and marveled that at 95 years old, she had seen so much and lived so heartily. I recited “Life and Death are twins” and my eyes welled up with tears, my mind playing back through my day to the bris and the promise of new life and that sacred miracle that is birth. I listened to stories, gave my condolences after the brief service, and left with a much heavier heart.

Life and Death are twins, inextricably linked in the passage of time. My job, my calling, is as a guardian over a cusp in time, a place where one breath, one heartbeat, one second is the difference between life and death. These sacred moments, where the Gate of Heaven is open and either a soul enters the body in birth or the soul leaves the body in death, those moments are heavy and heady. I sat in my car after shiva and breathed heavily with my head on the steering wheel. I had witnessed a holy few hours, a lifetime in one day.

I started the car and drove to dinner with my family, hugging my babies and my husband a little tighter. These are the days that give life meaning – they are the “living” in our daily lives.

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