The stones of silence

She appears, fleetingly, in our home movies. In her best dress and pearl necklace, Aunt Anne hurriedly brushes the cowlick off my cousin Paul’s forehead and smiles for the camera. While she seems to be the model of the happy, mid-century American housewife, her slightly worried expression gives us pause.

Or should have, had we been looking.

We weren’t. For she and Uncle Ed personified the American Dream. Living in a beautiful Catskill Mountain village, in unprecedented post-war peace and prosperity, they owned the town mom ‘n’ pop sporting goods store. At a time when Main Street merchants were royalty, they, scions of penniless immigrant families, enjoyed previously unimaginable riches, freedom, acceptance. What could possibly be wrong?

What indeed.

They are integral to my most-favored recurring daydream, the bucolic town we visited every summer.

Aunt Anne ended that the night she walked into their garage, closed the door, and started her car.

Afterward, we never returned to that house or that town.

Had Aunt Anne intended this? Assuredly not. But such is the way with suicide. For the actor, it ends in a literal heartbeat. For everyone else, it lasts a lifetime.

Suicide, rather than a small, quiet thing, spreads across entire families, across decades. When people take their own lives, they take a piece of everyone’ else’s life as well. And never return it.

An unintended consequence, to be sure, but one that’s real enough, like the better part of an iceberg lurking below the surface.

Never mentioned again, Aunt Anne was expunged from the records, thrust down the Memory Tube. After her passing, the rare times I saw Uncle Ed he was never happy, no matter the occasion. To the contrary, he was solid and sad, like old, worn metal.

As was my cousin Paul. Catching up with him at a wedding some years later, chatting about cities and careers, he was suddenly quiet, pensive, then wondered aloud if he’d inherited the gene that took his mother’s life.

That unsettledness is Aunt Anne’s legacy.

The legacy of all suicides.

So it is with far too many others I’ve encountered, suicide like the drop of iodine in clear water that never entirely disappears. Five years ago, Stuart, one of the best graduate writing students I ever had, a bright, funny, hard-working young man with a fierce work ethic, wrote me an upbeat e-mail about how good he was feeling, how his writing had turned a corner.

The next day he walked off a bridge.

His loss, a person so rich, so precious, still burns.

I thought about them, Aunt Anne and Stuart, and others, and the havoc they wreak, when I was in Israel last month. Staying with old friends on a small wine country moshav, I met the memory of Avidan, their tortured, beautiful son who took his life three-and-a-half years ago, age 24.

Troubled from the time he was a child, Avidan valiantly fought depression. Naming his nemesis Tom, Avidan was able to keep Tom’s darkness at bay by focusing on light, on random and repeated acts of chesed. Called for the army, Avidan saw a little girl in a wheelchair. “I’ll fight for people who can’t fight,” he said. “I’ll fight for her.”

Driving at night, he often picked up hitchhikers. “Where are you going?”Avidan would ask. Told it was Ashkelon, say, Avidan would lie. “That’s where I’m going, too,” he’d smile, then whisk them off.

We hear the limud that when one’s neshama has earned its chailek in this world, it separates from the body in order to continue its journey.

For Avidan, that separation began with Tom.

Tom, whom Avidan had to destroy to defeat.

Even if meant destroying himself.

Visiting his kever, I listened as his mother spoke of her pain, her emptiness, the kind that neither dissipates nor departs.

My own words, few and futile, neither staunched her wound nor added anything she didn’t already knew.

Nevertheless, she said, my support was invaluable.

Simply by being there.

Simply by fulfilling my name. Mendel, Yiddish for Menachem, for consolation.

The lesson, I thought, is one that we are learning all over Israel, comforting the families of 10/7 victims, chaylim, miulim, the displaced, all those suffering, wounded physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Having someone there is sufficient.

Even if the someone stands mute.

Placing a stone on Avidan’s kever, I thought that stones, as physics tells us, are hardly inert. Instead, they are whirring dynamos of electrons and protons, vibrant, shining. As the Zohar reminds us, buzzing with kiddushah, like all of Creation, they sing shira to their Creator, songs beyond our ability to hear or comprehend.

So is our silence, perhaps the most powerful divrei nechamah of all, the inaudible songs we sing to others, glowingly, indelibly alive.

Songs to help heal the loss of Avidan, and Aunt Anne, and Stuart, and all the others.

Songs sung by the stones of silence.