Gone where?

During one of my recent bouts of sleep deprivation I followed a link from a certain Portuguese insomniac I know, and read through the end notes on a blog called 'Cancer, Baby'. 

I say 'end notes' because they weren't posts per se, but rather brief updates left by a friend of the blogger... short Post-Its® written in rapid succession, with the final note - consisting of only 29 words - simultaneously lifting this blogger's veil of anonymity and placing the shrouds upon her newly still form:

"My phone just rang. It was cancerbaby's husband. "I guess you know why I'm calling," he said.

She died this morning.

She was thirty-three.

Her name was Jessica."

I had not even known this woman existed until she was gone, but while reading through her archives in the wee hours of a sleepless morning I was moved by the outpouring of prayers and support she had received throughout her well-documented battle with cancer... and by the outpouring of grief expressed by her readers when the battle was ultimately lost.

I'm a big believer in the power of communal prayer.  I saw with my own eyes how a neighbor's son - a young IDF officer who the doctors had given zero chance of surviving his battle wounds - was brought back to a full rich life by the power of people's prayers.

Your prayers.

So you can understand how I began to take for granted that if only enough people would get together and say 'pretty please with sugar on top', G-d would have no choice but to answer prayers offered by such a determined mob.

What I failed to realize is the old truth that although He always answers our prayers... sometimes the answer is 'no'.

While reading through the comments on that final entry, I was moved by a poem that one of cancerbaby's readers had left.  I found out later that it was was written by an Anglican Bishop who lived and died a century ago... something that should have instantly made it of no interest to an Orthodox Jew living in Israel.  Yet for the past few nights while I've played hide-and-go-seek with the sandman, I've repeatedly been drawn back to that poem in cancerbaby's comments.

I finally did a search and found out a bit about the poet... and located the text of his beautiful, non-sectarian take on death:

        WHAT IS DYING?

I am standing on the sea shore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an object
of beauty and I stand
and watch her until at last she
fades on the horizon.

Then someone at my side says
"There she has gone" -
gone where?
Gone from my sight - that is all.
She is just as large in the mast,
hull and spars as she was
when she left my side. The
diminished size and total loss
of sight is in me and not in her,
and just at that moment when
someone by my side says
"She's gone" others on a distant
shore take up
the glad shout -
"There she comes!"

Bishop Brent
Bishop of the Philippines
1862 - 1929

While this is a beautiful and moving poem... it is the small phrase 'gone where' that kept drawing me back.  My religion has countless volumes written on how to conduct oneself in this life, but is strangely laconic (one might even say intentionally vague) on the specifics of what happens... next.

'Gone where?', indeed.