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What, if anything, lasts forever? What is impervious to the ravages of time? What can we do today that will still be talked about a hundred years from now?
I have been thinking about these questions since May 13, which is the day that a great writer named Alice Munro died. Alice Munro won the Noble Prize in Literature in 2013. She was an absolute master of the short story genre. I had never read her work before her death, so I started reading a collection with the title Too Much Happiness, published in 2009. As you might imagine, the title Too Much Happiness is ironic. The characters in this collection do not have too much happiness.
One story is about a recently widowed woman named Nita. She had been married to a man twenty years older named Rich. They expected she would be the first to pass, because she was fighting cancer, and because he had gotten a recent clean bill of health from his doctor. But soon after the doctor’s appointment, he passed suddenly and unexpectedly while on the way to the hardware store.
It dawns on Nita that her life has changed not temporarily, but permanently. Rich is not coming back. The patterns they used to enjoy will not happen again. Who she used to be, a wife to Rich, she is no longer. And she faces this new reality with her own health challenges. She used to be a voracious reader. When Rich died, at first she thought I’ll just read. So she would sit with her books in her comfy chair. They kept her company. She liked the feel of them. But she realized she could not read them anymore. Her medical treatments had diminished her attention span. What she used to be able to do, she can do no longer. Is happiness when circumstances change permanently still possible?
Munro’s story captures a dilemma that many of us find ourselves in. The world is changing. Our world is changing. And we wonder is it changing temporarily. Or is it changing permanently? It is not always easy, or even possible, to know for sure. Think back to the worst of Covid. In the darkest days of the pandemic, we wondered whether we would we ever be able to gather in big, robust, happy gatherings without worry again. Now we know the answer is yes. But we didn’t necessarily know it at the time. There is a recency bias. The moment we are in is so powerful. Remember how we all felt in the early days of the pandemic.
Now we have a different set of questions. What will be with Israel? What will be with the American Jewish community? Is our golden age over, or will the spike of anti-Semitism pass like Covid 19 passed? Will our relationship with our alma mater ever be loving and uncomplicated again?
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