My Uncle Sidney: Shimshon ben Shlomo – Samson, son of Solomon.  How well-named he was.  Like Samson, he was a force with which to be reckoned in life and, in death, it feels as if the very house in which we dwell has fallen in, burying us all alive. Like Solomon, he was both a direct descendent of the line of David and instrumental in creating a house of God.  But perhaps most importantly, also like Solomon, Sidney was given a wise and understanding heart.

There were times, when I marvelled how Sidney’s heart could possibly have been as wise and understanding as it was.  Neither the accident that had once threatened his life, nor the sadness of losing Francis managed to embitter him.  Nor did the sufferings of his children and grandchildren, in which he shared deeply, harden his heart.  On the contrary, his wisdom and capacity to love only grew in depth and breath.

Two months ago when Rick and I were visiting from the States, Sidney invited us to join in on one of his favoured adventures: a prowl around Pinner’s second-hand shops.  Cathryn, lacking the Brichto gene of excitement for paying a maximum of 2 quid for a bed-and-breakfast marmalade and jam kit, was grateful she had a prior commitment.  Off the three of us went on our merry way, purchasing trinkets which Sidney knew Cathryn would later secretly return to the Oxfam shop.  After our tour, Sidney suggested a further delight: coffee and pastries at his favourite Pinner haunt: Wenzel’s.  As we sipped our cappuccinos, I shared a problem close to my heart, trusting in Sidney’s abundance of wisdom.  His advice, as always, was constructed to remind me that conflict resolution only comes about through mutual tolerance and gentleness.  “You may be in the right, Katey,” he said.  “But all of us always believe we’re right.”  In his counsel, as in his thinking and writing, Sidney intuitively married content with form.

Keenly aware that, like my father and his other siblings, Sidney was brought up with parents who were challenged when it came to the expression of feeling and affection, I asked him how it was that he’d managed to grow up not just so very emotionally intact but also with such a life-affirming perspective on things.

This is what he said: “I learned love from my sister Ruth. When I was sad or lonely, Ruth would call me to her bed, wrap her arms around me and rock me.  Because of her, I always felt loved, always felt safe.”  He went on to say that while he learned the fundamentals of love from his sister, later in life as an adolescent, he learned to love life from my parents, Milly and Chanan.  Bach and Blake, Dostoyevsky and Psalms, a good glass of wine to accompany a runny brie, the delicate beauty of a strong marriage and the incomparable joy of children.”

Sidney was not shy in love.  Indeed, he was a living testament to something my mother had always said.  “Love is the one thing that the more of it you spend, the more of it you have.” 

A few days ago, before calling in her obituary for Sidney to the Jewish Chronicle, Cathryn asked if she could run it by me.  I listened to her words, holding back my tears.  “Without you, Sidney,” she wrote, “I would’ve been a lesser woman.”  True perhaps, but how much less a man Sidney would have been uncompleted by Cathryn’s love.  They argued and they fussed, and there were moments in which the hair dryer seemed more a weapon than a fashion tool between them, but if anything, their struggles were vents for egos overwhelmed by a love larger than life.

This same love carried through to their children, to Anne and Daniel, Adam and Jonathan, to his son-in-law Derek and to his Jess, on to their grandchildren, Thorne, Franca and his father’s namesake, Solomon.  A family of strong individuals who instinctively understood that their identities as separate beings were not compromised, but rather enhanced, in belonging to a family whose emblem is love.

As the pesky relative who couldn’t be kept across the Atlantic without a frequent London Brichto fix, I have long been privy to their gourmet recipe for family romance.  At bar mitzvahs and birthdays, at weddings and births, but even more so, over grapefruit at breakfast and foot rubs after supper.  But at no time has the cement of their love been more evident than during this past week.  From the first moment of Sidney’s misdiagnosed illness to the Shabbat evening, five days later when he breathed his last, this family has been wracked by confusion, shock and pain.  But the sensitivity, tenderness and compassion that have buoyed them up has also cast a safety net, assuring them that despite the sense of being adrift in an ocean of agony, they needn’t fear drowning.  Indeed, nourished by Sidney’s example, his family has sought to comfort us for the loss of their Sidney.  Their Sidney, whom we all wish to claim as our Sidney as well.

I don’t think it presumptuous to say that there’s no one here today who hasn’t been profoundly touched by Sidney.  On a strictly personal note, I suspect that without Sidney’s presence in my own life, I may never have felt it safe to love a man.

The ache yet throbs, within us and without.  We all struggle with what seems like a senseless act of impersonal fate, with the impossible task of translating the abstraction of death into the concrete reality that we shall never again clink a glass, argue politics or seek comfort in the arms of one so recently and passionately vital.

While composing these words, I was sitting in Uncle Sidney’s study, its walls lined with his favourite books on Bible and poetry, the novels of Dickens and Turgenev, and all the photos freezing memorable moments of his beloved family, wondering where to seek comfort.  What would Sidney do?  I kept thinking.  Where might he direct us to seek solace?  I imagined him reaching for his Bible, turning the pages to Psalm 42, in which the Psalmist cries out from his personal hell,

My tears have been my food day and night…

And I say unto God my Rock:
Why hast thou forsaken me?

Then I see Sidney closing the book softly and resting it in his lap.  He fixes me with that gentle smile so characteristic and says, “Katey, there are no answers.  There is no escape from pain.  But perhaps we can find comfort in knowing that we don’t exist in a void.  Like our forefathers before us, if we fear there is no God, it is up to us to create him.”  

Baruch dayan emet.