Sitting in stunned sadness

 The last several days have been filled with terrible sadness and an awesome sense of loss for our family and friends.

If we punched cards every time someone joined us for Shabbat dinner or a Yom Tov meal, like the frozen yogurt place downstairs used to do, the person who would have qualified for the most additional free meals at our table would have been our friend Mike.

I had first met Mike when our two sons with the same first name found one another in synagogue and proceeded to spend every Shabbat crawling around the pews in the back rows with their Spiderman figurines and Thomas the Tank Engine trains playing together and creating fantasy worlds the way two and three-year-old boys do. After several months, My husband (who during those days attended a different service in the building) asked me if Mike had attended a particular  Hebrew High school program in Queens. Mike and my husband studied together three afternoons a week all through high school.

After a while, every Shabbat Mike would take our son home with him so the two boys could continue playing together every Shabbat afternoon. The boys were close and Mike and my son became close. Around the time that Mike's father died, not quite 25 years ago, Mike's life began to spin out of control. His gambling went from being an occasional pastime to becoming an addiction. His business went under. Mike's wife had had enough and left him. Mike was diagnosed as being bipolar and he got cancer.

Mike moved out of the city for a period of time but during those years would from time to time join us for a Friday night dinner or a holiday meal. I no longer recall when Mike moved back to our neighborhood but if we were having guests, it was likely that Mike would be among the guests. Mike was, even when his life was going terribly, so pleasant to be around. Once Mike moved back and started to come back to our synagogue each Shabbat our son sat not with us but with Mike. We started to refer to Mike as our son's shul Dad.

Over the past several years Mike has faced several difficult, some of them unexplainable, medical issues. Through all of it, he would show up with a beautiful bottle of wine or a fancy bottle of scotch and went home when he had had enough of being around people.

Over the years I had slowly stopped thinking of Mike as simply a friend and had begun thinking of him as Uncle Mikey. Who else would send donations to the synagogue in honor of each one of my children's accomplishments?

During this pandemic year, Mike joined us every Friday night for our Zoom dinners. We were a crew of family and friends who dragged one another through the difficulties of the year. During the last couple of months, Mike had a distressing array of odd physical symptoms and also got Covid during a three-day wait in the ER for a bed. Things seemed to be improving.  as of this past week,tThere was a diagnosis and a treatment plan.

On a Zoom call, this Thursday Mike looked as pale and as translucent as fine porcelain. Friday night he looked much better, his cheeks were rosy, but he left dinner early because he felt tired.

Saturday morning during Zoom Shul, a friend had noticed that a pair of paramedics had shown up on Mike's screen. Mike had suffered a heart attack and had pushed his emergency alert button. By the time the EMTs had arrived, Mike had already died. The EMTs were kind enough to turn off the screen.

The news of Mike's death arrived at our home in bits of scrambled information that were sent from various corners of our world and then reassembled into the sad sad truth that our dear friend who had faced suffering with the stoicism of Job had died.

I am unspeakably sad. I am avoiding thinking about what our Friday nights will be like without our dear friend.  I had always felt that Mike was in our corner. Having a presence like that in my life has made me a little braver, a little bit more courageous. Our corner is emptier.

מיכאל שלמה בן צבי הירש וגיטל

יהי זכרו ברוך