Cain

This post also appears on my Blog- http://alittlepileofseeds.blogspot.com/ I am placing it here because I hve heard from many that it has helped them to reconcile the complaints of their friends and family about their "non-productive" behavior while they are greiving.. One Thursday this past April Jesse (my seven-year-old) was running a temperature of 101 degrees when he woke up in the morning. I stayed home with him. Around noon I had to take him out to do a couple of errands that couldn't wait. On our way to the car, we found a dead song sparrow lying in the driveway next to the car. I explained to Jesse that sometimes a bird will get fooled by the way sunlight reflects off glass and fly into a window with so much force that they break their necks. I surmised that that is what happened to this poor little bird. Jesse proceeded to inspect all the windows of the car until he found a tiny fluff of feather still clinging to the glass at the point of impact. We decided that we would bury the bird when we returned. When we returned, however, Jesse was spiking another fever and was so tired I took him inside and we forgot about the bird. The next morning the bird was still there but I had to hurry big brother Dave off to school while my wife Cathy stayed with Jesse. The bird lay there unburied until I got home from work. When I finally got the chance to dig a little grave and go to collect the bird for burial, it was about 6pm on Friday. As I approached it, I couldn't believe what I saw. There was a pile of sunflower seeds next to its beak. Not just a little pile, it was very nearly as big as the bird. At first I thought maybe Jesse had done this but as I looked more carefully, I could see that the seeds had been carried there and the shells had been cracked open and the kernels had been left in the forlorn hope that they might inspire a miracle. The little bird who did this beautiful, heartbreaking thing was undoubtedly the mate of the other. A song sparrow is a small bird, unable to carry more than one of those seeds at a time. One can only imagine the desperate emotion that drove that bird to and from the bird feeder so many times on this errand of devotion. Of course, that was the height of mating season. Animal behaviorists might tell you that all this is no more than an artifact of the mating behavior that was interrupted by this untimely death. I wouldn't get involved in that discussion myself. There is probably a little truth to that theory but there is a greater truth to be had here. These are times in which loyalty and devotion are easy to mock. In both business and our personal lives we are encouraged to think about the cost/benefit ratio of everything we do. Is the status quo "working" for you right now? Are you getting the maximum return on your time and money? If not, change things! Lay off 10% of the workforce. Leave your relationship. Forget doing what you love and learn to love doing something that pays better. We often take the paradigms of the global marketplace and evolution to indicate that we need to make these decisions with an entirely cold and appraising intellect. Yes, what happened to this little bird is sad, but if you look deeper, there is hope and comfort that outweighs the sadness. As it is written in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.” The cost of building that pile of seeds was far in excess of any possible benefit for the surviving bird. A more “adaptive” behavior, one that would have yielded a better return would have been to move on and find another mate. But those “adaptive” behaviors are in the house of feasting. In the house of mourning you can glimpse the greater power that redeems the sadness, pain and privations from which feasting and wealth can only provide ephemeral insulation. If we only had eyes to see it and a heart to understand it, it is everywhere but we can encounter it most directly when the time of loss comes. It is this spirit (force? being? order?) that transcends the simplistic logic and arithmetic of narrow self-interest. Call it God or Karma or Love or anything else you like - It shines through in that little pile of seeds and it animates billions of such miracles every second. © 2006 Jerome N. Gould

My family sustained a loss almost fifty years ago. My parents have confronted the loss of my brother every day of their lives since then. Because it has proved helpful to others, I am positng this here in the event that someone here might find comfort and/or inspiration in it. I have also posted it on my Blog. (link below)Please know that if you are reading this, you are forging ahead with the rest of your life in your own way and you are on the road to bringing meaning and purpose to your loss. God bless you all. I have sometimes gotten irritated when well-meaning people refer to my brother’s death (I keep a separate website on the book I am writing about my brother’s death( http://home.comcast.net/~littlepileofseeds/ ) as “tragic”. I don’t like to seem ungracious or, worse yet, nit-picking in the face of the sincere concern of others but I make an important distinction. It is the word "tragic". Tragedy, to me, is something from which there is no possibility of recovery. Yes, my brother did not recover but that’s not what I mean. Recovery is for the living. A tragedy is an occurrence wherein darkness envelops the soul to the extent that the spirit that I wrote about as it shone through into my life through that little pile of seeds is no longer accessible. My mother and father are the great personal heroes and example in my life. As bereft as I was as a nine-year-old- finding my brother’s body in our basement, I can now see that their devastation as his parents was a more crushing blow. Ironically, I spent the next forty years of my life looking for answers to puzzles that my Mom and Dad were solving right in front of me. (Oh well, each of us has to follow our own path to its end.) Their strength and vitality carried them through. In a way that mirrored the primordial will to serve the divine presence in their lives that impelled Adam and Eve to answer Abel’s death by having a third child, Seth. My parents responded to my brother’s death by having another child. My kid brother Arthur, was born just a year later. By this and many other acts of generous faith they refused to be tragic. They are now 90 and 87 years old respectively, and enjoying a sweet and beloved old age. That is not to say that my parents ever forgot that they lost a thirteen-year-old son. Nearly fifty years later they still think of him countless times a day. In many ways the pain is still as fresh as it was the day he died. They live on Cape Cod, an hour and a half away and it’s sometimes not possible for us to see them more than a couple of times a month. This has been a good month and we’ve seen them three times already with a week and a half left to go. I treasure the time that I can spend with them. On our last visit, Dad and I were having a quiet talk when he said something that had me worried for a moment. He told me that he has never been afraid of dying since that horrible day because in the back of his mind there is the possibility that when he dies he might be able to see my brother again. When I looked at him for reassurance that he was not throwing in the towel on life, he smiled and I understood for the first time precisely what makes my father a real hero in the classic sense. He has never been afraid of dying but he has always had the courage and strength to go on living. Not just existing either, he has given his best- every day of his life. He loves to tell jokes and never offends anyone. His greatest joy is other people, especially his family. His crowning distinction, though, is the quiet, dignified strength with which he is thankful for what he has, and preserves it with his love. To me, his openness to all of life, his sense of humor and his enthusiasm for the struggle epitomize the wisdom that can come from “the house of mourning”(see: A Little Pile of Seeds above). He is the living embodiment of my favorite lines in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) “Go, eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy, for your action was long ago approved by God… Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that you have been granted to you under the sun- all your fleeting days…. Whatever it is in your power to do, do it with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going." Ecclesiastes 9:7-11 © Jerome Gould [url=http://alittlepileofseeds.blogspot.com/]My Blog