A month has passed since my sister Marta’s funeral, yet the entire event still feels surreal. Part of me remains frozen in that first raw moment of loss. One image refuses to fade: looking down at her coffin at the bottom of the grave as I tossed in a handful of earth. I’d performed this same ritual as a rabbi so many times at so many services. I did it at my mother’s funeral, and my brother’s too, but this time carried a sharper poignancy. Perhaps it was my heightened sense of vulnerability, my intimate knowledge of the disease that took her. Or perhaps it was simply the weight of having aged—of standing closer to the end than to the beginning.
There’s no celebration in this proximity to death, no prize or ticker tape parade. I know there are Jews who view this life as a prosdor, an antechamber to the olam ha-ba, the world to come—where God acknowledges our suffering and rewards our souls with eternal life, where we shed our pain and receive blessings and grace.
I wish I could embrace this traditional vision of what follows death. Marta endured more than her share of pain and suffering. If anyone deserved the gift of wholeness and an afterlife of ease, not to mention a parade and a tiara, it was my sister. But I don’t believe that’s her destiny—or mine.
When we go, we’re gone. Period.
Yet fragments do remain. The sound of Marta’s voice chanting Kol Nidre. Our duet version of Magen Avot. Her raucous laughter. These still play in my mind with perfect clarity. We delighted in each other’s company, and these recollections have no expiration date. They may never disappear.
But other things will inevitably fade. It’s the nature of spacetime itself—entropy flowing into chaos. The universe expands faster than light, pulling everything apart. Eventually, complete darkness will reign, with no sources of light, temperatures near absolute zero, particles separated by vast and ever-growing distances. No organized structures or processes will be possible. Time itself will become meaningless because nothing will change. Humanity will likely be long extinct by then, but the point remains: everything that’s put together eventually falls apart.
In the meantime—before oblivion—I hold both the sadness of loss and the warmth of love. Like all of us, I balance the blessings and curses accumulated over a lifetime. The juggling act can be exhausting, heartbreaking. Just yesterday, I spoke with a young woman about her upcoming wedding. When I asked about her grandfather, who died ten years ago, she didn’t just cry or tear up—she wept, genuinely wept.
It struck me then: humans possess this extraordinary capacity to love and grieve simultaneously. This is why parents cry at their children’s B’nai Mitzvah and weddings—life and death collide in a place so deep it defies identification. How many times has someone said, “I don’t know why I’m crying”? But I know: it’s Eros and Thanatos wrestling for our attention.
A part of my memory book is gone forever. Marta knew me like no one else could—we swam in the same womb, shared a lifetime of understanding. Now my sister Joan and I continue forward, carrying Marta’s laughter in our hearts, until our own end of time.
Before Shabbat 