Depression

Depression is presented as both a response to bereavement and a condition whose origins cannot be confidently assigned. Judah Loeb’s experience follows Mary Loeb’s suicide; Chaim Lerner’s is described retrospectively through competing explanations that never resolve into a single cause.

Judah Loeb after Mary’s death

Years after Chaim’s counsel that suffering should coexist with other forms of life, Judah recalls how completely it once persuaded him. After Mary killed herself, however, Judah spiraled into depression and addiction and remembered Chaim’s advice verbatim. In that later crisis, the words that had once seemed powerful were, in Judah’s judgment, utterly worthless. The recurrence exposes a limit in counsel: remembered language cannot by itself relieve a suffering that has changed in scale and circumstance.

Chaim Lerner’s reported depression

Michal says Chaim suffered from depression even before the war, a detail she offers while considering his death. She also names PTSD, his injured leg, and chronic pain as possible factors, emphasizing that pain could weigh especially heavily on someone as active as Chaim. Yet she does not settle on any explanation: the depression might have had nothing to do with the Holocaust, while his final book about God was another possibility she had considered. Her account keeps these causes as possibilities rather than a diagnosis of why he died.

Uncertainty and aftermath

Michal recalls that she initially thought Chaim had slipped because he was having difficulty walking, but Zehava understood immediately that his fall was not accidental: Chaim rarely spent time on the balcony and generally preferred being indoors. When Judah suggests disappointment with Israel, perhaps connected to Chaim’s statement about the 1982 Lebanon War, Michal does not pursue the question. She has spent months thinking about the suicide, but says that she and Yoav eventually had lives to live and that the reason no longer mattered to her. Her refusal to keep searching contrasts with Judah’s continuing effort to understand, while the narrative leaves Chaim’s depression and death without a definitive explanation.