Unfinished Business

Lee Kravitz loved his job as editor in chief of Parade magazine.
But like his ancestors before him, he was a workaholic. Most of the men
in his family worked until they died, usually from heart attacks in
their early 60s.

When he was at home his mind was still at work.
His wife complained that he was never there for her. One of his
11-year-old twins was afraid to approach him. What’s more, he had
become alienated from his boss, and was working in a
field—journalism—that was going through drastic changes, including
extensive job losses. One day an executive met him in the hallway and
told him he no longer had a job. The conversation lasted less than a
minute.

With time on his hands, Kravitz began to reflect back on
his life. He realized that he had a lot of regrets, especially about
the relationships that had gone bad or had ended due to neglect.
Instead of beginning the search for a new job, he decided to spend a
year making amends and trying to reconnect with people who mattered to
him. He interpreted what he was going to do in religious terms: it
would be a form of atonement not unlike Yom Kippur, which he enjoyed
observing in his youth.

The most heartrending stories involve
reconnecting with family members. He visited his Aunt Fern, whom he
adored as a child. She had been hospitalized years earlier for mental
illness and largely forgotten by the rest of his family. He tried to
get his father and an uncle communicating with each other again—they
were nursing grievances against each other going back to their
childhood.

Kravitz attempted to make good on a promise to supply
a young Kenyan boy's impoverished village with a library, and he
visited a high school buddy who had converted to Greek Orthodoxy and
co-founded a monastery in California.

Kravitz slips into
self-indulgence at points, but profiles of some remarkable characters
in his life save the book from total self-absorption. Chief among these
is Father F. Washington Jarvis III, an Episcopal priest who was
headmaster and philosophy teacher at the private high school Kravitz
attended. Under Jarvis’s tutelage, Kravitz read Camus and Rand, Buber
and Frankl, and became convinced that the search for meaning in life
begins with the realization that we all will die someday. When Kravitz
reconnects with this mentor, he is teaching at Berkeley Divinity School
at Yale.

While Kravitz appears to be a secular Jew, he has a
capacity for pondering religious questions. During his visit to Jarvis,
Kravitz admitted that he does something like pray to someone or
something that he increasingly calls God. But he doesn’t know if what
he’s doing could be called prayer. Jarvis wisely told him to stop
denying his impulse to pray. “Prayer is our deepest human instinct,”
Jarvis said.

It begins with the recognition that we are weak
and need help. There is so much in life that is beyond our control. So
we have to offer up. That’s what prayer is: the crying out, the
offering up of the mess we’re in.

Kravitz's story about unfinished business, part of the human condition, is a cautionary tale for all of us. As he puts it,

Even
when you’re not aware of it on a day-to-day basis, your unfinished
business weighs down your soul. Then one day, when you least expect it,
it makes itself known.

It makes itself known if you’re
lucky, that is, and you’re aware enough to notice. What you do about
unfinished business in your life is up to you.