Give Me Your Hand

Hold on, he said.
I’ve been where you are,
and someone caught me
before I had a chance to drop.
You’ll get through this.

Let go, he said.
Your life has been full,
everything has been tended to,
everyone is well-cared for.
You can rest in peace.


On the evening of May 3rd, 2003, I attended a Good Charlotte concert. Before their hit single, “Hold On” the lead singer explained that it was a song about teen-suicide. As he does whenever the band performs that song, he dedicated it to the memory of all people, especially young people, who have taken their own lives. Speaking from experience, he cautioned the audience that life’s bleak moments are transient.

The next day I attended the funeral of the much-beloved mother of a not-well-known neighbor. During the leviyah, the son talked about the conversation that he had with a VNS hospice nurse the day before his mother died. “Is there some unresolved business or tension which is keeping her from letting go?” she asked. The son, a rationalist, felt this question both odd and presumptuous; nonetheless he took an inventory of possible pegs on which his mother continued to hang what was left of her vanishing spirit. That night, after davening kadish for his father on the occasion of his 21st yahrzeit, he visited his mother, telling her that he had said kaddish, and lit memorial candles both in his own home and hers. She died the following morning.