I have faced mortality at age forty-three with the same force I did on a summer day at the beach when I was three or so. It was rare for us to go to the beach, despite all my begging and my brother’s pleading. My father did not like the sun burning his pale flesh. My mother did not like the sand scratching between her toes. 

But this day we did go. Right after our sandy lunch, my father walked dutifully off to a shack in the distance to buy us ice cream. I squinted into the sunlight as I watched him walk off and decided to follow. I forgot to tell my mother that I was going. I walked and walked and walked, and the sand burned my feet so terribly that I can still feel the scorch on my soles.

I must have started to cry for my Daddy; he’d vanished into the horizon. I was hopelessly lost and scared, and my feet were ablaze. I did not know it, but as I cried for my father, my mother, discovering that I was gone, was madly running up and down the shore staring into the ocean, crying for me. I was lost, she thought, forever. My Daddy was lost, I thought, forever. I understood mortality in the panic and isolation we felt, invisible to one another among the sands. 

Suddenly, a strong, young lifeguard scooped me up in his arms. My feet were red from the burning sand and my cheeks were red from the burning tears as I sobbed into his suntan-lotioned body. He had found me, and then he found them, and all was well. But from time to time, we still tell the story. 

About forty years later, I watched my father disappear into the sterile horizon of an operating room. He was not in search of ice cream,but of a cleaner, more efficient blood flow to his heart. They called it a quadruple bypass, a surgery that has become as routine as root canal. I, his daughter, called it open-heart surgery, a brush with mortality. My mother and I tried to amuse each other during the hours it took to operate. But in our hearts we privately called out his name. I called for Daddy, she called for Norman, we both prayed that God did not call for his soul. There it was again, after all these years, the panic and isolation of the small child within me, previously invisible among the sands of time. 

During the hours in the surgical waiting room and the days in the cardiac ward during his recovery, I saw hundreds of heart patients pass through. There were those who were recovering, those who were waiting, those who were scared, those who were relieved. There were those who were dying. Despite our many differences of size, age, color, and background, we had one thing in common: we became part of a club, privy to the secret that life is not forever. We were experiencing a crash that felt like the great salty ocean smacking us unaware in the face, when all we wanted to do was ride the waves. 

It’s enough to knock the breath out of you. 

My friend who struggles with breast cancer says none of us makes it out of this life alive. 

It is not unusual for us to deny our mortality. But it can’t be spiritually sound to do so. Life is so damn short.That is not a cliché, it is the truth. It is possible that the awareness — not the fear, but the awareness — that our time is short could help us find perspective and balance. If death could come at any moment, then why would I spend this moment angry, resentful, and unforgiving? 

Before Moses died, the legend tells us, he fought and fought against his mortality, trying to bargain, trick, and deceive the Angel of Death. Finally God intervened. God took away his soul with a kiss. The legend ends, "and God wept." 

At this moment, with the hospital smell still on my clothes, I feel the struggle of Moses. I feel his struggle to live grounded in this world while needing to ascend the highest mountain the spirit will allow. I feel his yearning to travel yet one more journey, to cross one more river. I feel his passion to live deeply, truly, and forever. 

I can’t help but wonder why it is so hard to live the words I write. I believe them, I teach them, I write them to you, and I know that one of the hardest acts of the human spirit is forgiveness. But at this moment, with the image of my gather in the recovery room seared into my brain — moments after surgery, helplessly dead to the world, with tubes coming and going from his frail body — I can’t help but wonder: How do I keep the fact of mortality from driving me insane? How do I use mortality as a gift to teach me to live my life more fully and with less pettiness? I want to learn to live in the light of God’s goodness and not in the darkness of human frailty. I reject the notion and reality of lingering hurt. I want to be forgiven. Therefore I must forgive. 

It is odd, don’t you think, that it seems easier for us to hate than to love, to hold on rather than to let go? 

This I know: I want my soul to be taken like that of Moses — with a kiss. I want God to weep when I bury my parents, may they live a hundred and twenty years. And in the meantime, I want to live as a trusting child as often as I can, playing on the beach, protected from true danger. 

Rabbi Karyn Kedar is the Great Lakes Regional Director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the author of God Whispers: Stories of the Soul, Lessons of the Heart. She lives near Chicago with her family.  

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