Yearning For Eden

I have recently been recalling a day that changed my life, specifically the unending sound of my friend’s mother’s wails at his funeral. A sound that penetrated to my core, harkened me to a pain I had never been conscious of. 

I call my old friend, Steve, and ask him, “Do you remember Joel’s funeral?” 

He pauses for a long moment, finally replies, “I really can’t say if I was actually present there.”

I say, “Had you been there, I have no doubt you would have recalled the way his mother’s wails, without end, had felt.”

“Oh, wait, I’m remembering now. Yes, I was there. I guess I must have blocked my recall. That sound was too much for me to be with. Her cries went so deep and somehow made me feel helpless.”

““Yes, I said, I was hearing-feeling-palpating the sound of all people’s suffering, an unbroken strand going back to the inception of our current civilization, as encapsulated through the agony that emerged through Joel’s mother.”

“Right, that does make sense,” Steve reflects.

Our current time hearkens me back to the days leading up to the Holocaust. Eerily similar. Uncanny to witness society presently carrying on its life in a collective state of denial. Again. At the same time as Israel, the Mideast nations, and the United States, are edging themselves toward all-out war.  Israel is at last perceived as being vulnerable to the kill.

Is Armageddon, long predicted to begin in the Mideast, underway?

Joel’s parents, as well as a good number of the adults in my neighborhood, were Holocaust survivors, people forever sentenced to their private hell worlds.  These adults and their children, "greenies", as my friends and I referred to them, were that group of Jewish immigrants we often kept at a distance. The telepathic message we operated on was “they carried something transmissible:” Endless pain of the unspeakable while interned at the camps— a pain incurred while going through the seven gates of hell.  Reward for having survived. 

And what of Joel? He had a brilliant mind, soft-spoken that he was. Yet Joel never joined my friends and I in pickup ball games after school.  Why not, I would wonder?  

We were seniors in high school the day the tragedy occurred. He’d been riding with friends in a packed car, on their way from Boulder in search of  some fun in Denver. His friend had accelerated onto the interstate outside of Denver when, suddenly, the car flipped. Joel’s friends all walked away from the car. 

Joel, however, died on impact, his frail bones crushed. 

Life  somehow went on for me—I tried to get away from the pain of his passing. I recall very little. Until then, I had perceived myself as being immortal.

I can’t remember the time of year the tragedy occurred. I would later present my high school graduation address, yet say nothing about our classmate. 

I feel certain that my life had, by my denial, lost something precious. He was a jewel, inheritor of a deep Jewish tradition.  I can only say these words now. Then, I was sleepwalking, seeking pleasure, just as Joel and his friends likely were that night.

Today, I wonder if we will wake up in time. I’m recalling how I made a commitment in the days following Joel’s passing, a commitment to waking up in the spirit of living life as a human being. Joel lives on in me as a spiritual ancestor.