Houses of Mourning

In one month, four young lives are gone, each one of them taken in an automobile accident. One after another — it feels less like a coincidence than an attack. For
such loss, grief goes beyond words. You can’t write about it, you can’t not write about it.

On Friday, Feb. 12, Avi Schaefer, 21, was killed by a car in Providence, R.I. Avi, a son of Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer, spiritual leader of the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara, and his wife, Laurie Gross-Schaefer, was a freshman at Brown University; an old freshman, he liked to joke, because he had first served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

He was “a young man of inordinate strength and integrity,” Brown University President Ruth Simmons said in a statement. Avi had just organized a campus-wide relief effort for victims of the earthquake in Haiti.
The same Friday that Avi died, 17-year-old Adir Vered, a junior at New Community Jewish High School (NCJHS) in West Hills, was killed when he was thrown from a car in Northridge. Adir was much loved on campus, “an A-plus friend,” Bruce Powell, head of school at NCJHS, said.

“Adir was a caring friend who always walked with his head held high,” his friend Yoni Gliksman e-mailed me. “He was always smiling and making others happy. Adir was loved by everyone and will be truly missed.”

Then, last week, on Friday morning, Feb. 26, 13-year-old Julia Siegler was crossing Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood and was struck by two cars. She, too, died. Julia attended Harvard-Westlake, where she was beloved. She was a bright student, a fun and eager friend.

On Sat. Feb. 27, Sandy Roberts, a USC sophomore majoring in cinema-television production, was killed in a highway accident near Bakersfield. USC Hillel, where Roberts was an active member, held a memorial service for him Monday night. 

“We feel like we lost a member of the family,” Roberts’ improv group, the Merry Men, said in statement. “Sandy was a daring improviser and an absolutely hysterical person, but it was his personality that made him incredible. It was Sandy that really defined our image not just as a troupe that entertains, but as your friends that also do improv. He had an astoundingly infectious zest for life and made everyone around him better for knowing him. A phenomenal talent that will never be forgotten.”

Four precious, promising lives.

I know every young life cut short is a fresh horror. And I know the Talmud teaches us that every life is a universe. But even so, these four young people were special. I didn’t know them, but we share close friends and, in one case, I know the family. Many of us know them: Their families all have vast circles of community, because their own circles of caring were so wide.

Avi’s friends from Brown all flew in for the funeral. So did men and women with whom he’d served in the IDF — all the way from Israel. Nearly 1,000 people attended Adir’s funeral at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 14.

Julia’s friends created a Facebook site, “Rest in Peace Julia Siegler,” the day she died. By Sunday night, almost 5,000 people had signed on. They wrote to her, because just looking at her photos, her presence was still so palpable.

“Dear Julia,” one member wrote, “your radiance lights up even the darkest nights. I remember your beautiful smile the first time I met you, your charming attitude, the way you could make anyone and everyone around you laugh. Rest In Paradise. You and your breathtaking charm will be missed by all.”

These deaths have been brutal, loading fresh grief on top of grief. When tragedy hits far away, as it has in Haiti, or Chile, we have the luxury of searching the universe for the Big Questions, even of giving ourselves comfort in offering our help.

But these four untimely deaths, striking such promising, beloved young people so close to home, have hit us like disasters of an altogether different magnitude — testing faith, testing strength, testing community.

Tragedies next door are different. There is no time for why, only how: How will we comfort the families? How will we mourn and help others mourn? How will we honor and remember those we loved?

The instinct is to shut down inside our sorrow. The reflex is to die with each death. We all have wondered how we would muster the strength to face what these families must now face, and our gut reaction is more likely than not: We would just die.

Our tradition gets that. And it pushes us toward others, toward life. There is burial. There is shiva. There is kaddish. There are untold tears to be shed alone, to be sure; but there also are many to be shed together.

“To grieve alone is to suffer most,” the Talmud says.

“Love is stronger than death,” The Talmud also says, and anyone whose path has crossed this kind of sorrow knows that to be true. These were lives cut far too short, god-awfully short. But I don’t doubt that each will leave a legacy of love among all whose lives they touched, and beyond.

As for the rest of us, we need to learn how to be there for others in their time of need. It is one thing to help strangers afflicted in a distant land. It is altogether more difficult, and perhaps even more important, to be there for our neighbors and friends, for those suffering alone from singular, unforeseeable tragedies.

Being there for them is not just the challenge of community; it is the definition.