Life in a ‘Narrow Place’

In a three-hour period on a recent Sunday afternoon, we had reason to celebrate and mourn.

The original plan called for us to fly on the Saturday to Miami, where my wife would attend a Sunday “ladies lunch” for her soon-to-be 80-year-old aunt, while I hung out with her uncle, one of my favorite members of the family.

But on Friday afternoon, we received a call from the son of long-time friends, informing us that his mother had succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

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This is a family we have known for 35 years, back to when they lived in Marietta. At one time, my wife and I worked at CNN with the husband, while his wife handled on-screen graphics for various sporting events. Their son and our daughter were born a month apart. We have photos of them as infants and toddlers.

So, on Saturday, after canceling my plane ticket, I dropped my wife at the airport and she flew to Miami, while I continued on, driving to Orlando, to be present at the Sunday afternoon funeral and evening shiva.

At about the same time as the Sunday birthday gathering and the graveside funeral, in the Texas Hill County west of Austin, a niece announced her engagement by texting a picture of a ring on her finger.

Then, on Monday, my wife cut short her stay in Miami and took a train to Orlando in time for that evening’s shiva.

Before driving back to Atlanta on Tuesday, we made another visit to the bereaved husband and the couple’s son and daughter. I told them that I would remember his wife and their mother as she was the last time we saw her, at the son’s wedding in January a year ago, when she maintained high spirits and good humor even as her body was wracked by the disease.

Her husband thanked us more than once for rearranging our plans so that we could be present for the funeral and shivas. Each time I replied that we could not imagine not making an effort to be there.

On the drive home to Atlanta, as my wife and I compared notes, the precious nature of life and the contrast in the weekend’s simchas and sorrow, was not lost on either of us.

A few days after this column is published, our three children (and our now son-in-law), as well as assorted friends, will gather for a Passover Seder at our house. Even as I write this, the guest list, the menu, and the Haggadah remain in edit.

A week after that will be the second anniversary of my surviving a “widow maker” heart attack. The date is not hard to remember. It is the day after our wedding anniversary.

I still sometimes wonder why (beyond the speed at which my wife drove me to the Emory University Hospital emergency room and the skill of the cardiologists and nurses), I am still here, when I know of others who did not survive such attacks.

If cancer four years earlier failed to sufficiently impress upon me a lesson about the fragility of life, the heart attack certainly did.

Two years after the heart attack, I still am trying to find the cardiac intensive care unit nurse from Emory Midtown Hospital, where I had a robotic bypass several weeks after the heart attack, who visited me twice and, in both conversations, said, “Try to find some grace in your life.”

I think often of those words. I want to thank this nurse. I have her name. But she was a travel nurse and no contact I’ve employed thus far has been able to locate her.

When our friend talked about how much there was to do in the aftermath of his wife’s death, I told him the story of the nurse’s visits and the advice she gave me.

This is the season of Passover, a holiday built on the story of how divine intervention freed the Israelites from captivity and oppression in a “narrow place” (in Hebrew, mitzrayim, which also is the word for Egypt).

In emotional terms, grief can be a form of “narrow space.” Another can be attitudes that hold us back from engaging fully in our own lives and with those around us. When I feel myself trapped in that way, “Give yourself some grace” can be a starting point to find the way out.