When We See You Again

I tried to explain the deep, bodily pain we were feeling. I said, “We have third-degree burns on our souls.”

In a competition of pain, there are no winners.

He had been so savagely and brutally held captive underground for so long. Now we would be reverently and delicately putting him into the hallowed ground of Jerusalem, the city he adored. I thought of my other mantra, “I love you. Stay strong. Survive.” That was no longer fitting. Even though he had done it. He had stayed strong. He had survived. He survived until we didn’t save him. He survived until they killed him. Until they put bullets into his body from so close his hair was full of gunpowder. But those bullets did not touch his soul. Only mine.

The last thing he said to us on October 7th was, “I’m sorry.” And it is the last thing I said to him as we put him into the ground. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. There was wailing. The screaming was holy and helpful. No burials of the young in Israel are genteel or courteous. No one wears fancy clothes. We are miserable and we look and act like we feel. We are traumatized people. I like that. It’s real. It’s appropriate.

I never knew how many wounds everyone was carrying, in different forms, in their pockets. Right there, but unseen. Although sometimes the outlines are detectable through the fabric.

Yes, hope is still mandatory.

Job, ingesting all the suffering, loss, pain, and grief, says just four words. Four simple words, “God gives, God takes.” The rest is commentary.

Most people think of Hersh as having been one boy in this whole wide world, but as a mother, I saw the whole wide world in that one beloved boy.

At a meeting recently, a man asked me, “How are you?” I said, “Suffering. How are you?” He said, “No, really, how are you?” Hmmm. I paused and said, “Really. I am suffering.” He seemed uncomfortable.

The other vignette that became part of my own family’s code words was when Gerda described what she’d yearned for most in the years she suffered during the war. She dreamt of “a boring night at home.” She didn’t want anything exciting or fancy. Just an evening with her father in his chair, smoking his pipe while reading, her mother in her usual spot sewing, and her older brother making jokes while she was just lying on the floor complaining about being bored. For the past twenty-nine years, often, in the middle of a hectic period, Jon would turn to me and say, “Let’s have a Gerda Weissmann Klein boring night at home tonight.” Oh, how I miss those boring nights. I’m grateful that we valued how heavenly they were.