Inside me there is a story I must tell.

I didn't realize it at first.

It began as a slight feeling of unease. Like butterflies in my stomach. But then I began to hear voices. My main character started walking around in my head. “Nu?” she said. “How long do I have to wait?”

She lives in Israel, I think, with her religious husband and children. Her non-Jewish brother, Jev, calls her. He says, “Come.” He lives in the States. And their mother has Alzheimer's. Or Parkinson’s. I'm not sure. But my main character is a convert (her name is Basya, Daughter of G-d. Or maybe Ahuva, Beloved. I don't know her that well yet, so I’m not sure) . And she has spent the last twenty years struggling with the with the concept of how her conversion to Judaism paradoxically has rendered her mother into a woman who-is-not-halachically-her-mother.

It's a bad time for Jev to call, because she is marrying off her daughter soon, and is experiencing the loss of a mother.

“Enough,” Basya-maybe-Ahuva says, slightly irritated, from where she is pacing my brain. “Just tell my story.”

It is not only Basya-maybe-Ahuva's story of loss and grief. It is our universal stories mine and yours.

And it is not only mine and yours, either. It belongs to my clients who sit across from me in the therapy room, telling their stories of heart-shattering losses. And it is the story of you, who reads these words and recognizes your own place of sadness; and irretrievable loss; of people who are gone, of times and places and a childhood that no longer exists except in memory; of valued objects that have disappeared, and with those objects are gone even the memory.

The grief you feel as you read this is nameless. It takes you by surprise that words have stirred your own feelings.

Perhaps you too have a story to tell.

I will write my story.

But how will my story end?

Partners in my monthly writing workshop, critiquing an early story of mine, said, “Change the ending. Too sad. Magazines only publish happy endings.”

Partners in my monthly writing workshop, critiquing a second story two months later said, “Change the ending. It's unrealistic that it ends on such a happy note.”

I send out tentacles to my writing forum. “I'm in middle of my story and stuck in front of those two proverbial famous closed doors. Open one and the man-eating tiger devours him; open the other and he marries the beautiful girl. Do I make my story ending happy or sad?”

Writer Sara Wiederblank muses, “Although I wouldn't say I write joyously happy endings consistently, my stories do often end on a note of hope. Most people I discuss this with say that when they read, although they appreciate deep exploration of real issues, they do not want to leave their book feeling down or depressed. Personally I have mixed feelings about this, since I am concerned that readers whose lives do not tie up so neatly — maybe they're still waiting for the baby or shidduch —will feel alienated by fiction that does…”

“My two cents,” fellow writer Jolie Greiff responds. “If you can make the ending happy, then please do. Some stories don't end happily — that's life. But there's so much sadness out there, I would much rather be uplifted instead of down, even if the [sad] ending was powerful or well written.”

Writer Rochel Burstyn echoes that sentiment, as do most of the writers who respond to my question. Go for the happy ending. But Rochel says, tongue in cheek, “Have him marry the girl he really wants to marry...then give them a couple of kids, maybe a set of twins, have the babies cry a lot in the middle of night and the parents step on pieces of Lego when they go tend to them. Have the mortgage bill come on the same day they're pink-slipped. Have them so exhausted they barely have any energy to talk to each other.”

Libby Lazewnik is pretty decisive. “I think the reason I go for happy endings is the same reason I like hearing happy rather than sad news about people. Despite the difficulties that we have to face in life, and the far too many tragedies, I think there's a seed of hope inside each of us that helps us to endure — with a smile. Think of it as casting my vote for joy. It's that simple.”

Chaya Kraines says it eloquently. “The reason I like happy endings is because that is how it is in the real world, with hashgachah pratis. In real life, Hashem conducts the world in a way that makes everything turn out for the good. Sure, in the real world things don't always seem rosy, but in the real world [in Olam Haba] we get to look back on it and realize how much we gained from that ordeal, and how Hashem really knows what is best for us. In fiction, stories are usually [based on an element of a real life experience], and so the events the author heard of/witnessed find their way into the story... [if the writer ends the story with a sad conclusion] readers don't get to see past the [sad] ending, and see how Hashem runs the world...”

The lone dissenter, Yehudis Litvak, says, “The reason I [like] to read stories with sad endings is because they help me work through my own emotions, which is something we don't usually have the luxury to do while dealing with our own challenges; but somehow find easier when reading fiction [which is] somewhat removed from our own experiences...so what I hope to accomplish with my own writing is to make the world a better place by helping people process their emotions. I don't have the time or patience to be a therapist, but this is my small contribution to the well being of our community.”

And Etka Gittel Schwartz made me laugh with her ambivalence that speaks to all of us. “My favorite Jewish book of all time is Henye Meyer's Exiles of Crocodile Island, which has a spectacular, bittersweet, realistic ending that I love. I am also a huge closet fan of Cinderella, so I'm not sure where that leaves me.”

When I was a child, I devoured books. In each book I recognized a piece of myself in the characters that lived in those pages. Of the thousands of books I read, it was the ones with the unhappy endings that have stayed with me. They were plainly disturbing. They rattled me and shook me up. They pounded at my skull and turned me inside out so that my most inner parts were exposed, raw, and bleeding. They colored my world in a way that nothing ever looked the same again.

I don't know if that is a good thing.

It brings to mind Franz Kafka, famous for his book about a young man who metamorphoses into a giant beetle, and the apathy of those around him. As an angst-ridden, stereotypical teenager reading that book, I became that beetle. The book had a lousy ending.

But it was also Kafka who wrote that a writer must craft his story to act as a sledgehammer to break at our thick skulls; otherwise, each person could just write their own happy stories for themselves.

As a teenager, I thought Kafka had a point.

And then I grew up.

And a very close friend grew up, too.

And her child was diagnosed with cancer.

Everyone had a good story to tell her. This one's child had cancer, and now she's the president of the United States. That one's child had cancer, and now he's married with a hundred and three children.

They flooded her with stories that have happy endings.

She was totally not interested in those stories.

Instead, she devoured Ariella’s story, which gradually emerged over a creamy Ziegelman cake at a vort they chanced to attend together shortly after her child was diagnosed. Ariella was dressed to kill and had a great sense of humor. She showed my friend pictures of her newborn grandson and schmoozed about her job, her crazy boss, and a great book she had just read.

And this is the story she told my friend: A child died, but the mother lived. Not happily ever after. But after a lot of hard work. That there's a lot of terrible stuff that can go wrong in life. But it's possible to laugh, to look young and vibrant, to enjoy the new life of a grandchild.

And from my friend’s story, I learned something new about sadness.

There's always an epilogue.

And in the epilogue the seeds of the next story begin to sprout. (Although it is true that before the seed can begin to grow, the outer hull of the seed first appears to decay deep down there in the blackness of the dirt.)

After her child went into remission, I was inspired to volunteer on the pediatric ward of a children's hospital, servicing children and their families who are, for the most part, very, very ill.

“Doesn't it depress you to see all those sick children?” my friends ask me.

“Not at all,” I say and I try to explain. “When I volunteer, I don't only see the children. I see the families. And I see the incredible potential of life that exists in each of them, how their experiences will change them and life will be even more exquisite, more real, than ever before. Even within the grief of a loss that cannot be undone, I don't see the ending; I see the beginning.”

People look at me like I am crazy when I talk like that.

But my clients have the same unspoken question: “Don't you get depressed listening all day to our horrible stories?” they ask.

“No,” I want to say. “Because the trauma you experienced is not the ending of your life; it's where you begin your life. I don't know how it will happen, but something special will emerge from your experiences that could not have happened in any other way.”

As a middle child, going through teenage-hood with the same itchiness only matched by a bad case of chicken pox, often only noticing how everything that could go wrong did, Alexander and I could have been twins. You know, Alexander the one who had that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? His creator, author and perpetual student of psychology, Judith Viorst, wrote a book for adults in which she described the inevitable stages of life we pass through as necessary losses. To make way for our permanent teeth, the baby teeth must go. To expand our lives by having children, we face the loss of the luxury of time and our prior freedom of movement.

We would not have it otherwise.

I believe that in the deepest part of my clients' pain lies the greatest gifts to themselves, to their children, and potentially to the larger community and world.

Basya-maybe-Ahuva's story is struggling to emerge.

Although I am reluctant to eavesdrop, I hear her conversation with her mother.

“Please give me a hug,” Basya-maybe-Ahuva pleads with her mother. Her mother sits wrapped in a blanket, in a wheelchair facing the window, the sun yellow as her hair she vainly dyed each month.

“Do I know you?” her mother asks, Alzheimer’s (or maybe Parkinson's) clouding her memory.

“I'm your daughter,” Basya-maybe-Ahuva says desperately.

“I did not know I had a daughter,” her mother says, puzzled, the soft folds of her skin creased in an effort to remember. “But if you are my daughter, then of course I would want to give you a hug.”

“Twenty years ago you said no,” Basya-maybe-Ahuva says, and her grief is a pulsing, amorphous mass blocking her way to her mother's now outstretched hands.

“Why?” her mother asks.

“It's complicated,” Basya-maybe-Ahuva whispers.

She reaches out to touch her mother, but finds herself clutching empty air as she emerges from her dream, like a swimmer coming up for air, the lines of her mother's face distorted and swaying erratically as if seeing her underwater.

I struggle with the ending of Basya-maybe-Ahuva's story.

I can't bear her grief and want her mother to finally hold her, hug her, dance with her at her daughter's wedding.  Maybe if I erase her grief, I can erase the grief of my readers.

Maybe. But then maybe not.

My losses cannot be undone. My clients, my readers, they have all experienced losses that are irrevocable. Do I insult them by pretending all stories have happy endings? That her mother converts? A medical breakthrough cures Alzheimer's? Twenty years of pain without a mother's hug is reduced to a puff of smoke and disappears? She listens to her brother-not-brother and travels to America, where she receives and dispenses absolution and all sins are forgiven and forgotten? Her mother-not-mother dances with her at her daughter's wedding?

I want to fix everything.

I want to assuage her grief, to hold Basya-maybe-Ahuva and give her that hug she desperately craves.

But I am only the teller of stories.

She must do it herself.

As we must all.

We must believe that our losses, that our grief, as well as our joys and successes, that all of our lives’ trajectories are part of a greater picture in a spectrum that stretches way back before us; that they will have meaning in a future suspended beyond a time and space that now, in this world, we cannot comprehend fully. And as such, stories must serve as a sledgehammer to make us think about our lives purposefully, to prevent us from allowing the ending to just come upon us.

We cannot choose our endings, but we can choose how we interpret them.

We can choose to discover the epilogue of new beginnings.

But now I must leave because Basya-maybe-Ahuva is waiting for me (Beloved Daughter of Hashem). And she wants to know if she will be happy. I tell her it's her choice. As I have said, I am only the teller of stories.

Write your own story then.

And I will let you know if I like your ending.

NOTE: This article was originally published in Binah Magazine 2014

My book, Therapy, Shmerapy, can be found in bookstores or online