Liora Karps finds meaning in tragedy

When Shaun Karps (or Karpelowsky), who was deeply allergic to bees, was stung three times in July 2019, he fell into a state of unresponsive consciousness before he died in August 2022. Faced by this devastating “wrecking ball”, his loving wife, Liora, knew she had to find her way out of the rubble.

Speaking at Yeshiva College in the run-up to Rosh Hashanah, Karps delved into the devastation she experienced on facing her “worst-case scenario”.

“Even if the worst thing that you can possibly imagine does actually happen to you, it’s possible to move forward,” she said. “It’s possible still to live a life of gratitude and growth, of happiness and joy, and even to make meaning from the most terrible thing that has happened.”

When Karps received a call that Shaun had been stung and was in a serious condition, she rushed to the Netcare Linksfield Hospital emergency room, where she was told that he would be taken straight to intensive care. Waiting with Shaun’s parents and sister, Karps was relieved when the doctor who eventually appeared was a close friend. “He told me, this is very, very serious, and Shaun may not be okay.” When she asked whether they needed to start a tehillim group, the doctor said yes.

“I’m told that the downstairs area of the Linksfield was so full as word got out, that they had to open up the boardroom to accommodate all the people,” Karps said. WhatsApp tehillim groups multiplied, and people would arrive, saying tehillim around the clock in Shaun’s room.

“It was humbling, but it was also overwhelming,” Karps said. A private person, she considered telling people to give her and her family some space. Yet she soon realised they were comforted by being there for them.

This echoed her philosophy of the “law of more” – to always try and do more when people are going through difficulties. This not only allows you to be there for others but also to receive the gift of knowing that you’re able to make a difference. “I decided to allow people to be there for us in whatever way they wanted. Who was I to take that away from them?”

After six weeks and no change in Shaun’s condition, Karps felt like her life was out of control. “I’m a very A-type personality and I thought to myself, ‘My life feels like a game of pickup sticks.’ The day before the accident, my life was like the beginning of the game, where you hold all those sticks and everything is tidy. But now they had been blasted from my hand, and I had a mess of sticks lying in front of me. I was busy trying to pick up every stick at the same time – to make huge medical decisions, financial decisions, parenting decisions.”

Karps knew that in keeping with the rules of the game, she needed to start lifting one stick at a time. “When you’re left with a mess in front of you, there will be some sticks that you’ll be able to move today, tomorrow, or in a month’s time, and there will be sticks that you’ll never be able to move – make your peace with it. That’s really helped me move forward.”

Five months in, Karps had put together a semblance of routine for herself and her children. “By then, the doctors said to us that the chance of Shaun regaining any kind of consciousness was next to nothing, and that even if he did, he would be so severely brain damaged that he certainly wouldn’t be the Shaun we knew. His body was there, but he wasn’t.”

One evening, while eating Neapolitan ice cream, Karps and her kids laughed at a funny story her son told. They immediately stopped, questioning how they could find even a moment of joy when Shaun would never wake up.

Realising in that moment that her children would follow her lead, Karps compared their hearts to the Neapolitan ice cream, a mix of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. “I said, ‘We don’t have to just choose one flavour or feeling at a time. The fact that we were able to have a moment to laugh at something funny doesn’t mean that we’re any less devastated.’ Our hearts have the capacity to hold all of our feelings at the same time.”

Karps also learned the importance of not writing every emotion off to anger. “When you label whatever you’re feeling as anger, it consumes you. I started thinking about my feelings as a pile of clothes.” Instead of just grabbing whatever emotion was at the top of the pile, which is how Shaun chose his sometimes-mismatched outfits, she decided to interrogate her feelings. “I feel hopeless and helpless. I feel untethered. I feel that Shaun was an anchor for me, and now I’m just flapping in the wind. But that’s not anger.”

Initially, Karps simply felt numb. “I understood that this was a survival mechanism.” Yet, knowing that Shaun wouldn’t recover and would eventually develop a life-threatening complication, Karps kept playing a scenario over in her head. “One day, I’m going to be standing at West Park at Shaun’s funeral, and as that first thud of sand hits that wood, am I going to feel nothing? That really got to me. And I also realised that as much as I wasn’t feeling the difficult stuff, I wasn’t feeling any of the good stuff either.”

Over time, through therapy, she has started being able to feel and cry. “Painful feelings are like fire. If a piece of your clothing is caught alight, don’t run, it fuels the fire. Rather stop, drop to the ground, and roll around – it puts the fire out.” There’s relief in the release of crying, then wiping your tears and being able to carry on, she said. “So, don’t run from your feelings. The gift is that you start to be present in those beautiful moments as well.”