by Sherri Mandell, November 16, 2001

On Thanksgiving we are supposed to give thanks. But what does it mean to give thanks? It means being grateful for what one has and not dwelling on what one doesn't have. It means being humble enough to accept what one has been given.
When my children were babies, I was grateful to have survived another day. It was so much work taking care of little ones. They so wore me out that sometimes I would put them in the car and drive around just to get them to fall asleep.

Now I am also grateful to have survived another day, but it is because I live with pain as my companion.

When my 13-year-old son Koby was killed this year, stoned to death by Arab terrorists in the West Bank, I was sure my blessings were over. But life always surprises.

During the shiva, a woman I know who has 10 children came up to me and said, "Your son blessed you in life, and he will continue to bless you." Her 18-year-old brother had died as a soldier in the Yom Kippur War. She told me that her mother had suffered but had also received gifts from her brother's death. I didn't know what she was talking about, but I wanted to believe her.

Now that my son has been dead for almost six months, I am beginning to understand what she meant. I am forced to reconsider the whole notion of blessing. If the Torah says that we are blessed, what does it mean for me? When Isaac blessed his children, "his eyes were dim so that he could not see." We, too, are supposed to close our eyes when we bless our children. The reason: we are supposed to see our children as whole, to overlook their faults.

Blessing doesn't mean that we get what we want. It can mean letting go of what we think we want so that we can recognize the gifts we have already been given.
Discovering blessing starts with accepting imperfection, both our own and that of others.

Because Koby was my eldest child, he shouldered the brunt of my battles with imperfection. I expected more from him than from his siblings, and I found it easier to accept the small faults of my other children. In many ways, however, Koby was simply more of a challenge. For example, he would often choose to be magnificently lazy, like a prince. He never felt rushed or hurried. The moment was so precious to him that he rarely risked spoiling it with chores or studying.

He wasn't always lazy, though. Once I came home and found that he had cleaned out a year's worth of caked-on ice from the freezer. He would take care of his younger brother whenever I asked him. He would run to go pick up a pizza. He could skate miles on his roller blades. The thing was, he chose when he wanted to move. It was not easy for a mother to handle.

Getting ready for holidays was especially frustrating. To get him to help was difficult. I would get angry with him, especially when I saw all the neighbors' children helping like little worker ants, because I felt his laziness showed me to be an inadequate mother.In fact, now that I think about it, the reason he upset me so much is because I, too, am lazy in the same way he was lazy.

But now, as we get ready for the Sabbath and holidays and I don't have Koby to yell at, as the pain of missing him is a constant knife in my heart, I realize that his laziness was a gift. What I perceived to be Koby's faults actually turn out to be attributes. What irked me so has been transformed into a blessing.

Mind you, if he were to come back, alive and well, and tell me: "I went for a walk. I'm not really dead," I would serve him like a king for a couple of days, maybe months, or even a year. Then, I would still work on getting him to help us. But I wouldn't feel angry about his laziness, because now I see it in a different light. I recognize something I wasn't ready to see before, that there was also a positive part of his unwillingness to budge himself.

I could have learned something from him: how to be in the moment, how not to care what other people think, how to enjoy life, how to relax. In short, I could have been more accepting of his nature. I could even have been grateful that I had a son whose biggest problems were that he left his room messy and wouldn't move himself when I wanted.

Now the fact that he didn't help helps me, because it forces me to remember him as a real person. I cannot romanticize him or put him on a pedestal. Miraculously, I begin to understand how we should bless the bad as well as the good. What used to drive me crazy seems so trivial now, so meaningless.

I wonder if one day I will be able to accept the life I have been given, a life without my beloved eldest son. I already see glimmers that I will learn to accept this life, to be able to bless it, to put my hands on my life and close my eyes and see it as the wholeness I have been given.

Ms. Mandell writes from Tekoa, an Israeli community in the West Bank.