Cynthia Levinson Care Page

I’ve sent this to a number of people, but I’m putting it here too in case some readers who might be interested will stumble across it:

A little more than a month has passed since Cindy died, and I get asked a lot how I’m doing. My standard answer starts with a couple ways of framing:

 --- the earthquake is over, but there are lots of unpredictable emotional aftershocks

 --- I’m past the Shock & Numbness phase, but normal life doesn’t seem normal. Lots of How Can This Be Real moments that can be disorienting and distressing

 --- many times emotions collide: how much to lean into or away from grief, how to feel it’s OK to feel OK when I do, how keep her with me and move forward too, etc

 I suppose at some point a fascination with grief can start to make others uncomfortable, but grieving has a logic of its own. One key part of “after” life was the 30 days of daily religious services I attended to honor her memory.  I found the routine and --- surprisingly, the ritual --- spiritually nourishing. Cindy’s eyebrows always shot up at the word “spiritual.” Usually mine too. I hope those of you I send these four pages to don’t find it too tedious Perhaps it’s a way of keeping Cindy in your thoughts and hearts too…

       I am a most unlikely daily mourning ritual observer. I didn’t do it for my father, and he asked us not to. But the ritual mourning prayers and the place where I’d be doing it meant a lot to Cindy, so I just committed without much deliberation. One problem in writing about a fairly traditional type of observance is that the spectrum of Jewish religious practice can be mystifying, even to many Jews. So how explain it to outsiders? I’ve tried to do it without being either too reverent or irreverent.

 One basic mourning commitment is to say “kaddish”, the mourner’s prayer, for a set amount of time. Jewish practice and custom is intellectually intricate and often arcane; there are rules and exceptions to rules and different interpretations of rules, etc. There are other customs/demands for remembrance too. Many think of saying kaddish as a year long commitment. Plus yearly anniversaries, set to a moving Hebrew calendar --- just to add to the degree of difficulty. But even the year thing has permutations: actual practice for some groups is 11 months, not 12.

 Why?. Different interpreters and communities make their own choices on duration. Our ritual director says “eleven.” Basically, some 13th century source says that “the wicked in Gehinom took 12 months for their souls to reach the highest levels of heaven.” But most Jews don’t even believe in a physical heaven!? Never mind. So, the reasoning goes, if the wicked took 12 months, we’ll mourn for 11: because our beloved Was Not Wicked. Welcome to Talmudic reasoning. But, traditionally, the year(ish) is for parents and children. For spouses the allotted time is 30 days. Though many people today may just do a year for anyone in the family. Thirty struck me as the perfect amount for the act to stay meaningful, helpful and not something I would treat as an increasingly resented chore.

 It’s not a prayer that religious custom allows you to say by yourself. You need a minyan (quorum) of 10. It used to be men, but now men or women, at least at our conservative temple (shul, synagogue, whatever --- more insider confusing terminology). But some do say it by themselves for the comfort it brings if finding a group is too arduous. And I cheated a couple days by joining the group virtually. But I found being with a gathering of supporters did matter to me. I could have gone to a shorter evening service to do this, but preferred the morning time. And came to think a 40ish minute observance time a good block to have meaningful daily impact.

 And then there’s the prayer itself. I realized right away that the weekday morning prayer service had many different kaddishs, similar prayers of thanks for and praise to a divine entity. But there’s one specific mourner’s version, said 3 times in oour short 40ish minute service. Twice, almost in succession at the end --- overkill or emphasis, depending on your point of view. Why the repeats? Haven’t pursued that yet. And, as some of you know, the prayer for the dead doesn’t mention dying or losing loved ones or honoring their memory, etc. It just profusely praises God (and lots of different words or phrases to refer to such entity since he/she/it is too holy and all powerful to mention the Real Name). Some phrases: “May god’s name be exalted and hallowed, his sovereignty soon accepted… glorified, celebrated, lauded, worshiped, exalted, honored, extolled and acclaimed… Lots of current Jewish religious practice incorporates the Middle Ages wholesale. Or earlier. Read the English on the facing page of the prayer book and much of the service sounds like the practice of a small, threatened tribe huddling in the desert thousands of years ago.

 There’s a lot about Jewish practice that seems natural and essential to practitioners but might alienate the uninitiated.  Or reluctant observers like me. The head coverings. The shoulder covering prayer shawls. The standing for this (many do: why not all??!), turning right for that, covering eyes for this line, fingering prayer shawl strings (tzitzit) for that. Whew. So many prayers and practices for so many different occasions. Designed, I’ve thought, to cement the devotion of believers. But it repel skeptics, too, I surmise.

 One such example: in these early services most men put on tefillin. Leather straps with little black boxes attached (a prayer inside) that have very specific wrapping/unwrapping  procedures for arms and head. It’s deeply moving to believers, but I’ve always thought it look repellent or ridiculous. Way too much like the garb of the ultra orthodox “crazies.” There are lots of I’ll do this/not that decisions in religious practice. I understand there’s a tenuous dynamic that exists between any minority and majority community, and clinging to tradition and being true to oneself can seem preferable to “selling out” to fit in. But sometimes it strikes us skeptics as more a clinging to “guns and religion” type intransigence.

 So, if you walked in on these services cold (I was lukewarm), there’s lots that would be pretty mystifying and potentially off-putting. How could you possibly fit in? In fact, I believe I was the only new guy or gal over my month. And there had to be a decent number of temple members who have lost family members during the time I attended. Seemingly no person younger than I was doing the morning kaddish thing. And usually I was the only or 1 of 2 who didn’t put on tefillin. Men. Women usually don’t. Though one of our female rabbis did. Good for her, though I wasn’t tempted to follow.

 I could fit in and feel comfortable at these services because a) I knew people there b) I was committed to being there and c) people took care of me. I no longer bristled at the imputation (real or just in my head?) that I’m a Bad Jew and I need instruction to be a Good One. This time I felt many there had cherished Cindy, understood why I was there, and quietly welcomed me. I was willing to look/be ignorant and accept guidance.

 It was reassuring to see many of Cindy’s compatriots from the temple sisterhood there day after day too. The whole group (20 to 40 most days) was interesting to observe: lots more joking and side conversations during the service than I’d imagined. And there was the guy older than I who usually wore cycling shorts and shirt, the much older guy who sat to my right who usually shuffled in 15 minutes late, etc etc.  Lots of accomplished people and interesting stories for another writer’s version. And --- most days --- someone called out the pages so I had some sense where we were.

 I can read Hebrew if I already know the prayer or chant. So I can’t really read Hebrew anymore. Much of the service is praising God’s amazing powers, thanking him for singling out and helping Jews (don’t let anti-Semites see this!), an intricate mix of different intricate sections that over days start to fit a pattern. There are a always some bits in any prayer book that I find edifying and worth recalling; often I’m reading in one place when the service is in another. My favorite in this one:

Rabbi Schuel ben Nahmani said: We find that the Holy One created  everything  in the world; only falsehood and exaggeration were not God’s doing. People devised those on their own.

 There’s no sermon on any days, just the chanting. And different melodies for different sections. And torah reading ritual (I could spend pages on this alone) Monday and Thursday. I still have to learn why those days. I preferred the shorter days without.

 I was most fortunate to have a long time neighbor and, like Cindy, long time temple leader who I was delighted to learn (only some 30 some years later) is a regular attendee of daily morning services. Like Cindy, he has the ability I don’t to take what’s worthwhile in religious practice and ignore the rest. He credits Cindy with his reading the new alternate section of one prayer praising the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) by adding Matriarchs too.

 It’s not supposed to be used at this particular service, but a couple women who led services on a rotating schedule snuck it in. Much to my friend Rick’s and my glee. He joked about wanting to write: Minyan, the Musical. Have to decide how reverent or irreverent to be I replied. Yes he said, and some would love it, some hate it. Like so much else in life, I thought.

 There’s way more I could describe: the various “honors” during torah reading for one. Early on I got congratulated for pulling the strings to open the torah ark/cabinet. Basically, the only task our ritual director could be sure at that point I wouldn’t flub. One more key detail: I was wearing Cindy remarkable hand knit prayer shawl. Which, of course, many of her friends recognized. Once I made the mistake when taking it off at the service end of holding it to my face: way too emotional to repeat daily. Much more detail I could include, but there’s likely already too much. Ask me if you want more.

 I was asked to say a few words on the last day, right before the concluding prayers. I told people I was a most unlikely minyan attendee, etc. Grateful for this and that person’s help and Rebbe Rick’s (joke) guidance and company. Uplifted seeing Cindy’s sisterhood comrades, etc. Hoped in coming months to find an enduring way to honor her memory, etc.

 My one specific observation: I had been hearing people recite kaddish at Saturday services off and on for over 60 years.  But I’d never given a thought to the brief parts where the congregation joins in on a quick line. Just part of the practice I’d heard without really hearing. Until I was the mourner. Then, on many days when the congregation joined in…

       Y’he sh’meh rabbvo m’orach l’olam ulolmey olmayo…

 …on many days I felt my heart lifting and a wave of emotional support wash over me. This is why you should say kaddish in a minyan if at all possible. Or I hope in your tradition or life there’s some equivalent thing to bring you comfort when/if you need it. Em and I have been lighting candles at a set time each week also. That works for us too.

 The morning group skews old. But I hope that such a group is always there for anyone who needs it. I don’t want to attend any religious services daily. Or weekly. But this is my favorite service. I’ll be back. But on a day they don’t read torah. Forty minutes is plenty.

these last musings, inevitably, have become more about me than Cindy. I think it’s a good place to stop writing. Or at least regular public posts. I need to find a way to live with Cindy not living, and that will take time.

I don’t get the full relief and rejuvenation from nature that Wendell Berry’s poem promises, but I do want to end this trilogy on a more hopeful note. We all need at least an opening to hope. And I do find a semblance of peace in trying to find and put together words to make sense of life. Rereading this just now, I think, in the last line, not just of me but of her too.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS by Wendell Berry

I am trying to move on, afraid of leaving Cindy behind. I presume that’s the way it is for most people who think a little. The departed are entirely at the mercy of our memories now. That is frightening and I feel a huge sense of responsibility for how her memory survives, that I can imagine becoming very distorted and distorting.

In a similar way, the responsibility I felt for her over these last years was intense and complex. I’m still living more there than in the previous 45+ years. She was so fragile, vulnerable and in need of protection and help. So stripped of the pretenses and defenses (often, anyway) the kind that shield most of us from the depths of too much deep feeling; it was like I could touch her heart through her skin.

This is a poem plumbing the depths of a more general despair. But to come to terms with that, to escape it, I think:

When people say, “we have made it through worse before”

                                                                                   — Clint Smith

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones of those who did not make it, those who did not survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who did not live to watch the parade roll down the street. I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

so, my mother just got out of the hospital after a scary episode, this is my father’s birthday (he’d have been 102 today), and Cindy has been gone 10 days.

Here’s one of the most devastatingly understated poems I know about grief and loss:

ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

I don’t know who’s out there reading anymore, and right now it doesn’t matter. I need to do this for me. I’m thinking now of three poems I want to post here this week. If you’re there reading, if it helps you too, all the better. Today I have a small early to late GBBS end note:

Many people over these last years have asked us about The Great British Baking Show, or mentioned how they had started watching after I wrote about Cindy’s enjoyment of it a long time back. I was pleased and touched to see how they’d remembered one of her first signs of sustained intellect when she was in Spaulding Charlestown rehab after getting her shunt replaced (too soon of course, but an early sign of medical unpredictability). That stay, that show, were key first steps in her becoming Cindy again.

Vanity, yes, but I am putting my service eulogy here:

I used to annoy Cindy making flippant comments about aging and death. Like wishing we came with a self destruct button that would sense when to activate. And then the love of my life became a getting older, cognitively and physically impaired person. And every flicker of her enjoyed life became precious beyond words. To filch a line from HBO’s Deadwood: some things are easier told than saddled and rode.

When we met she fancied herself a bit of a tragic romantic heroine, but she always had too much common sense for that. She had many practical talents; she could knit, crochet, sew (though never really used that expensive new sewing machine), remember and follow directions, cook meals difficult to time, write psychologically sensitive and acute torah interpretations, keep clear lists and neatly ordered files, soothe ruffled feelings and keep hers in check. She was Rich’s rudder, Emily’s anchor and the center of my world. She could tactfully hold her tongue, but she was remarkably guileless, straightforward, honest and honorable. Ok. Stubborn too. She saw herself as a worker bee, not the queen. Her sister was always the queen. She hated even the idea of downhill skiing, but snowshoeing crossed the earth’s terrain at a speed she could savor. When her fitbit said she hadn’t yet hit 10,000 steps that day, she would circle our living room through the dining room and kitchen until she got there. That was Cindy.

 It would have been better if she were the caretaker and I the neurologically impaired patient, since she was the neuropsychologist. She was so much the better, more useful person. The one advantage I had for this task was physical strength.

 I knew, very quickly, I loved her more than anyone I’d ever met. She said she was taken by my ability to explain Hegel. Of course, no one can explain Hegel. It would have been 50 years this Thanksgiving (oh, David --- and Ruthie ---, how can I thank you) that we met and swooned. And 49 years and whatever days later I still marvel that she loved me. Did I say that another one of her virtues was steadfast loyalty?

When she had her sub arachnoid bleed, most likely a ruptured aneurysm, that was a shock no life partner is ready for. But I saw enough of her remaining always, as did many of you, and hoped for more. Wanted to make however much time she had left the best it could be. I vowed to make up for all the times I felt I had failed her over the years (that’s a pretty universal life disaster type pledge I imagine). Impossible, of course. Towards what turned out to be the end, I had fleeting worries that I was pushing her ---  to get up, to exercise, to do various therapies --- for me more than her. The bleed had stolen so many things, including energy, strength and motivation. But I wanted to keep her here, despite what was for her a nearly unimaginably difficult life.

 I delighted in the smallest gains she might make, from being able to sit without falling back, to assisted steps, to brushing her own teeth. Was grateful to watch her swallow water without coughing. (SwalIowing is an underappreciated miracle. ) Could still marvel and delight watching the slow steady path of spoon to mouth when she ate cereal or soup. She just assumed she’d always done these things. Our pleasures were simpler, more elemental.

A walk with friends. Sitting in the kitchen watching tree branches  blowing in a breeze. Her days were very uneven. What she could and couldn’t do was frustrating and fascinating. Some of it was heart breaking, some wonderful beyond words, But she was still Cindy. One day she calmly stated that she had lots of Yucks in her life. We talked about what she wanted. More Un-Yucks, she said.

In the end, as physically ravaged as she was, I did not want to let her go. I did not know how I could live in a world that she was not in. She wasn’t the same Cindy these last three plus years, but she was still Cindy. The knitting fell mostly along the wayside (despite incredibly kind and patient help from Temple knitters). She kept no more impeccable records, journals and lists. But…she was still able to sing along to countless show tunes. Still able to finish Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me limerick quizzes before contestants. … Her life and my life became almost indistinguishable. Like all of this, a curse and a blessing.

I wake up and hear the birds still, somehow, chirping. I cannot imagine that when I go downstairs I will not see her sleeping. I will not be waiting to see her wake and smile and nod her head when I ask if she wants a hot drink. So many times in the last 3 and a half years I’ve thought: I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I felt fear, agony or despair. She was too often confused, frustrated or in pain. But I never wanted life to go on without her. I couldn’t imagine life without her. I can’t imagine life without her.

So I guess I should have updated the exact service information here. I know lots of people got things by emails, but others did not. I had a few things going on and forgot. Here is a link to watch a recording if you were frustrated by my dropping the ball.

Cindy died peacefully a little before 5 pm yesterday, July 3, 2021. No words right now, everything is loose in my head. She was 72. I will have information about a Temple Emanuel service in a few days. I am guessing now it will be Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday this week. No burial. The service will be open to fully vaccinated people and also available on a livestream link.

No change. This is pretty low key, now longer haul agonizing. I get her up to eat for two 2 hour stints these days, find food she doesn’t have to chew, feed her. Help her drink slowly so she doesn’t start coughing. Her eyes are open, she can be slowly responsive with a word or two or nod --- or not so much. One evening she had a small fever. No repeat. I try to make my mind quiet, focus on nothing but the task at hand as much as possible.

Talking to PCP office about retesting for infection once antibiotics should be out of her system. If I can get a urine sample.

Talking to her rehab doc about possibility that it just might take her weeks to recover.That an infection might be able to put her into this zombie-like state.