Twenty years ago today

In blessed memory of Eric.


Science fiction is rife with time travel and alternate realities. It presents alternate, yet coexistent dimensions, sometimes with characters shifting between shared phases. Approaching both the twentieth anniversary of my brother’s death and only days afterward the celebration of the forty second year since my birth, I cannot help but to wonder if our human interest in the aforementioned sci-fi topics are related. Not having concrete, irrefutable evidence about what really happens when we die has lead humanity on a journey of explanation, and attempts to comfort ourselves about the unknown.

I am a geek, and though it may sound presumptuous, I also think of myself as somewhat of an amateur theologian. I want to make some sense of faith and belief, of religion – something that does not always make sense. Often when watching science fiction programming with my partner, we put the program on pause to discuss how the “entertainment” before us is reflective of a teaching within a specific tradition. Historically, it has been common for science fiction to provide a way for us to present religious praxis such that we might not take offense, but that we might view our beliefs, customs, and actions through a different lens, and learn something about them.

We are currently reviewing Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Like so many things these past few weeks, I keep seeing, as I did in a recent episode, much about life, death, and our holding onto those we love and have lost. The son, Jake, so missing and so longing for his lost father Benjamin spends the entirety of his life trying to undo an accident that shifted his father into a different phase of space and time. For a very short while, every twenty years or so, the father would shift back into current space-time, aged and dressed just as he was at the time of the accident. This being Jake’s story he continued to age normally. Benjamin was able to witness his son grow from his late teens through to his elderly years, and eventual death. At one point in the story, Benjamin was heartbroken to have seen Jake lose his wife due to having been so consumed with trying to recapture, somehow recover, his lost father. Eventually, as many science fiction programs might do, another combination of events returns everyone to the original accident. The destruction is prevented, and their time together as father and son continues where it left off.

The rabbis teach that one single life is a world; that the destruction of one life is the destruction of the world. In the episode described, I saw how the loss of this father destroyed not only the world of the father, but more importantly the world of the son. The son, so loving of his father, so lost without him, led to his not living his own life. Getting lost in a science fiction program where the possibility exists that eventually everything will work out, we risk losing sight of the importance of each of us living in our world. That rabbis also teach that because of the murder of Abel, not only was his world destroyed, but too the worlds of all his potential descendants. They teach that we suffer as we do through loss of loved ones because we experience not only the loss of the loved one and that world we had with them, but the future world that we had imagined together, the future world that we continue to imagine if only they were still here.

I was shocked between phases of reality and imagination only weeks ago when I saw a young man, who looked to be about five years my junior, precisely that of my brother. He was walking in the oncoming direction on the sidewalk, stocky build, dark orange-red hair, still freckled on the face, and I am arrested that I just streamed the word “still” as I write this, as if this man in fact really was my brother. I remember nearly twenty years ago seeing my brother’s lifeless body, yet I was so tempted to call out his name to this stranger on the sidewalk. I almost tested the waters to see if in some twist of fate that maybe all these years of “thinking” Eric is dead had been a mistake.

These worlds my brother and I shared were destroyed because of his death, and I still mourn the loss. The pain of so many led to further seemingly irreparable rifts in the worlds between me and both of my parents. Today, I still find myself holding onto those lost worlds. Good memories are a good thing, yet they are kept in balance as only that, memories. In parallel, there is the knowledge that we will make no further memories together.

It seems so much about my life is affected by this loss. I weigh most actions, and reassign value to interactions recognizing we all have unknown amounts of time together. Time does not heal all wounds, and space is not what I seek. It does not get better; we only get better at managing how we cope with our losses. I used to long for an afterlife where I would get to be with Eric again, something that would hopefully, maybe, dull the pain of him not being here in this world anymore. But that just is not me, it feels disingenuous, and disrespectful to the relationship we had as brothers. It is okay to mourn. My love for him causes me to still miss him, and I am not willing to risk losing those memories of our love as brothers simply to numb me away from the reality of his absence. There is nothing I can do to change reality, hoping otherwise feels like dishonor.

I think, and I do hope that what I have learned is how to make the most of my world, to celebrate life, and how to mourn honestly.


I still remember.

Beginnings...

So, I used to have yonahgefen.blogspot.com, the minimal content of which still exists at that address. However, even for a tech geek like me, since blogspot became part of Google blogger, I have forgotten the username associated with that account. Rather than dig through customer service any further, I've created this place, rejewvinated, to share whatever it is on my mind.