Giving It Legs

​Written on the 12-week anniversary of Burt's passing.

 
Shabbat morning. I go to draw a bath and encounter a small centipede scurrying about the tub on its many legs. I’ve encountered such centipedes around our condo from time to time. Surprised perhaps by the sudden burst of light when I flip the switch, this one is now doggedly trying to mount the cool porcelain walls, only to slide down over and over into the bowl of the tub.
 
“Oh, hello,” I say. “You’re here again,” though I have no idea whether I’ve ever met this particular centipede before. How does a centipede find its way to a second-floor bathroom anyway, and why choose the tub, such an exposed spot, to idle? Maybe it’s seeking water in this dry California season. “Hoi, khol tzamei, l’khu la-mayim,” “Come to the water, all who thirst!” exhorts the Prophet Isaiah. In Jewish tradition “water” is life, a sign of divine beneficence. Sometimes it’s also a code word for Torah. Yam Ha-Torah, the Sea of Torah, is how we refer to both the ancient Jewish wisdom texts and the 2000-year-long conversation through which passionate students have engaged in interpreting their mysterious and hidden meanings. Maybe that kind of “water” is what this little arthropod is really in search of—it is Shabbat, after all, traditionally a day of prayer and study.
 
In any case, I prepare to save my many-legged  friend. I wouldn’t want to kill one of God’s wondrous creatures on any day, but especially not on Shabbat, a day dedicated to peace and goodness, to dreaming of a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb and the homeowner will at least tolerate the subterranean swarming termite…. Perhaps this centipede in my bathtub is a harbinger of that Day of longed-for blessed cohabitation, a Day which, these days, seems farther off than ever.
 
And there’s something else—on the Shabbat that Burt, my husband, died at home, just after he drew his last breath, a double inhale, a centipede appeared. Probably not this centipede, but nevertheless. As Burt’s final intake of air gradually seeped back into the space around his hospital bed in a long imperceptible exhale, the centipede circumambulated the room. Slowly, assiduously, it climbed the wall behind Burt’s desk, stacked with books on Jewish mysticism and Hasidut, disappeared behind his computer table, then reappeared near the ceiling above the overflowing wooden file cabinet on the opposite wall. Eventually it completed its circuit of the entire room, dropped onto the floor and was gone. 
 
I’d never seen a centipede climb a wall, especially a light mushroom-colored wall that would expose it to any predator who might be present. When I’d glimpsed centipedes in our home previously, they seemed to be seeking shadows, hugging a baseboard or hanging out under the bed, or occasionally, in an apparent quest for water, sliding into the tub or the kitchen sink. I wondered if maybe this bold little crawler was Burt’s spirit guide to the next world. 
 
Burt’s old friend Ken Cohen, a world-renowned qi gong grandmaster and China scholar who trained early on in Native American ways, thought that the centipede had showed up as a protector, to keep away any imbalanced forces during Burt’s sacred time of transition. And maybe also as a carrier of ancient wisdom transcending time and space. “Fossilized centipedes go back 420 million years,” Ken wrote. “They herald the vast unbounded realm that beloved Burt has now rejoined.”
 
Perhaps today’s centipede, the one in my bathtub, was a talmid chakham reincarnate, a holy sage seeking to dive into the Sea of Torah on this Shabbat, twelve weeks to the day after Burt’s transition from this world of joys and woes into the mysterious Sea of—what? non-being? unending love? infinite peace? When asked where he thought he was going as he approached death, Burt responded only, “It’s a mystery.” And so it is, much as this life of soul-breath animating flesh, of steaming coffee brewed to perfection and loving caresses exchanged in practically the same breath as bombs exploding, children burning, and other tragic human barbarities, is also a mystery. 
 
If, as the Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman teaches, every blade of grass merits an angel standing over it, exhorting it to “grow, grow!”, then so must this centipede, whether a harbinger of an invisible world beyond or simply a many-legged neighbor, another of Creation’s unheralded masterpieces, now gingerly accepting my proffered kleenex as its ticket to freedom. It drops onto the bathroom floor, scurries across the tile seeking safe haven astride the molding beneath the vanity, then disappears from sight.

                                                                                            –Rabbi Diane Elliot
                                                                                               9-14-24