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I don’t feel old; hardly feel finished at 58 years of age.  But it seems as though a lot of the folks I’ve known, admired, even loved have been called to the angels by now.  Not that I lack for love in this rich and fragrant autumn of my life—my adult daughters have joined wisdom and insight to their affection and what I have at home is delightfully edgy and spared of platitudes.

But so many are gone; beyond family, I don’t even recall all their names.  They linger at the cusp of my early morning dreams and in afternoon shadows.  My grandmothers—the one with the breezy porch and the other with the honey pastry.  The former spoke Hebrew and the latter, only Yiddish. In that was the cultural dichotomy of early Israel.  Gone. 

My own father, with his wit and poetry and inner storms.  Gone so long, never even became a grandfather.  My cousin Uli with the sweet and shy smile, whose young heart was apparently not set to tick for more than just four quick decades.  His father, my Uncle Moshe, who lived some 80 years, smoked cigarettes while others made prayers, was a genuine patriarch, and then more or less, had enough of the world and its incongruities. 

There was Terry, once a cousin by marriage, always a friend and an interesting, if brooding, veteran of the Vietnam mess.  He survived tours there, only to be crushed to death in his own garage when the van he was refitting fell on his broad chest.  Who gets it?  In truth, Terry never said much when he was around and now he won’t stop talking to me.

What of Carol Blakely, the stocky yet fit and cheery high school lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center pool whom I adored in the summertime and who mysteriously drowned in a cold river just as we were all going to graduate?   And Tommy Adams, my cohort at the high school paper, soft and thin and sentimental, pushed around by the toughies, whose life suddenly ended at home one morning when his spleen ruptured?  And Arthur Park, a colleague and leader of young people who just drank too much and then died in his airplane seat, quietly and poorly.  How I miss his mediocre voice and his guitar and fearless dedication to kids and peace.

And Allen Kaplan, my best friend and mentor, a retired Navy chaplain who spent weeks helping at Ground Zero and nobody will tell us why, really why, his blood went bad three years ago and he died painfully after 11 weeks in a New York hospital.  What of Laurie Beechman, the captivating Broadway contralto, my remarkable friend, star of Cats and so many other productions, cruelly recalled by Heaven due to ovarian cancer at the age of 44?  And my friend, the director and enabler Josephine R. Abady, a pure old-fashioned Baby Boomer artist—also dead from cancer at 52?  And my colleague Jack Bluestein, a sanguine rabbi who should have been a used-car salesman, stopped by leukemia at 40. 

One by one, so many have disappeared along the path of the life.   Each one of us can recall them—the parents, the brothers and sisters, the coaches, the ministers, the teachers. What of Miss Jennie Fine, the indomitable, diminutive but firm social studies teacher who taught us in 1965 that ‘HOME’ is the most beautiful word in any language yet also had the audacity to smack the butts of hallway thugs with her famous wooden paddle?

I guess that’s why God made stars in the sky.

[Note: Some of the names are real, some are not.]

Ben Kamin is one of America's best known rabbis, a multicultural spiritualist, NYT Op-ed contributor and author of seven books, including his latest, "NOTHING LIKE SUNSHINE: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination."  He is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist.

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