April 20, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Eighth Day of Pesach
Our Unfinished Love Story—A Yizkor Sermon
April 20, 2025 – 22 Nisan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
What happens when we lose our loved ones before we lose them? This happens to so many of our families. Our loved one experiences a slow decline, cognitively, or physically, that takes place over years that feels like forever. The decline crowds out earlier chapters.
Our mother has not been herself for so long I can’t even remember what she used to be like.
It’s been so long since my father was who he really was, I can’t remember him before his dementia set in.
What do we do with this pain when we lose our loved ones before we lose them?
We are about to say Yizkor. Yizkor offers us a poignant way to flip the script.
It is true that we sometimes lose our loved ones before we lose them. But because of Yizkor, it is also true that after we lose our loved ones, we still have them.
Do you remember the rainstorm this past Tuesday night? After the storm, there was a truly beautiful sunset. I noticed that the heavens were a radiant golden glow as I left my house to go to evening minyan. At minyan there was a woman whom I had never met before. She does not happen to be a member of Temple Emanuel but was there saying Kaddish. After services I went up to her and asked who she was saying Kaddish for. She offered that she was marking the eighth yahrtzeit of her father, and then she added: As I was coming to the temple to say Kaddish, I could not help but notice the gorgeous sunset. My father loved sunsets. My father was always open to the awe and wonder of nature. We shared sunsets. And now, on my way to say Kaddish for him, I feel awe at this sunset after the storm. When this daughter saw the sunset Tuesday night, and thought about the sunsets she and her father had shared, she lost him, and she still had him.
Sometimes a distinct memory can shape our whole life. Recently a woman at evening minyan shared that her father, who had passed away years ago, was scrupulously honest. She recalled the time that her parents took her and her siblings out to a restaurant for dinner. They ate. The bill came. Her father paid the bill and left cash for the tip. She was a child. She could not understand why he would literally leave money on the table. So as the family left the restaurant, she grabbed the cash. The restaurant was a thirty-minute drive from their home. As they got home, she joyfully pointed out to her father that she took the cash that he had left on the table. He explained to her that he had left that money intentionally, it was a tip to thank the waiter for the excellent service. They did not get out of the car. They did not stop at the house to use the bathroom. They drove straight back to the restaurant, and he and his young daughter went back to the waiter, apologized for the mistake, and she personally handed him the tip.
That extra drive to and from the restaurant, an hour in the car all told, lasted a lifetime and shaped how she and her husband raised their children. She lost her father. And she still has her father in ways that shape how she lives her life and teaches her children to live theirs.
Recently I read a personal memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin about her 42-year marriage to her husband Dick Goodwin. Doris Kearns Goodwin is an acclaimed historian who has written highly regarded histories of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. Her husband Dick Goodwin was a speech writer and policy shaper who worked in the White Houses of both President Kennedy and President Johnson. In their home in Concord, MA, they had 300 boxes of photographs, memorabilia, letters, documents, all carefully organized and labeled. For most of the years of their marriage, he was too busy, she was too busy, living their lives to go back in time, but near the end of his life, in his last few years, they started going through these boxes together, one at a time.
The title of her work, An Unfinished Love Story, is a willed double entendre. It is about the love story of America for Americans—our ongoing quest for the reality of our beloved and imperfect union to live up to its highest ideals. And is about a very personal love story of Doris and Dick. He dies in the middle of their project, and she is left to examine the remaining boxes on her own.
Imagine her world after her husband of 42 years dies. Their home for two is now a home for one. The boxes they used to open, review and discuss together she is now opening and reviewing on her own, without being able to share it with her life partner.
All this change, loss and instability in her personal life take place in the context of the charged political environment of our nation.
During this solitary review, Doris Kearns Goodwin experienced a powerful surprise. She rediscovered how resilient her husband believed America to be. Dick Goodwin wrote in a statement she uncovered:
America has been at odds with itself before. I’ve been drawn to such turbulent times—the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, World War II. The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.
Not only was America not as fragile as it seemed. Even though she had lost the love of her life, she was not as fragile as she seemed. The book coves the 60s, a decade where, Doris writes, “individuals were powered by the conviction that they could make a difference.” That was Dick’s life story. He believed he could make a difference. And he did. Now that he was gone, it was her turn to continue to make a difference. When they began reviewing Dick’s 300 boxes, the initial plan had been they would review and discuss the materials together, but he would write the book. But he died mid-project. And instead of being paralyzed by grief, Doris kept on keeping on, and she wrote the book in her own voice. Not fragile but strong.
We are not Doris Kearns Goodwin. We don’t have 300 boxes of memorabilia to sort through. But Yizkor is our version of that. We have 300 boxes of memories in our hearts and souls and minds.
For those whom we lost before we lost them, may we recover them this morning. May our recovery of their stories inspire us to face our future with renewed strength because of who they were, what they taught us, and what they leave behind, that is ours forever. Please rise.