MountainMornings

I’m getting to be an old regular at synagogue. After the Love Bug’s Bat Mitzvah, we entered the Jewish Holy Days with a renewed faith. Last week for Kol Nidre, the service on the night of Yom Kippur, I sat between my Granddaughter and my husband holding hands. The Bug had the honor of saying a prayer in Hebrew on the Bima (altar). The Day of Atonement is our chance to ask forgiveness for anything and everything and from everyone we may have harmed over the past year. We listened to the Rabbi speak about loss, about confronting our mortality.

She talked about getting a metaphorical box delivered to our door, with a string inside representing the length of time we have left to live. Would you open it, or would you bury it?

“Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” As a young, practicing Catholic, I would pound my chest, “Mea Culpa,” and go to confession every week and make amends by reciting the rosary. My ‘sins’ were the usual; taking the Lord’s name in vain. not respecting or listening to my parents. Asking for forgiveness is a universal thread running through the history of time and every single religion I can think of. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” was and probably still is the opening salvo inside the confessional.

But what are our sins like today, as adults in this 21st Century? Did we stand by while ICE arrested people on the street, outside of their church? Were we silent and indifferent in the face of injustice? What would we change about our lives if we knew that next week we would fall and break our neck and be gone, poof, just like that? Bob nearly died when he had a stroke on the operating table ten years ago. My perspective has certainly changed now that I’ve crossed that three-quarter century mark.

I recently listened to a podcast about how we humans react to an unforeseen event – like finding out you have an incurable, hereditary disease (say Prion), that could strike at any moment. “Prion disease is a group of rare, terminal neurodegenerative diseases. They happen when proteins in your brain turn into abnormal proteins known as prions. Prion disease causes brain damage that leads to dementia…” people die within a year of diagnosis.

There are usually three reactions to getting bad news: 1) Continue blithely living your same life, we might call this denial; 2) Go with the flow and be flexible enough to try new things; and last 3) Pivot. The woman in the podcast who watched her mother die of Prion at age 51 decided to take the test – she looked inside the box – to find out she DID have the genetic mutation for Prion. This woman pivoted, she was a second year law student who dropped out and switched course. She attained a PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard. She is now 49 and has a pretty good idea of the length of her string.

Last week, I did something a little unusual; I took an adult ballet class. Bob climbed to the top shelf of my closet and took down the box containing my pointe shoes and dance shoes, and they still fit me. I was the oldest in the class, but I didn’t care. My knees weren’t used to the pliés, but my muscle memory kicked in and I walked just a little bit taller afterwards. Of course, I spent the rest of the weekend recuperating. But I am happy!

I have a pretty good idea how long my string is, and I want to dance and eat all the desserts and take a river cruise with some of my old friends, plus a few new ones. I want to be improvisational, to go with the flow of the future. I want to be arrested for protesting this administration’s contempt of the rule of law, its authoritarian methods, its downright sinful treatment of immigrants. And I want my granddaughters to know I fought for reproductive freedom until the very end.