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Autumn 2003
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Irish Honeymoon
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We are haunted children. Each festival, we gather our little nuclear group about us. Elijah's cup stands on the table...it is my mother's, my father's cup.
I was 31 when I came to Israel. I left in a ferocious need find my own life ... and nothing was going to stop me
My parents never tried to stop me. When I left, my mother gave me my symbolic "wings," my validation. She told me she admired me - admired me - for having the courage to do what she herself would never have had the courage to do.
My mother lacking courage? Impossible. My mother fought the dragons of my childhood. My mother was the rock and we all anchored around her.
I lay in bed on the morning my mother died, and images tumbled through my head. In my mind's eye, I saw the funeral I could not attend...my father, alone now, for the first time. He and my mother had always been one. How would he go on? And my brother, older, sadder. And finally, my sister. My mother was her protector and angel. What would Ann do now? Two birds twitter as they build a nest on my Jerusalem window ledge...
I lived most of my adult life within half an hour's drive from my parents and never gave it a second thought. We talked by phone, saw each other now and then for a bit of shopping and a chat. Such was life in suburban New York.
Living in Israel - being so far away - taught me about family We saw each other through a time-lapse sequence. Each visit, they were perceptibly older, changed. A call "Your mother is in the hospita" brings panic. No-one can reassure me.
Another visit to Israel. It is the year following my mother's surgery and she looks so tired. I can see the weariness, yes, but she is still Mother. I see her as I have always seen her: strong, immovable, and elemental force in my world. A friend comments: "What a fragile little woman your mother is" I am shaken. I had never seen my mother as fragile.
My parents are here...they must leave...and another year passes.
It is 1983. They come for Passover, and I am overjoyed to have, at last, my entire family together. We will have three uninterrupted weeks. My mother looks wonderful. Her color is back. Just before the Seder, she tells me that she is dying. "Dying?" I am inane, saying "But you look so well."
She is not well. She has cancer. It has spread to her lungs and stomach and she says that she can feel that she is going...and soon. "I don't want to lose you," I cry. If I cry, Mother will fix it, it will be okay.
"I don't want to lose me either," she says, and laughs.
"How can you laugh?" How can she not?
Fears and prayers and hopes. Yet she makes me face the reality. Relentlessly, she tells me what I need to know about the will, the inheritance, my brother and sister. I am honored. I am the first to be told. A two-day trip to the Galilee. The wildflowers are blooming. Scarlet and blue, white and pink, yellow and purple. The Galil is ablaze, and we see it together. I remember. The Hermon, still crowned with snow. The Kinneret, mist-covered.
My mother always talked to me. I was little, very little...younger than my daughter is now. I sat by her, and she ironed and talked about life, her thoughts, her dreams. Was she lonely? Did she miss her own mother who had passed away?
I grew up and lived my life. Sometimes we quarreled. But that is the way life is, I tell myself. Children must pull away, must grow and try and fail. I couldn't let myself be kept safe at home. Now, though, I wonder. Did I ever say, "I love you?" I packed those three weeks with hugs, with little touches of fingers, and all the time my eyes followed my mother: watching, absorbing, saving.
The next summer, I went to the United States to be with her. My mother still looked well. How can she be so ill? Yet the signs were already there. Perhaps sheer will sustained her. She wanted me to remember the Mother I knew, and not as she would be in weeks to follow. She let me take care of her, and that told a story. We talked, talked, talked. I tried to tell her all the things I'd never gotten around to saying, never found the right words.
This time, I just let the words rush out, no picking and choosing, no searching for the elegant phrase. I wanted her to know that all the little hurts...they were nothing. Forgive me Mother...I forgive you, too.
I, myself, am my mother. I am the cycle, the pattern. I sit by the pool and watch my son play in the water, and I am my mother, and it is me in the pool. I am the one, the mother who is and will be. My mother gave me the diamond that was her mother's and perhaps, though no one can remember so far back, her mother's mother's. It is a symbol, the only thing that has been passed down the generations. All else was lost, long ago, left behind in another old ... older ... country.
I have become the woman my mother raised me to be. As she molded me, I am - for the good and the ill. I am my mother's daughter.