time travel

tikva’s quilt

/ gal / Leave a comment

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A month before Tikva was born, our community of family and friends surrounded us with the most incredible love, circling around David, Dahlia and me – and Tikva still in my belly – blessing us with everything we would need to welcome our second daughter when she was born. All together in that giant circle, they gave us the strength to take on the unknowns the future held, and the 58 days that unfolded of Tikva’s mighty life, days spent entirely in the critical bay of the intensive care nursery at UCSF.

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For that day, my sister had prepared blank prayer flags that people could write on, sharing their messages for Tikva. We planned to hang the flags above her tiny bed in the hospital.

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Tikva was born 11 years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning while it was still dark outside. Just as I arrived in the labor room, I looked out the window at the eucalyptus trees that surrounded the giant mountain where the hospital sat and a red tail hawk swept by just a few feet away.

Tikva was past her due date, showing no signs of being ready to come out on her own. She knew she had a good thing going inside me, where my body breathed for her, fed her, held her safe and warm. They broke my amniotic sac to induce labor, and as soon as she came out, she was intubated because she couldn’t breathe on her own.

She was beautiful. My Baby Girl.

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Her prayer flags did indeed hang in her little corner, surrounding her with our community’s love and holding. Above the machines attached to the wires that monitored the oxygen saturation in her blood. Above her ventilator and C-Pap and IV bags and the hospital baby blankets with the little footprints and the pictures Dahlia drew for her sister.

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58 days later, the morning after Tikva breathed her final breaths outside in the hospital garden, held by David and me, surrounded by her two primary nurses, Allyson and Elaine, and her two doctors, Roberta and Tom, Dr. Tom wrote to me, For all of her difficult moments, we always felt Tikva’s bed space had a special aura of love and tranquility. It was no wonder that so many of us became attached to your family and that she touched so many lives.

If you ever want to meet an angel on earth, spend time with the nurses and doctors who work in the neonatal intensive care unit. They are high souls.

After she died, I wanted to do something with Tikva’s prayer flags, something lasting that held her story, her meaning, and the hope she brought with her. My friend Elizheva helped me begin to turn them into a quilt. I wanted it to be circular, like a mandala, because for me Tikva is infinite.

We began to sew, by machine and by hand. I never made a quilt before this one, and mostly I sewed by hand.

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Tikva’s nurse Elaine asked me for a piece of the yellow fabric that would become one of the corners on the quilt. This is Elaine playing with Dahlia and me in Golden Gate Park, sometime during the year after Tikva died. I’ll never lose touch with the special people who cared for my daughter.

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Onto the yellow fabric, Elaine quilted a red tail hawk – the animal spirit that followed us before, throughout, and since Tikva’s life. Red tail is a divine messenger, bringing messages from the spirit world.

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As we drove cross-country for our move to Cincinnati, I sewed circles and spirals onto the quilt. Infinite.

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And in Cincinnati I connected with another quilter named Barb, and she helped me continue my project. I added the corners, Elaine’s hawk and pieces of baby onesies friends had made or gotten for us. Barb sewed the checkerboard back side of the quilt.

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Four years later, just before moving to Atlanta, our son Judah was born and became a part of our family through adoption. I didn’t do very much work on the quilt in the five years we spent in Atlanta – my plate was full with caring for a new baby, supporting Dahlia through her bat mitzvah and middle school, working, and being the partner of a newly ordained rabbi.

But as soon as we moved to Alexandria, I saw the wall in my new sunroom where I would hang Tikva’s quilt, and I knew I had to finish it. So I asked around for a quilter at the synagogue that was our new home, and I met Sandi. And she helped me to finish Tikva’s quilt.

When I traveled west last fall to say goodbye to my beloved mother-in-law before she died, I brought the quilt with me. I wanted her to see it, and I finished sewing it there, quilting little spirals throughout the quilt.

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When I got home, I sewed a crystal bead onto the quilt for my mother-in-law, imagining her holding Tikva, their spirits now intertwined.

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I spend a lot of time in my sunroom, on the couch under my bookcases, surrounded by two of my most favorite things in the world – Tikva’s quilt and my books. It feels as though this wall was built for Tikva’s quilt, and I know I finished sewing it at exactly the right time, even if it took me ten years.

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I feel a strange kind of peace, 11 years later. Or maybe it’s more acceptance. Grief is no longer a sharp and jagged thing, edges smoothed by time and space. And yet I think a lot about the sliding doors that closed and opened, a parallel universe in which Tikva survived. I could be sitting on this couch with my 11-year-old Tikva, the quilt above us as I tell her the story of her beginning. Or a time and a place in which she was never diagnosed with a birth defect and was just born healthy and well like her sister – no quilt at all. Probably in a different city. In a life where we may never have met her brother.

Strange how life unfolds. Complicated and mysterious, far beyond my grasp. I’ll get cupcakes today, as I do every year, and with my husband and my children, we will celebrate the day Tikva was born. The day she changed everything.

Happy birthday, my beautiful Baby Girl. I love you forever.

The Best Picture of Tikva - Rudi Edits

all of time in this moment

/ gal / 1 Comment

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In the front row of the sanctuary, seated in the center so that my eye looks right at the Torah in its arc, I listen to the cantor singing the blessing over the wine. In a flash of my mind I am 18 years old again, at a Shabbat dinner at UCLA surrounded by new Jewish friends who know the entire full blessing so well that I can hear they have sung it every Friday of their lives. I only knew the beginning of the blessing then, and just the words, not the melody; it’s all we had recited in my home growing up, on those occasional Fridays when my mom decided to make chicken and rosemary potatoes for a special dinner and we lit the Shabbat candles. At that dinner during the beginning of college, I tried following along with the long prayer, mostly listening. Now, in the sanctuary of the synagogue in Atlanta where my husband is concluding a five-year tenure as one of its rabbis, preparing to move to a new congregation in a new city in a new state where he will lead a Jewish community, I easily sing along with the familiar words and melody.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I think about what it means to me to be Jewish, to have Judaism as my sanctuary. I remember the first day of freshman orientation, when I walked through a courtyard at UCLA towards the table marked with a sign that read, Jewish Student Union. I unexpectedly found my people that day, and in those years I connected with my Judaism on a new level. I think it was then that I knew without doubt I would marry a Jewish man and raise Jewish children one day.

I didn’t grow up a synagogue kid, but I went to Jewish summer camp for three years, and had come back from one of those summers to tell my parents I wanted to have a bat mitzvah. They hired a retired cantor and every Wednesday of 8th grade, he came to my house and taught me to read Hebrew, taught me all of the prayers in the Shabbat morning service, taught me my Torah portion, and helped me write my dvar Torah. Before our meetings he would sit in his car and smoke a pipe, and his breath smelled like cloves and cinnamon while we studied together. I had my small bat mitzvah at the library of the JCC, where there was a Torah I read from before 40 family members and friends, and we had a party in the garden of our home. My maternal grandmother had died just a few months before, and I felt her presence deeply on that day. My paternal grandmother had come from Italy, and prepared all of the food for the party.

I didn’t do much Jewishly after that, but at UCLA I connected again with this piece of myself that I had never questioned. I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and Sephardic refugees who were forced out of Egypt in the 1950s for being Jewish. My Judaism growing up was in the fact that I was born in Jerusalem to parents who had met on a beach in Eilat. It was in the Sephardic and Ashkenazi food my grandmothers made when they came to stay with us from Italy and Israel. It was in stories I heard of relatives who had been rabbis, in my great uncle who prayed daily at the Sephardic Egyptian synagogue in Paris. It was in my cousin’s wedding in Tel Aviv, where I had been a bridesmaid when I was nine years old and danced with IDF soldiers who had come dressed in their fatigues to celebrate their friends. It was in my memory of putting a tiny piece of paper into the Western Wall in Jerusalem with my nine-year-old’s prayer that my great grandmother live forever. It was in the stories I heard of how grand life had been for Jews in Alexandria before Nasser came to power. Stories of my Polish grandmother sewing clothing out of potato sacks in Auschwitz to trade for eggs she could eat.

She would have been so proud of my husband, my maternal grandmother. Proud to know that I had married a man whose family came from the same part of Poland. Proud to see the humility and grace with which he holds the responsibility of being a rabbi, of leading a Jewish community.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I look up at the majestic sanctuary of this historic synagogue in Atlanta, this beautiful Southern city that has been our home for five treasured years. I feel gratitude and love for its people, its history, the way it has held us. I think of my daughter’s bat mitzvah in this sanctuary last year, of the four years of preschool here that have given my son the unquestioned conviction of his Jewishness. I think of the work I have been able to do to connect the Jewish community to the refugee families I worked with professionally. I think how much I am going to miss the Southern hospitality and genteel welcome we have received from everyone here, the sweet lilt in how words are spoken, wondering if Northern Virginia can still be considered the South.

Then, after the senior rabbi has spoken, after others from the community have spoken – all so graciously, so lovingly, so generously towards my husband and our family – my husband goes to the bimah to speak, from this pulpit that is now so familiar to him that it has been strange until this moment for him to sit with me in the front row. From my seat in the center of that front row, I watch him, I hear his words, and tears stream down my face, boundless love and pride burst from inside me.

In words spoken and unspoken, he says to me, We did it. This thing we set out to do together at the very beginning of our relationship 18 years ago, when I first told you I wanted to become a rabbi… We did it, and look how beautiful it is! All of time coalesces in this moment and I feel my grandmothers sitting on either side of me, agreeing with me as I reply silently: Yes we did, babe. Yes we did. And yes, it is beautiful. So beautiful.

After he spoke to the congregation, a standing ovation from our community showered him with the kind of love that fills every well of reserve our family is going to need as we take this next step forward in time.

The entire evening was a life-giving moment. My well is full.

I am going to miss this place, these people, so much. The 18 years leading to this moment have not all been easy. But they have all been so important. Our five years in Atlanta have been our best. I leave here deeply satisfied and grateful. I am so proud of my husband. I am proud of us. I am proud of our family. I can see how every single moment before this one is the moment that brought us here. To this precious place in time where we could pause …Well full. Deep breath. Here we go… before our next adventure together.

 

how love smells

/ gal / 1 Comment

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I washed my hands in the restroom of a doctors’ office the other day and smelled it instantly. It lingered on my hands even after they were dry. The smell of that particular kind of medical antimicrobial soap, I will know it forever.

In a flash, for a moment, it is 7 years ago and I am back at the big sink outside the NICU, the one whose water flow is controlled by foot pedals. Or the sink inside, right next to my daughter’s tiny bed. The one only nurses are supposed to use, but which they let me use as well. That same soap. That same smell.

For a while it unsettled me to encounter it. Just over a year after my baby died in that hospital, I found myself at the sink in the bathroom of another children’s hospital in a city 2500 miles away. I had just interviewed for a job managing a research project in their NICU, and before returning to my car in the parking garage, there I was washing my hands and that smell… I almost collapsed as I watched the tears flow down my face in my reflection. In a daze I found my car, and I sat privately and cried, doubting that I was ready to be working in such a hauntingly familiar environment. Wondering if my desire to create meaning from the loss of my baby girl would be overpowered by the raw emotion of having so recently lost her. I didn’t get the job, and perhaps it was for the best. I would have been so good at it though. Good for the right reasons.

Then one day that same smell surprised me – in the moment that it went from being unsettling to comforting. It was February 2011 and I had come to the hospital to deliver the twins who had stopped growing mid-pregnancy inside me. They gave me – the grieving-mother-to-be – the largest room, the nicest room, and also the room furthest away from the other mothers (those giving birth to living children) in Labor & Delivery. I went to wash my hands at the big hospital sink and there it was… that smell. With tears in my eyes I said to my husband, “It’s the same soap.” And I just stood there and smelled it. I washed my hands at that sink many times that night, and the smell remained the strangest kind of comfort throughout.

The smell doesn’t haunt me now. Whenever I am in a medical office, I smell the soap to see if it is the same one. When I encounter it, I take the time to smell it, and I travel back for a moment and return to a time and place where my daughter is still alive. Where the possibility of her survival still exists. Where my entire purpose each day after washing my hands up to the elbows is to sit by her side and love her.

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I keep my baby daughter’s things in a wooden chest in our home. It’s amazing what accumulates from such a short life. Not just things she touched but things that came afterwards. Like the little shrine I made in her memory for Dia de los Muertos that first fall, with three friends who had also lost their babies. Like pictures her sister drew as she navigated her own grief. Like the shirt I wore at Tikva’s blessing way when I was still pregnant, the sweater that kept me warm throughout the second half of my pregnancy, and the nightgown I wore when I delivered her.

The tiny blanket that lay over her during those weeks is in a jar, along with the hat that covered her head when we took her outside to breathe her final breaths. The stuffed lamb and the stuffed duck that lay against her fragile body are in another jar. I open those jars sometimes and take a deep inhale. The smell is the same, a little musty but so familiar. Perhaps it’s not exactly her smell, and whatever it is has replaced the familiar in my memory because I would open those jars to smell it so frequently in the months immediately after she died. Like the soap, it brings me a tiny bit closer across the divide between the living and the dead.

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It’s been more than 7 years since she lived and died. That’s a long time. And yet there have been times during those years when her loss feels especially present. There is no rhyme or reason to why and when that happens, it usually catches me by surprise. The loss of her is very present for me right now. It’s not a stabbing pain, more like a dull gnawing to remind me. I said to my older daughter the other day, “What do you think life would be like right now if Tikva had lived?” She replied that we probably wouldn’t have my son, her brother. She’s right. We always wanted two children and Tikva would have been the second. So this little being who came and went so fast and will forever remain a baby, she will eventually come to represent something to the little boy who came afterwards, her brother.

After Tikva died, on one of the nights of our shiva, as friends and family filled our home with love and food to share in our mourning, three amazing women came through our door. Two of them had been the midwives we’d worked with during my first pregnancy with my older daughter, and it had been years since we’d seen each other. The third was an acquaintance from many years before whom I’d gotten reacquainted with when I donated some of my breast milk for her baby. I had freezers filled with my pumped milk from the two months of Tikva’s life, more milk than she was able to drink through her feeding tube, and I wanted it to go to babies who needed it. This woman who came to our shiva with our midwives was one of them. It’s hard to explain the connection you have with someone who was able to nourish her baby with the milk you pumped for your own baby who is no longer living.

She walked into our home carrying a basket of warm muffins wrapped in a beautiful napkin, and I hugged her with tears in my eyes. She did not take her basket and napkin with her when she left, and they have followed us in the 7 years since. This little basket that is perfect for small corn tortillas, and this beautiful single cloth napkin.

And you know what? It is my son’s favorite napkin. He calls it “My Napkin” and it is the only one he will use, even when it is filthy and needs washing. He throws a fit if anyone else picks it up.

And I love that. I love how it is all connected – this baby who came and went too fast, this mother I reconnected with whose baby drank my milk, this napkin that has followed us from that time and which didn’t end up in the trunk of Tikva’s things, but instead fell into the hands of my son, the one who came into our lives as the culmination of everything that began when Tikva left us.

The connection between them all is love. It’s that same connection I feel when I smell that hospital soap. It’s in the musty smell inside the jars in Tikva’s trunk. It’s the connection to love – my love, the ones I love, the love from others. The smell and the feel of love.

 

meeting myself in time

/ gal / 2 Comments

Journey

(Artwork from the book, Journey, by Aaron Becker)

I just got back from a trip through time to my teenage years. I’ve been reading To Kill A Mockingbird with my book club, and as I’ve read, my mind has jumped back to being on stage in my high school auditorium, performing in the play as Miss Maudie Atkinson my senior year. Even with my bit part, the experience made a significant imprint in my psyche – I remember feeling like I was a part of something. After four years in high school theater, I felt like this show was IT, the one with meaning, the one that everybody came to see (even the jocks), the one that moved people. I was telling my daughter about it a few weeks ago, trying to remember the names of some of my classmates who had also been in the play. This led me downstairs to one of the endless plastic bins in our basement – this one held my yearbooks and my high school and college diplomas. I brought my senior yearbook upstairs and it’s been floating around the house since. I can’t seem to get myself to bring it back downstairs.

“Look Mommy! You’re on the first page of the senior photos. You look so pretty Mommy!” my daughter said to me as she looked carefully through each portrait.

Really? I thought. That’s when I had already started gaining weight after my mom left. And my eyebrows are so bushy. I didn’t say this aloud, but it was the first thing that went through my mind when I saw myself again. I also noticed that I looked kind of sad. She said it several times over the next few weeks as she picked up the yearbook again: “You look so pretty, Mommy.” I know she meant it completely – she isn’t the type to say things she doesn’t mean.

“Take that in,” my husband said to me when he heard her say it the second time.

I sat with my yearbook over the next few days, reading the notes people had written inside its covers and pages. It’s been years, possibly decades, since I’ve reread them, and I tried to put myself in my almost-18 year old shoes to remember how they affected me then.

The words of my best friend, surprisingly unsentimental. But then again, we had only known each other for 8 years then. (That felt like centuries, 8 years, when we were not even 18.) Now all these years later, she has stood by my side and held my hand for 34 years. She knows me like only someone who has been consistently present for 34 years can know you.

Then this jumps out unexpectedly: A single message from a guy I remember knowing only barely, who nailed me probably most perfectly. I’m sure it made me uncomfortable to read at the time. Or maybe it made me feel seen. However it felt then – understanding my younger self as I do now, with the perspective of all the years that followed – he got it. The essence of his words was, You are such a giver, you care so much about others. I hope you will let them give back to you. I hope they will.

I kept reading and found this several times in the words others had written: Never lose your optimism and idealism. They are the most special thing about you. 

I sat at the dining room table with tears in my eyes. I felt as if I were sitting with almost-18 year old me, getting to know her again. Discovering how much she already was so completely the person she could only dream of becoming.

Already I was exactly who I am still. 

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This past week I read a work of fiction written by someone who had known my father shortly after my parents divorced. They had known each other well for several years, and kept in touch in the years that followed. She had known our family during a difficult time of enormous transition, and she had known that same teenage me I had just become reacquainted with through my yearbook.

While her work was fiction, there were some familiar pieces in her story. And it took me back. Back to how it felt to be figuring out what it meant to be a family after one-fourth of our family had disappeared. Back to driving my little white VW Rabbit – anywhere that was away from home – to get some space from what felt heavy. Back to finding a home in theater, a place that gave me meaning, community, confidence. Back to eating Ben & Jerry’s at 11 o’clock at night watching reruns of Welcome Back Kotter.

But there was also this: The perspective of someone who had known not only my father, but also his daughters. She had had her own experience of me as a teenager, her own view of that younger me. Hers was another lens through which I could revisit myself, another impression of the person I had been. Just like the words of those kids in my yearbook. I was seeing me as they had seen me.

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I felt warm towards her, that teenage me, but I didn’t feel sorry for her. Already then, she was mighty. Already then, she was finding resilience, she was finding joy and meaning amid loss and sorrow. Even then, she was unescapably hopeful. Even when she felt alone in her heart, she continued to care for those around her.

I think we can choose how we tell our stories. I have told mine in many different ways, but I don’t like the version of the abandoned daughter anymore. That one doesn’t serve me, it hasn’t for years. Neither does the one about the girl who never felt cool enough, the one who was always overly self-conscious and insecure. And the story about the girl who got fat from grief, and then overcame that anger and sadness and released the weight? That one doesn’t really speak to me anymore either. There is no victory in overcoming our pain – only the important experience of letting ourselves truly feel it, and the peace that comes out of that.

They have all been my stories, though. Even if I no longer tell them the same way, I have told them, and they remain a part of me. 

I used to feel regretful that I had wasted so much time in all those self-pitying places my soul has taken me. But I know now that this is where I needed to go. That entire sophomore year in college that I spent on the rooftop of my apartment building, feet soaking in the hot tub, writing furiously about my sorrows and my rage in a dozen journals? I had to go there too. Those journals – however depressing and endlessly circular – are also a part of my story.

What comforts me now, all these years later – here where I am surrounded by the love  of others, blessed by family and home and a life of great meaning that I dreamed into being – is knowing that she was there already, that much younger me, even when she thought she had barely begun being herself. I don’t know that we are here to become ourselves, so much as  our journey is about returning to our essence.

Maybe she is the one who traveled through time to see me. Maybe she doesn’t need me to go back in time to comfort her and tell her she will get there. Instead, perhaps she is the one with the message for me:

You are already there. You are already you. Your destination is inside you and you have been carrying it all this time.