The Dividing Lines of Loss

A few weeks ago, at a party to ring in the New Year, I entered for the first time the home of a woman whom I’ve only recently begun to know. I’d heard that she was a fairly recent widow (she lost her husband a few years ago), but it wasn’t until I attended this party that I got a sense of her late husband. Besides the fact that there were books and knick-knacks that clearly belonged to him still on the bookshelves, many people mentioned him to me. “Did you know ____?” they asked. When I said no, they sighed and shared a small memory. One person told me that he was a lot of fun, had a great sense of humor, and always lit up the room. Another person said he was “the consummate gentleman.” A third person told me the last time they saw him, he’d ordered a martini and joked about it possibly being his last because you just never know.

Even though it was a joyous party, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of his absence… a man whom most people at this party knew and missed, and whom I found myself wishing I could have met. The evening reminded me of a particularly painful but somewhat subtler aspect of loss that is sometimes overlooked… the loss of being able to share the person with others.

When my mother died, I used to categorize people into two groups: People Who Knew Her vs. People Who Had Not Known Her. I lost her when I was 22, so the first group was comprised mostly of family members, friends of the family, and childhood friends who used to casually say hi to her when they’d come over for sleep-overs, or when she was heading out to grocery shop while we hung out. To this day, these people are dearer to me than I can articulate, and the bond I feel towards them is palatable.

To the second group (people who did not know her), I would always try to explain who she was. Once when I was working abroad for a short period during our first year together, I wrote Kaz a long letter describing my mother:

My mom is on my mind tonight. I really wish you could have met her.  It’s always tough when I meet new people that I care about, and I can’t introduce them to her or vice-versa. To not be able to share my mother with someone I love really hurts. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to introduce her to you now. I mean, I know I’ve talked about her before, but I’m not sure if I’ve accurately described who she was. 

She had a great sense of humor, and was goofy like me. I think we would all have laughed together a lot. She was young at heart, open-minded and curious about the world. She loved to travel, meet new people and experience new things. When I was a kid, she was always dragging me to some new place to visit, an art exhibition or museum or independent movie theater. She was an avid reader, and LOVED music. She would have loved that you know so much about music and have access to it.  

She was a great role model in many ways, not the least of which in how to deal with adversity, how to keep going no matter what, how to not give up hope, how to “maintain” like you’re always telling me (she would have loved that motto).  She went through so much—her body was frail—but her will was incredibly strong. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of her now. I’m so stressed out and wish I could call her and hear her voice. She actually spoke in somewhat of a whisper due to the multiple tracheotomies during her heart surgeries. Each one messed with her vocal chords, so she really only had a “voice” in the morning, or after naps, the rest of time it was a whisper. 

Whenever I was down, she would tell me to “think happy thoughts,” or she’d encourage me to draw something, or write a story. She was always encouraging me to express myself and write about what I know. She was a great listener too. It was one of her greatest attributes, that she could listen without judgment and give good advice. And she was so loving. Even when we didn’t get along, I knew that she loved me and would always love me, no matter what. I know that you and I grew up differently—me with siblings, you as an only child—but on this we can relate, no? Our mothers were there for us through thick and thin (when our fathers were not). They loved us unconditionally and were the people that we could always count on. 

I’ll be honest. Sometimes I feel jealous of you because your mother is still alive. You’re so lucky. Losing my mom was, and still is, the biggest thing that has ever happened to me, and I miss her every day. The pain of losing her never really goes away. It just subsides, so that it’s not at the surface. I hope you don’t mind me sharing all of this you. I know she would have loved you, and vice-versa. Anyway, thanks for listening…

Kaz’s death, three years after I wrote that letter, created another dividing line. Like with my mother, the people who knew him hold a special place in my heart. The few people who knew both my mother and Kaz… well, they are the rare gems in my life.

Maybe because of these losses, I’m more sensitive to the desire that I see in others to share the essence of their lost loved ones. I recognize the urge to try and communicate who the person was, what they were about, how they sounded, dressed, moved. Like the  person who invited me into their home recently and revealed a guest bedroom they’d decorated specifically to honor their late mother. Maybe that sounds strange to some, but I totally got it. Walking into this room, which even smells different than other rooms in the house, I immediately sensed the essence of a feminine, kind-hearted, intelligent, classy woman… a lady in every sense of the word. I was moved by the care in which the room had been lovingly put together, every detail considered, and my heart surged with compassion for the person who’d created it.

We all struggle to keep our loved ones alive in some way… if not alive, then at least remembered. Parents try to explain to their children who their grandparents were… show them photos, tell them stories. It’s never satisfying enough. Nothing can sum up the whole of a person, and often people don’t have the patience to listen. But we do what we can, learn to accept the limitations… and perhaps (if we’re lucky) we find other ways to express the person’s character.

The Peace Baby (day 3/30)

A little over nine months before I entered the world, my father returned to Israel from the States, where he had been looking for work, and immediately flew into a rage about something related to my mother’s friendship with another man. My mother was a social woman and had many male friends, as well as female friends. In Israel that was normal. Despite my mother’s reassurances, my father was beside himself. He threw a fit, and then stayed locked in their bedroom for several days, not interacting with the rest of the family, not even coming out to eat (my mother brought him his meals).

According to my siblings, one morning my father reappeared as if nothing had happened, and everything was fine again. “A few weeks later, she told us she was pregnant,” they would later tell me. “You were the peace baby.”

That year, 1970, Yom Kippur was on October 10. I was born on October 11, 1970. Because everyone had theoretically atoned for their sins the day before, my mother always told me I was born on the “cleanest day of the year.”

She was pregnant with me all through that hot summer, working in the stationary store that she had inherited from her parents, the reason why she and my father had moved to Israel in the first place. My father was traveling back and forth to the States that summer trying to find a job because the store wasn’t bringing in enough income. So, my mother was often alone while working pregnant in stifling, non-air conditioned heat, dealing with notoriously rude and demanding Israeli shoppers, and then coming home to deal with my siblings, who turned 10 and 6 that summer.

In September, my father came home. A few weeks later, my mother went into the hospital on the advice of her doctors. My father told me she was in the hospital when her water broke and the contractions started. That’s when her best friend Talma, who was a nurse in the same hospital, called my father at the store. He finished the work day, and then went to the hospital, arriving after my actual birth. Like with my older sister and brother, my mother had given birth without my father present.

When I asked my father to describe the day I was born, he said, “It was an ordinary day.” “An ordinary day?” I laughed. “That’s how you describe the day your youngest daughter was born?”

But that’s how he saw it… just another work day, that happened to end with a new baby. Things were different back then, I guess.

The first thing he did was check on my mother, who was resting but still awake. There had been no complications. Once he confirmed that she was fine, he went to see me, and my mother’s friend Talma went with him. The maternity ward nurses brought me to the looking glass, all swaddled up like newborns are. Talma congratulated him on having another daughter. They had decided to call me Niva, which my mother told me means “a beautiful expression” in Hebrew. If I had been a boy, they would have called me Niv (now my nickname).

As the story goes, a day or two later, when my father came back to the maternity ward to pick up and take me home, this time with my brother and sister in tow, the nurses once again met him at the window with a swaddled baby girl. My father peered down and shook his head, “That’s the wrong baby.” At first the nurses protested, but my father insisted. After a few minutes, the nurses conferred amongst themselves. Then they put that baby girl back, lifted up another baby, and brought me to the window. My father nodded.

My siblings watched this exchange with wonder. From then on, they loved to tease me about possibly being the wrong baby and actually belonging to another family (clearly not the case, as I look exactly like them, but you know how siblings can be).

Later in life, I would delight in asking my mother what kind of baby I was. “You were an easy baby, always smiling. You only cried when you needed something, and as soon as you got it, you would stop. You were always happy.” My brother and sister, who helped take care of me, confirmed this.

I also asked my mother what it was like to give birth, something I always found it impossible to imagine her doing. By the time I was a child, she was already frail. Some of my earliest memories are of her in a hospital. As my siblings and I grew up, we seemed to tower over her. How could we possibly have come out of this woman? How could she have carried all three of us and gone through childbirth three times?

She shrugged. There was nothing to it, she said.

I always found that hard to believe, but maybe she was one of those lucky women who have easy births. She did have wide hips… hips of life one might even say.

A Mother’s Will to Live

Yesterday (March 18) was my mother’s birthday. She would have been 78 years old. She died at age 56. My mother had been seriously ill at different points in my childhood, so I had contemplated her death many times, beginning at 5 years old when she needed her first open heart surgery. Not that I understood what “death” meant at that age, but I was aware of the possibility that she might not come home.

Somehow though, miraculously it seemed, she did come home… over and over, after every operation. By the time I was 22, my mother had beat the odds so many times, to my young mind she seemed almost invincible, like a frail old tree that has managed to survive multiple natural disasters.

For this reason, despite her history of bad health, it was a shock when one day three weeks after my 22nd birthday, she collapsed in front of a neighbor’s house while walking the dog. Two hours later my brother broke the news, and I too collapsed (he caught me). It felt as if the entire world had been yanked out from under my feet.

My mother was the anchor and center of our family, the one person my siblings and I knew we could always turn to and rely on, a constant and unwavering source of unconditional love. She was an artist, music lover and world traveler.  She went back to college in her mid-40’s to finish the degree she had abandoned when my parents married. She finally learned how to drive after they split up twenty-five years later. In the year before she died, she and a high school girlfriend did a European road trip, visiting Switzerland, Italy and Germany. She also visited New Orleans for the first time, and returned saying she could move “in a heartbeat” to either New Orleans or Florence, Italy.

She spoke English, Hebrew and German fluently, the latter only with older relatives. It always surprised me to hear her laughing with her aunts, or saying something under her breath to her brother, in German. She once told me that she liked writing poetry in English more than Hebrew (her native tongue) because English had so many more words to choose from. She loved movies, literature and laughter. A few of her favorite authors were Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, James Baldwin and Somerset Maugham.

She was beautiful: rosy cheeks, jet-black hair (later, salt & pepper) and deep blue eyes framed by beautifully arched eyebrows. Her only regular beauty regiment was applying face cream and plucking her brows. She never wore a stitch of make-up, and she never died her hair. She was opinionated, but also fair-minded and wise. My older siblings and their friends would often seek her counsel. Me being the youngest and barely out of the rebellious teenage years, seeking her counsel (and listening to it) was still relatively new. We were just beginning to make the transition from the traditional mother/daughter hierarchy to adult(ish) friends when she died.

As cliche as it sounds, there was something special about my mother. She once found a shiny bauble on a Tel-Aviv sidewalk, only to find out that it was a diamond worth over a thousand dollars. The boyfriend of a friend, upon meeting my mother for the first time, gave her the crystal necklace he was wearing off his neck. His girlfriend urged her to accept. Strangers, children and animals were all drawn to her.

Hours before she collapsed, she had received, separately and completely by coincidence, wonderful news from both of my siblings, news that she had been waiting years to hear. My last conversation with her was a bit more tense (something I still regret), but we did speak about the college film I was directing, and I knew she was proud of me. My siblings and I have a theory that, with all the good news she heard that morning, she might have died of happiness.

We never asked for an autopsy because we felt like her body had been through enough, but her doctors had their theories. They also revealed their genuine surprise that she had lived as long as she did. These men of science credited her will to live as the reason. 

Physically frail but iron-willed, she left her mark on the world.

My mother and me