Chapter 38 | More Than Sorrow
A few evenings later, Lavi knocked at my door.
He smelled of dust, crushed thyme, and sun.
The scent of the vineyard clung to him the way it once had to me.
He had become broad through the shoulders in the years since James first hoisted him upside down in the rows.
There was a steadiness in him now, and even sorrow seemed to settle into him differently than it once would have—not smaller, but borne with quiet strength.
He leaned one shoulder against the wall and studied me for a moment before speaking.
“The east wall is holding,” he said. “I reset the loose stones this morning. Amos helped me retie the lower vines. We’ll have to prune late this season, but it can still be done.”
As if he were only giving me a vineyard report.
“And if the vines don’t like it,” he added with a faint shrug, “they can take it up with me.”
That sounded too much like James.
The thought hit so suddenly I had to look away.
Lavi was quiet for a while after that. Then he crossed the room and sat at the foot of the bed, forearms braced over his knees.
“Rebekah asked after you,” he said softly.
It still startled me sometimes, how quickly the boy I had found beneath the olive tree had become a man with a wife of his own.
I nodded once.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I was out tying the vines this morning, and I kept thinking...” He stopped and tried again. “Now that I have a wife, I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose her.”
The words landed hard.
He looked down at his hands.
“I keep thinking of the two of you in those early days,” he said, and this time a faint, broken smile tugged at his mouth. “Always fighting. Always bumping heads like two stubborn goats.” His eyes lifted. “You were the fire to his thunder.”
A laugh almost rose in me and died before it could become sound.
“It looked like war to everyone else,” Lavi said. “But it wasn’t. Not really. It was passion all along. Passion for each other. Passion for our Lord.” His voice roughened. “Ima… he died for Him. What greater cause is there?”
That should have comforted me.
Part of me knew it should have.
And part of me was proud—desperately, fiercely proud—that James had not wavered, that he had spoken the Lord’s name until the end, that he had died the way he had lived: all in, no half-measure, no retreat.
But grief is cruel. It can take a holy truth and turn it bitter in the mouth. He was still gone.
“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”
Lavi’s face tightened. He knew then that he had not reached me. Not because he had said anything wrong, but because I was too far gone for right words to matter yet.
Still, he reached for my hand, and I let him take it.
~
Abba came to me a few days later—or maybe longer. Time was lost to me, each day blending into the next without James.
He lingered in the doorway for a long moment before entering. Then he crossed the room and sat beside my mat. He set down a cup of watered wine and honey, though we both knew I would not touch it.
For a while he said nothing.
I stared at the wall.
At last he let out a long breath and folded his hands loosely in his lap. “I used to hate it when people told me to get up,” he said.
The words took a moment to find me. When they did, I turned my head.
He did not look at me. His eyes were fixed on the floor, perhaps on something he could only see in his mind.
“They meant well,” he said quietly. “Your uncle. The neighbors. Men from the synagogue. They would say, ‘Yosef, you must return to your duties. You must be strong now. You must lead your house.’” His mouth twisted faintly.
“As though I did not know that already. As though shame had not already told me all those things.”
He rubbed his palms together slowly. “I thought if I could force myself hard enough, I would become the man I had been before. But grief is not moved by force. It is heavier than that. It sits on a man’s chest and in his bones and behind his eyes until even the smallest thing feels like lifting a stone wall. ”
His voice had gone quieter now, rougher.
“I know you saw me as weak,” he said. “And maybe I was. But it was never that I did not care. It was that I cared so much, and had no strength left after losing her. After losing them.” His jaw worked.
“There were mornings when getting from the bed to the door felt like crossing the whole of Galilee.”
Looking at him then, I saw not the father who had failed me, but the man who had been buried alive beneath his own mourning and had somehow still remained.
“I thought I was stronger than you,” I whispered.
He gave a sad little smile. “Perhaps you are. But strength does not keep sorrow from finding a person.” His eyes lifted to mine at last. “And knowing what it is does not make it easier to climb back out of.”
Abba reached out then, hesitant at first, and laid his hand over mine.
“You are not lazy,” he said. “You are not faithless. You are not failing because you cannot rise.” His thumb pressed once, awkward and warm.
“You are grieving. Deeply. And grief, when it takes root, can make even the smallest step feel like too much.”
My throat ached, but the tears would not come.
“I cannot move. I cannot cry…” My voice faltered, rough and uneven.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve cried every tear I have—that there is nothing left in me but dryness, like I might crumble and turn to dust.” I swallowed hard, my chest tightening against something I could not release.
“And then it comes again. All at once. I cry, I scream, I ache until I think I will break—and still…” I shook my head faintly. “Still it does not end.”
My breath hitched.
“And all I want is him,” I whispered. “His arms… the way he would hold me like nothing in the world could touch me. His voice, always teasing, even when I did not want it.” A broken breath slipped free. “I’d give anything… to have him again.”
Abba hung his head, a tear slipping down his cheek.
“I do not know how to help you,” he admitted. “But I know better now than I did then. A person cannot be argued out of this. They must be held through it.” He glanced toward the doorway. “Lavi has been trying. So have I. But I think it is time to send for the women.”
I closed my eyes.
Not because I wanted them.
Because I knew he was right.