I love live music and especially enjoy the feeling you get when you share that experience with a friend. Saturday, January 25, 2020, was the last time I was able to enjoy such a moment—and it was an amazing evening: a tribute to Willie Nelson at the Troubadour featuring many of his friends as well as younger artists he has inspired. The highlight of the evening for me was a three-song set by the legendary John Prine who would be honored the following day at the Grammys with a lifetime achievement award.

While I was familiar with his best known works (especially “Angel From Montgomery” and “Paradise”), I’d never seen him in person. It was one of those special moments that you just know you’ll remember forever.

Two months later, I found myself sitting in front of the television screen heartbroken as Stephen Colbert, a longtime John Prine fan, reported that the singer was on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital due to complications of COVID-19. Colbert then shared a video from 2016 of his duet with Prine on “That’s the Way That the World Goes Round.”

A week later, John Prine was dead and, as he instructed in the final verse of “Paradise,” his ashes were sprinkled on the Green River in Kentucky, near to where his parents used to take him for summer vacations, not far from where his dad’s hometown once was—before it was strip mined away and turned into an ecological disaster zone; a once beautiful place that is now uninhabitable.

Last week we commemorated the awful milestone of more than 500,000 American deaths due to COVID-19. Amongst the fallen are members of our congregation as well as friends and loved ones from near and far.

For those who are missing someone dear to them, each death is a tragedy. For us as a community, as a nation, and for our world—the losses are staggering.

My heart hurts and my head aches as I think about what we’ve been through this past year.

What comforts me is the very capacity to love and care for each other that can open us to the possibility of so much pain. As a matter of pure reason, we might be tempted to steel ourselves from such heartache, to shut ourselves in forever so as to protect ourselves from the pain of loving that which must ultimately fade.

In spite of these feelings, in spite of ourselves—we have no choice but to embrace the pain that comes from loving what death can touch.

As Prine put it:

In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a sittin’ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.

The most precious gift of all in this world—the big door prize—is the love we have for one another, the love that both makes the loss both painful and bearable at the same time.

— Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback