Mrs. Elissa Felder: What Comes Next: For Them and For Us

Grief can be an overwhelming journey, but the enduring connections we hold with our loved ones can provide us with profound understanding and healing. Join us for a deeply moving conversation with Mrs. Elissa Felder, who shares the intimate story of her infant son Sam's passing 35 years ago. Her poignant recount of the brief yet impactful time with Sam, who faced severe medical challenges, reveals how these deep bonds transcend time and grief. Elissa insights into maintaining this connection with Sam illuminate the eternal nature of love and loss.

We also explore the spiritual dimensions of life and death, focusing on the concept of the neshama, or soul, and its interplay with the physical body. Using metaphors like the glass blower, we delve into how the divine breath infuses us with life and purpose. Our conversation touches on traditional practices surrounding death, such as the significance of closing the eyes and mouth, which underscore the sacred nature of the body's journey. By examining these spiritual insights, we are reminded of the urgency to live life fully, cherishing the vessels that carry our souls.

Finally, Elissa shares her personal path to healing and the lessons she learned from the deaths of her son and her mother. Through therapy and storytelling, she has found ways to keep their memories alive while supporting others on their grief journeys. Her reflections on finding meaning in suffering and the role divine intervention played in her experiences offer a source of comfort and strength to listeners who may be grappling with their own losses. Tune in to discover how these sacred passages from life to death can foster resilience and compassion.

YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsK24OSmIYG_XWzeplhfmb8LJcWKphITh&si=untn3fmHLLaEEFNm

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relief-from-grief-by-mayrim/id1788349916

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3AvWNp0DrHqE5AVYJHooiK?si=ufpIObuGRumS5uFXmvrpgA 

Questions or feedback? Email me at: podcast@mayrim.org

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Welcome to the Relief from Grief podcast, hosted by Mrs Miriam Rebiet and brought to you by Mayrim. Mayrim is an organization dedicated to supporting families who have experienced the loss of a child. It was founded by Eloi Nishmat's, nechama Liba and Miriam Holman. Despite her illness, miriam devoted herself to addressing the needs of parents and siblings grappling with the immense pain of losing a child. She felt this loss deeply, having experienced it firsthand when her older sister, nechama Liba, passed away. Mehrim continues to uplift and expand on the work Miriam began, a mission carried forward by her parents with great dedication. If you have any questions or comments for the speaker, or if you'd like to suggest a guest for the podcast, please email us at relieffromgriefatmayrimorg.

Speaker 2 0:55

Everyone, thank you so much for joining me here on the Relief from Grief by Mayrim podcast. So today we have Mrs Alyssa Felder and I'm very, very excited because she's like I don't even know how to describe you. You're just so warm and easy to talk to. But let me just introduce you properly. Alyssa is the coordinator of course communities of practice and in this role she facilitates connections, conversations and developments of all the core communities. She also actively manages course community of practice for women engaged with traditional Chavikadisha, and I find this fascinating that to date it's truly an international community of hundreds of women from all over the US and Canada and the UK and France and Sweden and England and France and Italy and Israel and Chile and Panama and Mexico and South Africa and even Australia I know that's incredible to me and the mission of the community is to share experiences, give encouragement, network and to help to develop and support each other. So thank you so so much.

Speaker 2 1:52

Oh wait, and I forgot to mention that she recently wrote this book. I'm holding it in my hand. It's called From One Life to the Next the Sacred Passage After Death, and I'm holding it up for everyone to see. And I'm holding up for everyone to see, even though no one could see because it's only audio, but it's very. I found the book very, very phenomenal. So thank you so so much for coming on. Thank you, thank you so much for having me. So I guess we could start with the beginning. Let's talk about when your little baby boy was Lifter.

Speaker 3 2:16

Yep. So I was newly married I'm British, in case you don't know the accent, and I was living in London. I met my American husband in London and we got married and we moved to Washington DC and a few years into our marriage, we were blessed with a little baby who we called Sam, named Sam, and he was born with a host of medical issues, none of which we thought would be life-threatening. We really thought whatever Sam has, we'll just fix it and he'll be just great and he'll grow up and he'll be this wonderful person and he'll make us into a family, made me into a mother, made my husband into a father. It was like the beginning of our journey of parenthood.

Speaker 3 3:02

However, he wasn't thriving, he wasn't growing as he should, and this was already now close to 35 years ago, and at the time they couldn't really diagnose what was happening. The biggest issue was his heart, and so he went in for open heart surgery at the end of October of 1989. And he was in surgery for many, many, many, many hours. The doctors kept coming out and telling us they were trying this and they were trying that, and then at some point, I looked at this poor doctor, this poor surgeon, who's drawing pictures of Sam's heart, giving us hope, perhaps, that he was going to be able to do something. And I looked at this poor man and I said is Sam still alive? I mean, it didn't occur to me that Sam wouldn't be alive, but somehow I had this thought to ask him. And he didn't look up and it was so obvious in his body language that Sam had died on the operating table.

Speaker 3 3:58

And I had never experienced a death so traumatically like my grandparents had died. They were old people, but to have a baby that you had vested so much love and hope and desire and dreams into, and then the finality of losing him was so big that my world completely changed from that moment on. So Sam lasted, he lived in the world for four and a half months and he thrived as best as he could, and he was a sweet little baby that we got to care for and take care of and we really feel like he was a gift that God gave us. And as much as God gives, god also takes. And God took our little Sam in what we thought was before his time, but it was his time, and the journey since then, which is now 35 years, has been one of really figuring out how to live and thrive and still hold and be attached to this little baby that only lived in this world for a few months. Lived in this world for a few months.

Speaker 2 5:04

It's really amazing because, like what's amazing, what I'm saying is amazing is how our life experiences, they become so part of us forever. Some could say, okay, it's 35 years ago and the baby was four months old, like you probably almost forgot that you even had him, and yet your love is so deep and your connection is still so real that it's amazing how our experiences just stay with us forever.

Speaker 3 5:27

Right, I mean, I think that I believe perhaps this is a deeply I really deeply feel that there was. We have soul connections with our family members and especially your children, one's children. You're intertwined with on a soul, on a cellular level. That I totally understand. Why people who have miscarriages not miscarriages, people who lose pregnancies it can be very devastating to them because it's a part of them. Your children, whether they're biological or they're not biological, they're a part of you and when they come and go so quickly it shakes your whole world, it pulls the whole rug out from under you and you have to learn how to walk again. Right, right.

Speaker 2 6:10

So you wrote in the book how eventually you came to appreciate that you had a part in helping Sam, in helping his Neshama, really complete his journey. Yeah, I found it very fascinating because I don't know different parts. One question that came up for me was like how long did it take for you to feel that?

Speaker 3 6:28

Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a process. They say that grief is like a snowflake. No, two snowflakes are alike. So everybody has their own experience of grief, and where you are when you start the grief journey and where you end up is uniquely yours.

Speaker 3 6:44

I didn't come into this death experience with much understanding any understanding actually of what Jewish teachings are around this topic. So I didn't have a belief system, I didn't have something to draw on, and I had to learn that step by step. So in the beginning, if you ask me personally, my story in the beginning it was grief that was so overwhelming. It wasn't about trying to understand why bad things happen to good people. It wasn't that. It was just trying to figure out how to live, how to get out of bed in the morning, how to reframe a life without Sam in it, because my whole trajectory going forward was with Sam and then all of a sudden it wasn't. I had pumped milk for him to drink, post-surgery, post-op. So I felt a mess, physically as well as emotionally. And so the sort of more existential questions about what happens when you die and all of those things. I had them but I couldn't absorb them. So you know, I remember somebody trying to explain to us why you know why good people suffer, and it's like in one ear out the other, like it didn't resonate, it didn't flick with me.

Speaker 3 7:48

However, I did want to know where Sam had gone. Like where was he? Did he need me anymore? Was he going to be taken care of? Was God taking care of him? Like where was he? I wanted to know that and I also wanted to try to understand.

Speaker 3 7:59

Like then, what it makes you question is like why am I even here in the first place? What is life all about? If a four and a half month old baby come and go, then what does that say about our lives? What's the purpose of our lives? What are we here to achieve? Given that we are here to achieve something right? So it kind of makes you question your own life or just life in general. Does my life matter? Did Sam's life matter? And so, in the bigger picture, as I have now, 35 years later, I can say Sam was destined to live for four and a half months. That was his allotted time in this life and that he had a job to do. Whatever that job was, I don't even know what that job is. I can put my own feelings and thoughts into it. I don't know for sure.

Speaker 3 8:42

Obviously, I think that he was an old soul that had to come into the world to complete something, some tikkun, some rectification that he had to bring into the world, and that we were chosen. There's a Kabbalistic teaching that the soul, before it's born, chooses its parents, that that's the family that it's going to be born into and it buys into that experience that these are the people. So Sam quote chose us and we helped him in his journey. And I look back and I feel like, was I as successful as a mother? I didn't save him from death and that was a big deal because, like, if I'm a good mother, I shouldn't have died. So I had to get over that. So that's out of my control and what is in my control is the kind of life that he had.

Speaker 3 9:30

Even for that four and a half months, you know, he had a life in our home, in our care. I don't think I left him with a babysitter ever. I took him everywhere with me and I took him to. I took him to Shawl and I took him to Shurim that I went to and I wanted him to be surrounded by all the good that's in the world Love and loving people, and Torah and Shabbos, and I mean, you know he didn't live that long. He lived, he lived, he lived through all the like. So he was born in June and he died in October. So he got some of the year Well, I'm the mom and everything. He got all that. He got all the suckers, and then it was his time to leave.

Speaker 2 10:13

Look back also and say that obviously we don't really know what his half kid was, but you could say that because of him, this is how I changed and that's a credit to his neshama. Yes, maybe that's what a neshama needed. It needed to make you be more careful with that.

Speaker 3 10:28

I don't know, I don't know, I actually have another. I have another, another something I hold on to which is that, yes, yes, he did come in the world to change the people around him, for sure, and I'm I'm very committed to making him continue to live on through my teachings and through how I am in the world, for sure, and I also think that his soul had something to complete, whether he was a Gilgul, whether he had come back to complete something. Maybe he needed a kosher burial, maybe he needed to drink kosher milk for the length of his life, maybe he needed to experience whatever it is that he also, as a baby, as a pure neshama in a little body, needed to experience, needed some kind of tikkun that perhaps I and my husband and all the people around him gave him that opportunity to finish his soul journey. So I think it's both. I think he expected the world and we're all rippling off with that and he had something to complete in this world.

Journey of the Soul and Healing

Speaker 2 11:29

I'm like a little bit morbid sometimes, you know so. Like whenever I have a baby, like after, like I don't know if it takes three days or, like you know, seven days, but I'll look at it. I'll be like a week and a half ago. I didn't even know you. If something would happen to you today, I would never be able to go on Like it's amazing how you said before just how connected we are to our children and it's just everyone should just always live. I guess I wanted to ask you also about some of the questions. I know that you said that you eventually had and that you wrote about in your book, but I think people really struggle with like the Neshama and the three parrots, and which parrot is down here and which parrot is not down here, and all that type of stuff.

Speaker 3 12:09

Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of differing opinions in our tradition. So again, just to disclaim that whatever I learned that I found to be helpful to me from Amasora is what I'm sharing, and it's not the only take. So there are different understandings of what a neshama is and what it is here to achieve, and et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really only sharing the things that I found to be helpful. So the glass blower metaphor is a very commonly used one for who we are in life. So we have a physical body that is the vessel, that is the container that holds the holy neshama, the shamanashima breath. It's a breath that comes from God. So if you take the glass blower mashal, that God, so to speak, is the glass blower and he's blowing the breath through this tube into the vessel, into the glass at the end of the tube, and the neshama is the higher aspects, or higher aspects even than the neshama. Then there's the ruath, which is sort of the breath that then rests in the nefesh, which is the life force that's within the physical body that we are all blessed with. So when we're alive, we are a combination of physical, tangible, organic, dust-like matter, body with a holy neshama that is constantly being blown into us. So go another step and say that the people who are alive, all of us today, the soul comes out through our eyes, through our eyes, through our eyes, like that's the shine, that's what we see. When you look into these eyes, you're seeing the neshamah of the person, you're seeing the inside. The Kabbalists say that hands and your eyes are the ways in which you can access and you can interact with the soul of the person. So when we're alive, that's what's shining. We have this like in Aramaic, in Aramaic so I'm very involved in Chafikadish and we'll get to that but the Tahara, the purification process that we go through, tahara means shining light and what we're doing is we're somehow cleansing, purifying the body and the soul. That's what we're doing.

Speaker 3 14:33

So when a body loses its soul, meaning that God is no longer blowing the soul into us, there's nothing coming from the inside out.

Speaker 3 14:41

There's no emanation of bright, shining light that is your neshama coming out of your eyes, out of your hands, out of your body. It's not animating you anymore and it's not cleansing you anymore. You have, so to speak, like a vacuum of where that neshama resided in your composite, which is why we shut the eyes of the dead right, there's nothing coming out through the eyes anymore. It's a, so to speak, an emptying out and leaving behind a shell that needs to go through its purification process, as does the soul that we have lived with and schmutzed up throughout our life. It has to go through its process until the end of days where tifkas ha-mesim they'll come back together as a purified body and soul together, after Yom HaShem HaShiach in Oram Abba, so that you know to see life as a piece of the whole trajectory of the soul coming in, living a life in a body, exiting at death, going into the higher realms to be purified and then to reconstitute it.

Speaker 2 15:44

So how do you ever do any of eras if you're so involved? Even when I was reading your book, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm becoming perfect. Today, as of today, I'm perfect.

Speaker 3 15:51

I don't plan to so when you're perfect. None of us are perfect. Nobody is perfect, right?

Speaker 2 15:55

But when you're so deep in, you're probably living with such a more like it's always before you, like you're probably always so aware of what, like I don't know you.

Speaker 3 16:07

Just I think it's important to. I think that's why I'm on this mission to talk about death, and you're on a mission to talk about death. We're on a mission to talk about death because it informs our life. Right, if we're, if we are aware of what life is, then perhaps we can be more aware of what life is. And in that awareness of knowing what life is, it takes on a greater sense of maybe urgency or importance or something. It matters, like it matters, everything matters, and that doesn't mean that we're perfect and it means that we mess up, and it means that we don't do all the things and we're human and we have different you know Yateses that take us in different directions and all those things. And where are you heading? Where are you heading and what are you thinking about? You're thinking about. You're thinking about who you are in the world and what you're here to do, and what God wants of you Doesn't mean that you live up to it, but it means you have a sense of it, or perhaps a little bit more.

Speaker 2 17:00

Right. So when you're so involved in the work that you do that, it's so much easier to really keep that vision constantly before you. Yes, and yeah, I mean, we're all regular people, mere mortals and regular people. As my friend was saying, some are better than others, but OK. So I wanted to talk about the Chabot Kaddish and how you got to be part of it.

Speaker 3 17:29

But maybe we could cover this when we get up to it, because when you talked about closing the eyes and the n them off, I know that you said also we close the mouth. So I was just wondering, like why that? It's all the apertures, it's all the things, all the places which allow internal, external communication. So all the orifices should be closed. So what do you do with the nose and ears? We don't, but it is eyes and mouth, I don't know. I mean it probably should be ears. Part of it also is his very beautiful teaching. Very beautiful teaching as the Hevokadisha wash our body right. So our body is B'tzelem Elohim. Our body has the capacity to model and emulate God and emulate God, and so each body part has a huge potential to it right and you could say well, so your eyes will only see good and your mouth will only speak good and your ears will only hear good and your hands will only do chesed and your legs will run all the things right that your body can bring you to do. When we in the Hevogadisha are washing the body before the Tahara, before the mikvah, before that immersion, there's a cleansing of each body part and as we wash each body part. There's a pasuk from Shir HaShirim that relates to that body part. That we say, and our intention on the Hever Gadisha is to elevate the body part to the maximum, to the highest potential that it had. Knowing that nobody actually reached that potential, nobody, was all everything positively good. Nobody is like. Most people, I would say, right At some point use their eyes in the wrong way or use their mouths in the wrong way or whatever. But we, you know, on Nechev HaKadisha, have the intention and the kavanah that the person in our care reach that highest level. Wow. So it's a beautiful and it's a very comforting experience to know about, especially in the outside world, the non-from world, where American Jews, for sure, are choosing cremation. They have no understanding of the beauty and the power and the spiritual aspects of what the preparation for burial is and what burial is and why we need to be buried. So all of these pieces that the Hevra Kadisha do are to elevate and purify and cleanse in the most loving and the most dignified and the most Kabedic way. And so why wouldn't you choose that? It seems like a bit of a no-brainer, but even to know, like maybe we all, there's no question, we're going to choose Hevra, kadisha and choose burial. But even to know, like maybe we all there's no question we're going to choose Khavikadisha and choose burial but even to know, like, how comforting and beautiful it can be to know what's happened to your loved one, which is what happened when Sam died.

Speaker 3 20:06

So when Sam died again I'm 26 years old, I don't know anything about Khavikadisha and my friends came to me one particular friend and she said that she had brought together a number of women from our community and that they had prepared Sam for burial. Again, I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn't know anything about it and all of a sudden, I want to know everything about it. If your child goes on holiday somewhere or goes on vacation somewhere, you want to know are they going to be taken care of? Are they going to have the food that they need? Are they going to have nice accommodations? Who took care of them? Are you with good people? Like you want to know all these things.

Speaker 3 20:42

So, as much as I wanted to know what happened to Sam, the essence of Sam, the soul of Sam in the world of souls, I also wanted to know, like, who took care of his body before he was buried, like I didn't even think about it till she came and said you know, we did this. And I said what did you do? Could you please tell me? I really want to know, because I really want that comfort that comes from knowing that you took care of my baby. You knew him in life, that played with him, that tickled him, that, all the things you did with him. I don't even remember all the different things he wasn't that old and he wasn't that interactive but people who knew him in life were people who took care of him and did.

Speaker 3 21:16

And I'm telling you I'm so comforted to that, 35 years later, I still love those people with an intensity because I was so open, wounded, my heart was shattered. And here's people saying we're taking care of you and we're taking care of your baby and we love you and we love your baby. And it's like thank you, thank you so much, thank you so much, thank you so much, like beyond my capacity to thank them, like how do you even know to do that? And then, wanting to be that, I want to be that, I can do that. I'm a nurse by training. I can do Hebra, kedisha and I've had the opportunity to wash friends and friends and daughters of friends and my own granddaughter I washed. So you know it's a beautiful thing and it holds the two many different emotions in your heart at the same time. You can hold the grief and the sadness and the shattered parts of you along with. This is a beautiful thing and there's meaning in this, and if there's meaning in this then it's good and you can hold those together.

Speaker 2 22:21

Which part? The death or the doing, the Shabbat.

Speaker 3 22:23

Kaddish stuff, all of it. You can hold all of it, because people will say to me how did you wash that 26-year-old that just died in a car accident in Mexico? How do you do that? And you do it because you can and because you want to, because you're bringing love. And you're bringing love and you're bringing the shekhinah. That's another amazing teaching.

Speaker 3 22:41

The living are considered emes. I know people say the chevek azisha chesed shal emes Another way to understand that term and this comes from a Kabbalistic text called the Ma'avah Yabok that was written in 1626, kabbalist in Italy, and this book, the Ma'avaiyya Bok, is the source for all of the minhagim of Ashkenazi, hevra, kedisha. So in the Ma'avaiyya Bok he says that MS, if you look at the letters of MS, right, it's Aleph Mem Taf, which is an Aleph, divine oneness with a mace. So what are we? We're a mace with an aleph. We have this godly soul and a physical body. We who are living can be seen as emes. So any chesed we do is chesed shal emes because it's chesed, done by the emes is chesed shal emes because it's emes done, it's chesed, done by the emes.

Speaker 3 23:41

When we go into the, when we go into the tahara room to take care of a sister, mother, daughter, whoever they are. When we walk into that room, says the Maravai Yabob, we bring the shekhinah with us. The shekhinah comes with us. When we do bichro holim, the shekhinah comes with us. When we do mitzvot, we bring the Shekhinah along with us. So we're also having the Shekhinah be there to escort this neshama on its journey.

Speaker 3 24:09

There's something about that. And you walk into this space where there's your fellow Jewess on the table and the living walking in, and there's a silence that kind of descends because you're just focused on this and the gravitas of what you're doing, that you somehow are in this space where you get to be the one to help this person and you'll bring the Shekhinah with you and you're very intent on what you're doing and you're very focused on what you're doing and it's all for her, aaliyah, it's all for her, and you're going to do the best job you can possibly do and you're going to center off, with all the kavanahs and all the as much as you can, all the intentions that in the end God brings the cleansing and in the end, God brings the cleansing.

Speaker 2 25:01

Does it feel to you at all like intrusive when you're doing someone like your daughter's good friend or your good friend's daughter?

Speaker 3 25:08

Yeah. Is it intrusive? No, it's not intrusive. It's. Look people watch Sam. I felt so grateful to them. This is I want Sam to have a kosher burialher burial. He didn't know what a kosher burial, all the things that entails till now, so that they did that and that they took care of him and that he had a kosher burial. As the mother, I want to make sure he has a kosher burial and he did so. Now, if I can help somebody else have a kosher burial.

Speaker 3 25:38

And this young woman and I wrote about it in the book this young woman who was killed in Mexico. She came to Rhode Island where I live. She came after a few days because it was hard to get her body out of Mexico. And when she was in and she arrived into Rhode Island, we were told you know, maybe because she'd been, you know, she had died a few days earlier, maybe it wouldn't be so easy to take care of her body. And we walked into that room saying we're going to do the best we can.

Speaker 3 26:02

And the fact is we did a beautiful Tahara, beautiful Tahara and Danielle. With permission from her parents, I'm using her name. Danielle was beautiful and we took care of her. It's such an honor to be there. And it does say again in the Marvaya book that when there are people who knew the Nifteras in the Marvaya book, that when there are people who knew the Niftaras in the room, your kavana is heightened or something. There's something a little different. It just is the way it is when you know the person or they related to you in some way. Or maybe it shouldn't be that way, but I think the reality of the situation is, I mean, we treat everybody the same, but maybe emotionally there's a different, there's something in addition.

Speaker 2 26:43

So when you just said it was a beautiful Tahara, your whole body showed how you closed your eyes, like your whole body showed the intensity of how you felt that it was so beautiful. So I'm curious what's the difference between a more beautiful one and a less beautiful one? I won't say beautiful or not beautiful.

Speaker 3 26:58

Yeah, I don't know, I can't really answer that question. I mean, everything we do is the same. I think that a beautiful Tahara, everybody should get it. Everybody should be so good to have a beautiful Tahara. What is a beautiful Tahara? A beautiful Tahara is where there's as little, as little like the body is treated with the utmost, utmost, utmost respect and dignity and love. If somebody has been in a car accident which Danielle was in a car accident so a body of somebody in a car accident could have a lot of damage to it, which involves a different kind of involvement of the Hefra Kedisha, because we have to be careful about blood and all the different things. So for Danielle, even though she had been in a car accident, her body didn't seem to be as damaged as we were anticipating it would be, and so the Tahara that we were able to provide for her was as if she hadn't been in a car accident. So I think maybe that's what I was trying to say, that it was that it's complicated.

Speaker 2 28:06

Do you feel sometimes the Shekhinah like more than other times?

Speaker 3 28:11

I wish I could say yes, I don't know what I'm feeling. Are you feeling the Shekhinah? Are you feeling the Neshama of the Nifteris? Because that's also in the room. Right, we have an understanding. It says in the Gemara that the soul of the nifter is aware of its body until burial, until the lid is put on. You know to move into the. You know, move up, move on up.

Speaker 3 28:35

There's a mixture of going on here and we are aware when we on the Fevik Disha are in the room, the first thing we do is ask for forgiveness. We haven't even touched you and we're asking for the person, and we're asking for forgiveness for anything we may have done that dishonors you or disgraces you. Who are we talking to? We're talking to the Neshama. We know you're here and we're going to do the best job we can, and if we do something that isn't coveted, we're really sorry and we come with the best of intentions. So that's the beginning and our goal is to move you from a place of being soiled, whatever that means, to a place of purity. That's our goal. We're walking in and we declare it. That's what we are here to do, and then, when we use the water to do the Tahara. When we've done that, we say Tahorahi, tahorahi, tahorahi, kosha, kosha, kosha you are. Now God brings about cleansing and purification and we have done our part and now God will do the rest and you will be purified.

Speaker 2 29:34

And then you like go home and eat lunch. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 29:36

You kind of take it with you and it's supposed to take it with you. You're never supposed to be used to seeing a dead body ever. It should never not affect you. And there's a hope, desire, intention, something that the Hever Kedesh should be in a state of teshuvah, always. Again, none of us are perfect, but I'm alive, we're all alive, baruch Hashem. We're all alive today. Why am I alive? What do I have to do? What can I do today? Little things, big things, whatever it is, there's a reason why we're here and whatever that is, and it might be going home and cooking for your family, and it might be picking up the phone and calling your friend, and it might be making, having a nap, so you have more energy for other people at another time or more energy for yourself. You know, it's not all the big things. This is a big thing, but every little thing is a big thing.

Speaker 2 30:27

Right, because when we spoke a few days ago and I said to you something like I don't know what it is, I don't want to know, I can't know, and I was like, but but one second, I always want to know everything. So I was like confused and I was thinking about it and I realized that the whole thing I don't know. The physical part, I want to know everything spiritual. Tell me everything about the Neshama, from the second it leaves the body until I don't know forever. But the physical part, like what happens until burial, I don't know. It's so scary to me which is interesting. Why? Yeah, I don't know why.

Speaker 3 30:54

I mean, I think that the body is spiritual. After a lifetime, four months, whatever it is, however long that body and soul have been in combination and coupled with each other, there is a spirituality that the body has absorbed. Like I say for Torah, it's absorbed the words of Torah. We don't throw that out, we don't put it in the trash. It's holy, right, right. We bury it. Same with our bodies. Our bodies have acquired holiness. They're not our bodies. We know that we can't tattoo ourselves. We're not supposed to kill ourselves.

Speaker 3 31:31

You know it's not really ours, it's a gift that we have, and then the body is considered like a Sefer Torah, and outside of Israel we put the Sefer Torah, we put the body, the mace, into an Aaron. We don't call the coffin a coffin or a casket, we call it an Aaron. We put Sefer Torahs in an Aaron. We're putting a holy shell of the body into the Aaron. And then we have various Pesukim that we say that relate to the Mishkan, and when the Mishkan moved and you couldn't look at the holy Kehlem of the Mishkan, you couldn't look at them, they had to be wrapped up out of you. The same thing. So I would even suggest that there might be a way to understand our physicality as something that over our lifetimes again, however long they've been, have acquired an aspect of spirituality to them, that there's this intermingling of physical and spiritual. That happens. So we elevate a physical body into a spiritual garment. It's a garment and it's going to come back. You want to be buried. So, like a seed goes into the ground and the seed disintegrates. And then what? Then you wait till the right time, when it sprouts and becomes a tree or whatever. It's going to become right. So we bury our bodies. It has to go into the ground and become one with the ground, awaiting that time, because, I may say, where the body and soul, both purified, will rejoin for all eternity. Wow. So what is our goal in this world? Our goal in this world is, on some level, amongst other things, to make the physical more spiritual, right? So?

Speaker 3 33:31

So I'm going to challenge you on your. There's spiritual and then there's physical. Perhaps there's a lot of intermingling of the two, especially when it talks about our bodies. Yeah, and we're doing physical things all the time, right, we're doing all the physical things that we do in our lifetime to exist. We're doing physical things, but we're trying to elevate them into a spiritual realm. We eat certain foods and we say certain things and we pray, and all the things that we do. We eat certain foods and we say certain things and we pray, and all the things that we do. So I think that it's a lifetime of trying to work on how to see spiritual and physical, for sure, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 34:10

It's definitely a timer more than I like, right For sure.

Speaker 3 34:14

For sure. But these conversations about death, I think, are so not necessarily pervasive, right, we don't talk about death in a way that we used to Used to be, that people would die at home, and there was a much more awareness of beginning of life, end of life, because it all happened in your eyesight, in your dalidamos, it was all around you and that was more known to you. But now we've given death to the funeral homes or we've given death to somebody else and we're not, it's not as familiar with it, and I don't know. I don't know. For me it didn't work well. Didn't work well for me to not have any knowledge of death. When death happened, I didn't have any beliefs to hold on to, I didn't know anything Right, it was just complete beliefs to hold on to. I didn't know anything Right, so it was just complete. I was completely adrift. Thank God, we have ways to access Jewish wisdom that can help us. Right, because you want to contextualize it. Why is this happening to me? Am I such a bad person that my baby died?

Speaker 2 35:19

I don't see it that way. So what was it like for you when you saw your daughter going through it, when your daughter lost her daughter? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 35:28

Look, as I said before, we want to protect our children, don't we? First of all, we don't want them to die. I didn't do a good job. It wasn't in my domain, it wasn't in my domain to stop Sam from dying and it was not in my domain to protect my daughter from her loss. We can't protect each other. We can't even protect ourselves from pain and emotional difficult struggles that we go through in our lives. So what can we do?

Navigating Grief and Healing Process

Speaker 3 35:56

I think I learned the power of being present for another person, really being present for another person, and I felt like, if she wanted me, I could do that Something. I could do that Right, something I could do if she wanted me. And again, you know she's an adult and she's going through her experience that God gave her. That's what she needs to go through, and she has parents who've suffered a loss that could be seen to be somewhat similar and we've survived and thrived. So perhaps that's comforting.

Speaker 3 36:31

I never shielded my children from knowing that they had a brother who died. He was my first child. They knew about him and I had yearly yacht site gatherings of women in my home to talk about lessons I had learned, and she was aware of that on some level. Again, one never wants it to happen to you or to anybody, you know, and it's not under our control. So it was very, it was very heartbreaking to see and to know that she had to go through this and I also truly believe that it was not. That it was very, it was very much. God was here, god was crying along with us, and that we had each other to help each other, through to help each other through.

Speaker 2 37:16

Did it bring up all your pain of Sam again, Like were you crying for your daughter, for your granddaughter and for your son.

Speaker 3 37:23

No, I don't think so. I do think I had very good grief therapist. I went to a lot of therapy after Sam died. There were so many therapists around in those days. There weren't so many therapists, they were all they weren't.

Speaker 2 37:37

I cannot, because he said he went to. Didn't you say you went to a lot? Oh, you said a lot of therapy, you had a lot of therapists.

Speaker 3 37:42

Right. I went to a lot of therapy. I had to find a therapist, but she was really great. Thank God, baruch Hashem, that I found a good therapist and I did a lot of very difficult work and very challenging work and very hard work and it was took a lot of strength and it took a lot, a lot, a lot. But I didn't have a choice. I couldn't function like either I just stay in bed the rest of my life or something, or I just have to deal with this on some level because I don't want to be this well. So the therapist really helped me a lot, a lot, a lot.

Speaker 3 38:11

And then all the research I've done and then finding the Hever Ketisha as a place to put my kohos, like I can, that I can do and I want to do it, and it gave my me a lot of strength to be able to let go of Sam at some point. I let go of him and I don't. I don't have any expectations that anybody else is doing whatever they're doing and whatever they do is right for them. On some level I let go of Sam like he was in a good place and he didn't need me anymore and thank God, I have other children and I was focused on them.

Speaker 3 38:53

And then Sonia lost her baby and it was. She's going to be okay. I know she's going to be okay because she's going to be okay and I'll be there for her as much as she wants, but she's going to be okay. The lessons I've learned and the person I've become because of Sam I credit Sam, credit God for giving us that suffering so that we could be the people that we're trying to be. We're trying to be the people that we can be, having experienced that Right, or if that makes any sense. So I want Sam's life to have been meaning and if I've changed and I've learned things, then I want to share those things because I think they could be helpful to other people. So I'm helping Sonia and I'm helping whoever comes my way, and I wrote this book in order to have this information be more accessible to people.

Speaker 2 39:40

So I want to talk about that, but I know we have to end soon. But let me first just ask you about this, because when you said you let go of Sam, I know what you mean, but I think a listener might be confused because they might think letting go means that you're all fine, you don't think about him and you moved on, and you moved on and you're good. But and you let go, but it doesn't mean you forgot him. So I guess I just if you could, I definitely didn't forget him.

Speaker 3 40:02

Very shortly after Sam died, my mother died. She was 56 and she died. About six months after Sam died, I felt like I topped and tailed, like I lost my child and I lost my mom. So I lost, like these, two really important people in my life, and it took me a lot longer. I'm still processing the death of my mother, but with Sam I really came to a belief that he's sitting under the Kisih HaKavod with Kaddish Baruch Hu he'srah and he's. He did his, he did. He did everything he was supposed to here to do and and he's good, he is really good.

Speaker 3 40:38

So letting go maybe means I don't feel weighted down by grief. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But with my mother I'm still a little bit weighted down with grief, because I haven't, because it's a different relationship, but yeah so, but on some level we all live with grief. I think we live in a very grief-filled world. There's grief all around us and I truly believe for most people, many people, sharing it and speaking about it is very healing healing.

Speaker 3 41:09

Dr Edith Eva Agar is a survivor of Auschwitz and her little quip is expression is the antidote to depression. Not for everybody, but many people feel that when they can talk about it, that it's helpful to them. So, again, I think that's why I wrote the book and, as I've been speaking, people want to come and tell me their stories and I want to hear their stories. I want to be an address for people to tell their stories because it's cathartic, it helps Like that person didn't die. They died but they're still alive in your memories, in where you are in the world, in how you are attached to those people, attachment, grief, where you're still very much attached to the person. Even though they're not physically here, you're still attached to them. And we have that in our tradition, right? We have Kaddish and we have Yizkor and we have Yart sites and we have traditions to go to the Kavari and we have a connection with the loved ones that have pre-deceased us. So we don't completely let go of them.

Speaker 2 42:13

Right, right, but I think what you're saying is so important because when a topic is taboo for so many years, for so long we don't really talk about it. And then you start talking about it and then people come flocking to you and say, oh, I have to tell you my story. It shows how important it is to talk about it. People need to talk about it. People need to talk about it and they want to know. I want to know the spiritual stuff, but other people want to know the physical stuff, yeah, or they just want somebody to share their experience with.

Speaker 3 42:38

They want to be seen Right. And when you express it, however you express it, do you express it by talking about it? Do you express it by crying? You know everybody's saying you have to be strong. You have to be strong. I don't even know what that means. I think it takes more strength to ask for help and it takes more strength to let yourself feel the feelings, feel that grief, and cry in a safe place with safe people. Right. A good cry is very cathartic and very healing. Yeah, we're frightened of crying. I don't really understand why we keep holding back. I have to be strong. I have to be strong, I don't know. I think actually, it's stronger to let it out.

Speaker 2 43:12

It is. I have a hard time crying, but I have friends that cry so easily and I always tell them like I'm so jealous, I wish I could cry like that. Yeah, Sometimes it's like I feel like I really need to cry and like I don't know it won't, I won't let it, whatever. So yeah, Wow, okay.

Speaker 3 43:54

So anything like important that we didn't touch kind of overlap of experiences that people have with grief and they're also very individual and your way through it or with it is uniquely yours, and I think it doesn't help us to look at other people and say, well, they, whatever, you think other people are experiencing, that you're whatever try not to compare yourself to other people and to have one or two or some people that you feel you can talk to and share your inner lives with and your grief with.

Speaker 3 44:15

For me is very important for my functioning that this isn't something that's gone and never talked about again. You know, we want to keep our loved ones alive and the dignity of our traditions and what God put into place for us in terms of how we take care of the dead and how it's all part of a big continuum and that this life is a fleeting experience in the greater realm of all. That is so. We live in a box of time and space, but God created time and space, so once we leave this box and we're outside time and space, then all be had to be the way it is. So we're behind the tapestry. We don't see the full picture, right, right, there's a picture and God's in charge and God loves us, and it's a beautiful one, the picture.

Speaker 2 45:11

Yeah, there's a picture, and God's in charge and God loves us and it's a beautiful one. The picture, yeah, yeah, I'm curious. You know so much. Do you want to leave contact information in case anyone wants to reach out to you or they could reach out to you? Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 3 45:20

Absolutely so. My email's very easy alissafelder613 at Gmail, and you're welcome to be in touch. I have a website, alissaf alissafeldercom, and you can look there and um, and I'm I'm happy, to happy, to come to your communities and speak, if you like, to fabricatisha, or to outreach communities or in reach communities, whatever, to continue having these conversations and having this topic be one that we can all have together and help each other amazing.

Speaker 2 45:50

Thank you so so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 45:55

You've just listened to an episode of the Relief from Grief podcast with Miriam Riviet, brought to you by Mayrim. For more episodes, visit the Mayrim website at wwwmayrimorg. Help us reach more people who might benefit from this podcast. If you know someone who could find it helpful, please share it with them. If you have questions or comments for the speaker, or if you'd like to suggest a guest for the podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at relieffromgrief at mayrimorg. We look forward to having you join us in the next episode.