Author biography:

Barbara K. Steinberg is akin to a vintage wine in an aged cask.  Definitely oaky flavor.  She has been married for forty-nine (sometimes grueling, sometimes bountiful) years to someone less than a saint but much better than a serial killer – a man who is deeply loved. 
Barbara watered her remaining children like garden flowers and they blossomed and seeded children of their own.  Being a grandparent is her most rewarding job to date and Barbara highly recommends it (although she does understand you can’t control whether or not you ever become a grandparent).
Access Barbara’s website at BarbaraKSteinberg.com for photos, blog postings and information on other books by Barbara K. Steinberg.  
Barbara Steinberg possesses a lifetime of experience in executing tax returns for dead people.  The dead people rarely complain, but those left behind to spend the accumulated wealth occasionally do.  Barbara blogs her inestimable financial wisdom through the Medium website at https://medium.com/@barbaraburbles.   
Barbara and her husband live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, cached in a venerable home with dusty corners and no open floor plan.  Their pet sugar-glider, Rocky, barks for attention and children and grandchildren tumble in and out.

To contact Barbara directly: bksltd928@gmail.com

Dayenu: Picking Up the Pieces was self-published in December of 2018, and can be found through Amazon in both paperback and kindle e-book editions. 

Question:  Why did you decide to write Dayenu: Picking Up the Pieces? 

Answer: I didn’t.  In a sense, the book wrung itself from me.  The need to write about Rachel’s loss possessed me like a lurking shadow, but I wouldn’t let myself write until I had enough emotional distance to reflect all of Rachel and myself with tenderness and acceptance. 

Question: Who should read your book? 

Answer: First and foremost, my book is a good read. 

Beyond that, in particular, those who have experienced a child, sister, brother, friend, or anyone torn from them by the tragedy of suicide will receive some comfort from my journey and the journey of others in this book.  Those who are fortunate enough not to have walked through this valley will get a whiff of the experience - enough to comfort to those who are. 

Also, there are many who witness self-harm in their children and other family members.  Some means to understand and address these issues is provided. 

Question: Judaism is an aspect of this book.  Explain your relationship to religion. 

Answer: I folded Judaism into myself when I married my husband.  I was raised as an Episcopalian, replete with memorized Catechisms.  As a child, each Sunday my family would oversleep and make a mad dash to church services, tossing on our clothes in the car. 

My Grandfather, a Russian Orthodox priest, married my parents and baptized all of his grandchildren, myself included.  As a child, the ceremony and tradition of the Russian Orthodox service intrigued me. 

Today, other family members embrace or ignore protestant, Catholic, and Evangelist religions.  I believe in some form of G-d and don’t overly worry about what form or flavor that is, though I believe its awesome power entitles it to respect.  To define G-d as either male or female is to limit the form and scope of the Almighty.

When religion is not warped and manipulated to justify the obscene, religion can and should provide a moral foundation on which to build your life. Religion should also be a refuge in times of pain. 

Question: What do you hope people will take away from this book? 

Answer: The value of life and love.  All of the main characters of this book are deeply loved and treasured.  If any individuals believe they have been treated unduly harshly by my words, I apologize.  That was not my intent.  No individual is free of flaws or mistakes, myself, as my text reveals, included. 

I enclose the title and the table of contents from the paperback version of the book:

Dayenu:
Picking Up the Pieces

by Barbara K. Steinberg
bksltd928@gmail.com
web page: barbaraksteinberg.com 

Excerpt:

To this day, I block the image wrought by the ravages of time to Rachel’s remains.  No preservative is pumped into the body of the Jewish dead.  I have just enough scientific education to know that I don’t want to know.
The cemetery is only three miles from our home.  I pass it on my way to many destinations.
Mature trees fill the small, old cemetery.   For the ten years between Rachel’s death in 1998 and March 9, of 2008 I have visited nearly every week. My visits are ever brief.  I plant whatever flowers I chose for the summer in an urn at her gravesite and water them through the heat of the summer.  In fall I clear Rachel’s small marker of the golden leaves, in the winter cold I shovel the accumulated snow, and in spring I shift the white, feathery seeds of the cottonwood trees.
Hannah, Norman and Joel grieve in their own ways.  Most often I perform this vigil alone.
A corner of the cemetery houses aged soapstone markers.  The worn inscriptions announce death dates from the early and mid - 1800s.  There is a marker capped with the figure of a lamb, the inscription proclaims the name of another sixteen-year-old girl.  I stop to reflect on her parents.

Time passes.  A mature elm that once sheltered her gravesite is now gone, a casualty of Dutch elm disease.
A year after Rachel’s passing, an acquaintance lost her twenty-one-year old daughter to suicide.  Her Jane is planted less than thirty feet from my Rachel.  I pause at Jane’s gravesite each time I visit Rachel’s.
The remains of a dear friend, a victim of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) now reside here.

There were times when I believed that my progress was a betrayal to Rachel.  She was fashioned from my own flesh.  How could I leave her in the past and move on?
There were times when I suffocated myself in the cloak of my hurt, envisioning it as a sacrifice to my daughter.
She would not have considered my pain a tribute to her existence. I know this. There were times when that knowledge struck me as an empty platitude.
Most of the time, I knew such pain was pointless and best abandoned.  It helped no one, least of all myself, but emotions are not ruled by decision or conscious thought.
Everyone around you wants you to move on.  After a time, even your closest friends, don’t want to hear of your anguish any more.  I am lucky to have Janet, ever patient.
In 2007 and 2008, when I am honest, I know the pain has receded with time.  The physical and mental depression associated with her birthday and her death date are less acute.  I don’t know when or how the intensity of the pain began to fade. My movement resembles a hunched figure as it lurches into a fearsome wind.  Two small steps forward, a stumble, a stutter to the side, then again forward.

I do not visit the gravesite of my parents.  They have none.  My mother told me she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered.  Today I am older than my mother ever lived to be.  I wonder why she thought to tell this to her fifteen-year old daughter. I do not know the answer.
My Aunt Phyllis warned me I would someday regret the decision to scatter the ashes of our parents.  She argued I would want to visit their gravesite.  Today, I understand she herself wanted a place to visit her sister.  At sixteen, I was unable to understand the subtext of the conversation and thought only to obey my mother.
Today, I regret my lack of understanding of Phyllis’ need.  My sister, my brother and I have not regretted that decision, but I believe the needs of those left behind have precedence over those who die.  Had my sixteen-year old self understood what Phyllis wanted, I likely would have chosen otherwise.
At sixteen you are in the process of defining life.  Life, for me, became defined by the possibility of instantaneous loss.  What I loved could be removed in the movement of the wings of a hummingbird and never returned.
It is also true the pattern of life is that parents will die before children.  I accepted their deaths as part of that pattern.  I never fought their deaths as I have Rachel’s.
As I said earlier, for years a part of me simply chose not to believe they were dead, but simply chose not to return.  (I wonder today: how would that be preferable?  At that time, a part of me thought it was.  I imagined they would return when I was older and hoped they would be proud of what I had become.  I still pray they know and are proud of me.)  In time, this dream faded and I accepted their deaths.
I say little about the loss of my parents.  Like the growth of a tree, each year has added a ring of knowledge and experience to the person I was.  With that growth, my view of the world has altered. It is hard to find the voice of the sapling I was then.
I retain this much - like most sixteen-year-olds I was full of myself.  There were moments I disrespected my mother and believed I knew more than her.  After the shelter of my parents was gone, I regretted my harsh words.  Today, with the perspective of a mother, I believe my teenage rebellion, on a scale of one to ten would rank somewhere between a three and a four – not all that much.  In spite of my behavior, I now know my mother knew I loved her.  Like a wet dog, I have shaken that guilt from me.
Today, I remember more my need through the years to have my mother guide me through Rachel’s illness.  I wonder if the result would have been different if I had the wisdom of her counsel.  I remember as an adult and a parent myself, how many times in the years alone my sister and I yearned to have the unrestrained acceptance and love of our parents, a love not measured by our successes and failures.
And the joys.  There is not one – my wedding, the birth of my children, the weddings of my children, nor the births of my grandchildren when I have not felt that void.
It is also true that I have felt their presence within me.  There have been times in dreams and at odd moments when I could taste their attendance.  Spiritual company is better than nothing, but I have longed to hear their voices and feel the warmth of their touch.

My husband-the-doctor describes the body’s physical reaction to injury.  The initial red, raw inflammation of the wound is essential to the healing process.  Anything, like steroids, that dull the inflammation will delay healing.  After that initial inflammation, we do not witness each skin cell grow.  One day it is better and we stretch the skin and it doesn’t hurt anymore and we don’t really know the exact moment when it was different.
Is a wound of the spirit all that much different?
Healing doesn’t happen, as Hollywood implies, through a climactic revelation.  The soul doesn’t mend in an instant like a light turned on or off.
The Me of today learned that healing doesn’t happen when I stand by and watch.  I mend as I engage in life, bit by bit.

On July 24, 2007 and on March 9, 2008 I am at Rachel’s gravesite.  The pain is muted but still profound on Rachel’s July birthdate and the March anniversary of her death.  My good friend, Janet, orange floppy hat perched on her head, comes with me, to provide emotional comfort in my odyssey, as I visit my forever sixteen-year-old daughter.
When we arrive, I stretch my arm to caress the flowers and notes already there, moved beyond words at their presence.  Her good friends continue to remember her.