Hi everybody,
The theme for this year's Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur services was "Passages". Here's my talk:
Passages
(For Louis, Frances, Mitzi, and M. [my daughter])
A few months ago my 26 year old daughter, M., e-mailed me a link to the Google street view photograph of a 6 story brick apartment building in Brooklyn. It was not the townhouse in Brooklyn where she lives. Rather, the photo showed a rather ordinary and peaceful looking six story brick apartment building on a busy city street. It was two doors down from the house my maternal great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandmother, and her two younger siblings lived. The reason M. sent it to me was that it was the building from which my great-grandfather, Louis, then in his mid 40’s, jumped to his death.
Most people would look at the photo briefly, think to themselves, “poor man”, and move on. After all, it was almost 100 years ago. But not me. Somehow, I’m drawn to pain and suffering. Or, it’s drawn to me. For example, the other day I was driving home from the dog park and I saw a road sign that said, “blind driveway ahead” and my heart sank and I immediately said to myself “Oh my god—not another one. Can’t anyone do anything? And then I catch myself.
So, I look at the photograph and zoom in to look up at the top of the building. (I’m not sure Google had this use in mind when they invented streetview technology) And suddenly I’m Louis, my great-grandfather, standing on the edge. All I feel is inescapable pain. I don’t look down because it’s too scary, and it may stop me from doing what I need to do. And I make the final decision for the 1000th time to end my suffering. I close my eyes, and either by will or fate, I jump.
I suppose you might think that that’s not a good thing, to respond to a photograph in this way. And you might ask (as my psychiatrists did in my two failed therapies): so where did you get that---that, shall we call it, extreme sensitivity?
When my mother was dying 17 years ago one day she said to me, before eating breakfast, and in a “by the way” tone of voice: “You know, people in my family committed suicide.” And I said, “I know”, and to prove my point, I listed all of them: “Louis, Nana Frances’s sister, Edna, and Edna’s son—I can’t remember his name—and Louis’s son Norman refused a life-saving operation.” And my mother said: “Norman didn’t refuse a life-saving operation.” And I said: “Well that’s what I was told at the time.” And then, without pause, we moved on to the scrambled eggs.
My mother, Mitzi, was intellectual, tough, and secretive. She rarely shared anything personal unless there was a particular reason and certainly, nothing ever about her vulnerability. However, she always tried to do the right thing, and dying, she felt obligated to tell me something that she had never wanted to talk about. I knew, and she knew I knew, it was not about Louis and his children. It was about her. What she was telling me was that she had often felt despair during her adult life, that it was an inherited trait, and she knew she had passed it on to me.
So, here I am holding the bag. And now you know why seeing a sign that says “blind driveway ahead” affects me the way it does. You might think it strange, but I would not trade the bag for anything. Not that it hasn’t caused me a great deal of suffering. It has. I know what Louis was feeling on the roof. But the passage of genes from Louis to my grandmother, to my mother, and now to me has affected my life in positive ways as well. My extreme sensitivity has allowed me to make attachments to my family, my patients, and a small number of friends in unusual ways. These attachments are, I think, the best part of life. Of course they also create an obligation to stick around. Sometimes I think about my grandmother, Frances, 16 at the time, looking up at the roof of the apartment building from which her father jumped. I imagine what it must have been like for her traversing that same sidewalk for years afterwards.
I also think about my daughter, M., and my genetic passage to her. She and I have had long talks about what it is like for each of us being in the world--how it is the same and how it is different. These talks I will always remember and cherish.
And I think about Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, a poem about choosing whether or not to continue living. Frost and his children faced very difficult genetic passages. Frost survived. His son, Carol, did not. You may remember the last stanza of the poem:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Have a good year.
