Sacred Text

Published July, 2023 in HerStry

Joy writes:

There are many stumbling blocks and barriers – real and imagined – on the path to publication submissions and acceptance. I am fortunate to have a writing teacher, Catharine, who shepherded our class through the process. And our cohort of students memoirists have been steadfast in our mutual support and encouragement.

According to my Submittable account, I have submitted only 13 times since Spring of 2021, so I feel very fortunate to have received my first acceptance! (Side note: I always try to have some piece or other still out there being considered so that when the next rejection arrives, there is always a glimmer of “hope” because another piece or two is already submitted.)

Once the thrill of the notification wore off – oh hell let’s face it… I don’t think that will happen any time soon! – having something so personal be available to anyone’s eyes at any time was a bit terrifying. I had about a week from notification to online publication. Initially I only notified a small circle of friends and family who were already familiar with some of my work. Prior to publication day, I made a list of all the people that I would notify and send a link to. I was slowly contemplating widening the “inner circle” of notification. On publication day, I began to circulate the link. First to my family. Then to my writing class (of course!!). Then gradually going down that list. My comfort level began to increase and by the evening, I took the plunge – I posted the link on my Facebook page. And in the weeks since publication, I continue to share the link with people I know or meet. Which is all to say… one of the unintended consequence of this experience has been pushing myself to begin to be comfortable having my writing in the world.

Sacred Text

Reb Nachman of Bratislav, the 18th century sage, wrote:

כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד והעיקר לא לפחד כלל

Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tsar m’od v’ha-ikar lo l’pakhad k’lal

The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge and the important thing is to not be afraid.

This narrow bridge, this gesher tsar, that I traverse is not about reaching the other side. There is no destination. Rather it is a span that separates, that distinguishes. It is a membrane. Between love and suffering. Between cleaving and releasing. Between knowing and the unknowable. Between the sacred and the profane.

There’s an unsent text on my phone.

These were the final words that David wrote. Almost as a postscript tagged to the end of his suicide note. Before composing the suicide note, it would seem that he composed a text, and did not hit send. And he is the only one who ever would know what it said.

This decision, this conscious choice, to compose a text, and not send it, and then notify me in the suicide note, holds significance. Something to be read by me. My eyes only. Not included in the note. Yet not to be “received” prior to our discovery of his body.

My imagination and inner amateur sleuth asks, “why?” on the way to the question of “what?”

Why not write a separate letter to me on paper, secreted somewhere that he knew I would find it, knowing I would be able to discover it. Why did he take for granted the reliability of our devices, of technology, of the ether. And why not send it? One stroke of the thumb. It was deliberate. He made the decision. He states it. What more did he have to say? What private message that was not to be included in the more public handwritten note?

So began the hunt, and the haunt. Searching for the “what.” Detective G was the first to have discovered and read the note. Because of the reference to an “unsent text,” police protocol required that they remove David’s phone and iPad in order to search for this text. If he had written, “The laundry is in the dryer,” would they have gone to the basement to check? I always wonder what they were looking for and why. A few days later I met Detective G at the downtown station to retrieve the devices. They hadn’t been able to locate anything.

I, too, tried to locate this unsent text. I looked through all the apps: Text. WhatsApp. Draft email. Notes. Memos. Lists. Reminders. Google docs. Facebook DM. I exhausted all the possibilities I knew of. All to no avail.

There was no text ever found on any devices.

As the second year passed, and the gnawing of unanswered and unanswerable questions persisted, I even consulted a forensic digital private investigator. Perhaps, I wondered, there is a means to retrieve the keystrokes? Or is it possible, I queried further, that something was automatically backed up to the cloud? There might be some method to look through all the data of the phone. However exorbitant fees and likely zero chance of success put this inquiry to rest.

Indeed, there is no record of any unsent text except in the postscript of a dead man.

The important thing—ha-ikar—these last words, or next to last, take on greater significance because they cannot be read. They are the most elusive—slipping through my fingers before I could know them. I will never know for certain. But the invisible, the intangible, the important, these paramount words of the text. I can only imagine and dream.

I see David’s thumbs on the phone keyboard, those thumbs that wielded knives in a life of food service, and those thumbs that inserted catheters and breathing tubes in a life of nursing care, and changed diapers and clung to children’s hands, and grasped paintbrushes and manipulated wire and twine and plaster sculpting materials, and those thumbs that clutched a pen for the last time, and emptied a bottle or multiple bottles, how many bottles of pills. Those thumbs created one last missive.

And we are without him. And we are without those words. The text is everything and holds everything and yet is unknowable.

Much as the divine. As the name of God. We can not pronounce it. But still we recognize it, and we sanctify that name in the acts that we do. Our acts are sacred.

All that is left is space. And silence. Sacred space. And sacred silence.

Of the lingering pains, and ongoing questions, the unsent text is one that continues to sear my flesh.

Perhaps I have not truly exhausted all possibilities and resources. I keep David’s phone in a safe place and for the most part untouched. Maybe someday they will invent a technology to recover those key strokes. And I don’t want to have polluted the record with too much usage.

And like when you are looking for something in the bottom of your black book bag or purse. You look ninety-nine times and can’t find it. And then weeks later, on the one hundredth time—Aha! Hineini. Here I am. There is that key or pen or coin or token or lost earring. So, too, I imagine one day I will charge that phone again and—Hineini —the text will appear.

There is a common sentiment expressed to the grieving: You will get through this. I find no comfort in that. Indeed, I have no desire to get through anything. This is the place that I am. I peer to one side of this gesher tsar, this bridge that is oh, so narrow. I graze with my fingertips this hopelessness and eternal frustration. This struggle to accept the searing feeling of the unknowable. This untouchable thing that is too hard to let go of and keeps me suspended—reaching toward and away at the same time.

And to the other side, a flickering firmament burns, and I know it has been near, and I am certain, too, that in my proximity to the unknowable, I have almost touched the sacred.

V’ha-ikar lo l’pakhad k’lal. And the important thing is to not be afraid.

-Joy E. Krinsky