Take time to reflect on Purim

MIRA SUCHAROV

This year's Purim holiday finds me more reflective than usual. While I look forward to baking prune and poppy seed hamantashen with my kids and will have hopefully cobbled together attractive, creative, yet functional costumes, I am thinking of my friend Shira this week. (I have changed her name to protect her privacy.) Last August, Shira was set to become a mother, having carried her and her husband's baby for nine months in her womb. At 38 weeks into the pregnancy, their baby inexplicably lost its heartbeat and died before she had a chance to birth it.

I think about Shira every Purim, since during the winter and spring almost a decade ago Shira shared a flat with my husband and I in Jerusalem. When Purim came, with no kids yet in the picture to outfit, we three enthusiastically worked on our costumes together in anticipation of one of Israel's most festive holidays. My husband dressed as a court jester with blue nail polish and a bell-rimmed hat while I went as a combination of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Shira fashioned a pair of colorful and ethereal wings to become a butterfly.

Back in Canada, when the time came for Shira to get married, a group of friends gathered with the bride-to-be on the beach to issue blessings for her new adventure. Passing around a symbolic wishing stone, I recalled that Purim holiday in Jerusalem. I told Shira that I hoped she would always be able to channel her inner parpar (butterfly) as she proceeded to be joined in marriage with the person who by all measures is her bashert (destiny). The carefree and beautiful butterfly, I thought, neatly reflected who I thought Shira to be and symbolized the kind of outlook I hoped she would be able to maintain in her married life.

With the immediate idea of motherhood far from my mind at that point – I still wanted to settle into my career, buy a house and pass the 30-year-old mark for the imagined maturity that the decade would confer – that night the unspoken feeling on the moonlit sand was how wonderful a mother Shira would make. Her caring and patient manner, her passion for song and dance, and her commitment to social justice promised to endow her with qualities important to fine parenting.

Years later, as Shira and her husband struggle to make sense of their lives now shadowed by their personal tragedy, I find myself reflecting on what it means to be a friend. As a person who finds herself often using words to fill the space where others might be more inclined to observe, I have now learned to listen more than to speak. Having been delayed in mailing the good-luck bead she had asked each of her friends to send as her pregnancy progressed, I carried it in my purse for months afterwards, as a figurative way of carrying around one teardrop's worth of her grief.

It is hard to be an ideal listener given that I live thousands of miles from Shira, but I have tried to find a way. Through reading her blog and offering infusions of e-mail and handwritten prose (the last time I asked, Shira said she preferred e-mail rather than phone during this immensely sad time), I have tried to affirm her pain rather than try to fix it. I cannot possibly fix it, of course. Endeavoring to offer verbal solutions might make me feel better, or at least make me feel relevant, but I know that offering the kind of pat, solution-oriented slogans that spring to mind during times of other people's misery would only make her feel worse.

I think about the metaphor of Shira's inner parpar and wish that her pain would fly away. Soon after the tragedy, I dreamt one night that she and her husband were dancing. The dream, I realize, was my unconscious attempt at erasing their heartbreak. But I know that walking with them along this dark path is the only hope for helping them manage the sorrow.

With Purim being Judaism's holiday of escapism – it is the only time in the Jewish calendar where celebrants are told to get so inebriated that they don't know the difference between "Blessed be Mordecai" and "Cursed be Haman," as the rabbinic saying goes – it can represent a time to unleash our pent-up dreams and fantasize about paths not taken. But while we dream, hope and consider, we need to remember to keep one foot on the ground to help anchor those in our lives who are having difficulty getting up. Sometimes, simply being there in active silence is the best kind of friendship.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University.

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