Editorial: The lessons learned in mourning

How long should a death be mourned?

Does it get measured in days or weeks or months? Is it a year or is it years?

Judaism has several — the days between death and burial, the sitting of shiva for seven days after, the 30 days adjustment to the loss, and for parents, a year of mourning.

But there is no yardstick for the complicated emotions what took place at the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018.

There is no simple arithmetic that gets us from the death of one person to the death of 11. It isn’t as easy as adding the suffering and carrying the pain. It is much more personal than that for the people at the center of the grief.

It is the same for those in the concentric rings moving outward — those at levels of separation but still struck and stunned by the most deadly attack on a synagogue in American history.

For a year, other cities have moved on.

They watched aghast what happened in Squirrel Hill, and then they stopped and breathed before following the trail of tears to the Poway synagogue shooting in California and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado.

They could be appalled by the 12 people killed at the Virginia Beach public works building. They could observe the assault at the Gilroy Garlic Festival before moving on to the attack on an El Paso Walmart six days later and the Dayton bar district shooting hours after that.

But Pittsburgh watched those shootings unfold with a terrible understanding of what would happen next.

There would be sympathy and support. There would be funerals and memorials. There would be sorrow and anger. And then there would be an expectation that the mourning has to end.

Like learning to walk again on a broken leg, Pittsburgh has limped out of mourning through hard work and leaning on one another for support. No matter how much it hurts to drive past a synagogue that sits quiet on Saturdays, life — and Squirrel Hill — has carried on.

What we have to carry forward is the lessons we learned. How to add strength when someone offers it. How to subtract pride and ask for help. How to multiply the good memories to make them last. How to divide the pain into manageable morsels.

And most important, we should honor the lives of Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, David and Cecil Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. We should have faith, share love, work together, give back and know joy.