When Sarah died, Abraham aged overnight. The midrash says it plainly: old age came upon him the moment he buried her, as the verse notes — "Abraham was old, coming with days" (Genesis 24:1). The spirit of prophecy looked at this moment and quoted Proverbs: "A Woman of Valor, who can find her?" (Proverbs 31:10). The whole poem, the rabbis said, was composed about Sarah.
She was the sea that the ship captain navigated for decades — the currents and winds that shaped his every voyage. When she was gone, the midrash offers a parable about a great ship captain who survived pirates, treacherous straits, and storms at sea. Then his ship arrived at port — and the mast broke. The danger of the whole voyage had been survived. The safety of port brought the disaster. The man who outlasted everything, the rabbis say, sometimes does not outlast his own grief.
Abraham buried Sarah in the cave of Machpelah, in Hebron, in the land God had promised him — land he had to pay for because he did not yet legally own any of it. The irony is sharp and the rabbis did not miss it: the first piece of the Promised Land Abraham actually acquired was a burial plot. Not for himself. For the Woman of Valor. The land began, for him, as a place to bury the person who had made the journey possible.