Secrets

Some losses never get announced

Rabbi Yudin’s last Shabbos as Rav of Shomrei Torah, before he became Rabbi Emeritus, was not an ordinary Shabbos. Everyone understood what that Shabbos was, and what that drasha was. The room did not move.

He thanked the kehillah that morning for many things. For the privilege. For the opportunities. Those are the things you expect a rav to say, and he said them, and he meant them.

Then he said one more thing.

Thank you for trusting me with your secrets.

And that caught me off guard. It has stayed with me since; I’ve since repeated it to friends and colleagues, usually to someone who needed to hear it.

This time of year the questions start pouring in. Tishah B’Av and fasting. A woman who is expecting and is not sure what she is allowed to do. A complication. A history. A previous loss that nobody in shul knows about. These conversations happen by phone, late, or in a hallway with the door closed, and they happen weeks or months before anyone will hear an announcement.

I have always understood that this is a privilege, and it is. I do not take it lightly.

And sometimes the pregnancy does not become a birth.

One morning this week, I stood in a far corner of a cemetery with a family burying their child who was never born. There were four of us. A small box. No crowd, no hespedim, no announcement, nothing that the rest of the world will ever know happened.

I have stood at many graves. I was not prepared for the marker.

A marker carries three pieces of information. A name. A date of birth. A date of death.

This one carried two.

Where the date of birth goes there was nothing. Not a dash. Not an approximation. An empty space, printed and waiting for information that was never going to arrive.

I do not fully know why that hit me the way it did.

Maybe because it is honest. Maybe because it says out loud the thing that nobody says out loud. There were hopes attached to that blank space. There were names being discussed quietly. There were tefillos, sometimes for years. There were spaces in a home that people had already begun to think about differently. And all of it collapsed inside of a few minutes, in an office, on an ordinary Tuesday.

Miscarriage is common. It is far more common than most people know, and the reason is that almost nobody talks about it.

The aveilus for a life that was never lived outside is not the aveilus for a life that was. That is the halacha and it is not easy.

But grief does not check halacha before it arrives. There is no shivah house. Nobody is bringing food. There are no visitors, because there is nothing that anyone has been told. There is a couple who goes back to work on Monday and answers normally when somebody asks how they are doing.

So they carry it. Usually alone. Sometimes forever.

That is when Rabbi Yudin’s words came back to me.

I always heard that line as gratitude. Thank you for including me. Thank you for letting me in.

I think now he was naming the holiest part of the job. Not the drashos, not the shiurim, not the smachos, not the parts that are visible and countable. The rest of it. The things you know that you will never be able to say. The stories that end and are never told. The people you watch smile at a kiddush while you are the only other person in the room who knows what they were doing that Tuesday.

He was not only thanking them. He was telling us what he had been given.

I drove home from the cemetery that morning and I could not stop thinking about that blank line on the marker.

Last week the whole community sat on the floor together. There was a date for it. There were kinnos for it. A room full of people doing it at the same time, out loud.

Not every loss gets that.

Some of them get a marker in a far corner with one date on it.

I think I understand the line now.

Thank you for trusting me with your secrets.

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NechamaComfort supports Jewish families through pregnancy and infant loss, from the doctor’s office through the burial itself. nechamacomfort.org