Keeping a promise, I’ll share a story that we need to hear

I promised my late husband, Mendel, I would write a novel dedicated to the memory of his half-brother and half-sister, who were murdered in a Nazi extermination camp when they were nine and 10.

I have a colour-tinted photo of these children at three and four. It is the only surviving representation of them. Theirs was the first family story Mendel told me. In marrying him, I married his story. We carried it together. I carry it now after his death.

I will launch the novel this spring.

For any other of the pieces I have published, Mendel was present, an advocate, firing off emails to family and friends, organizing details, filling the car with the “stuff” I needed to pull off an event or make a presentation, supporting me in everything I was trying to do.

Imagine a love like that, I say to myself. Imagine that kind of care. I find I am forever humming “I had a love of my own like yours.” I hum it more frequently when the seasons change. I seem to stop humming in November when winter comes to whiten the landscape, but then the days get longer and the song comes back to me. I am seasonal, I guess.

The humming continues through spring, summer and fall. Sometimes the song shifts to Fools Rush In; sometimes it morphs into All By Myself, no matter the season, when the day is too long and the silence hurts.

I live what it is like to have loved and lost. Shakespeare observes it better to do so than “never to have loved at all.” I always think and feel through that observation knowing it has merit, but also knowing that losing a loved one through the dimly lit corridors of a relentless chronic illness, stings, derails and darkens.

During the course of the ambiguous grief that distinguishes this reality, I try to learn acceptance (not my strong suit), patience (not my strong suit) and resignation (different from acceptance insofar as it speaks more poignantly to the loss of possibilities once held dear — dreams of grandchildren, of meaningful engagement with the world in a vibrant last act together).

The grief that comes at the moment of death has its own key signature, as does the grief that comes through the dying process, when the diagnosis is first revealed; when the person suffering the illness loses parts of himself; when it is too hard to say out loud what is being stolen.

Grief changes over time, but remains in myriad, altered forms as the measure and the cost that attends the risk of loving, attachment, a shared life. It comes often without warning — while backing the car out of the garage, loading a dishwasher, dusting. It comes with warning — during the setting of the sun or its rising; while preparing a meal for one; when a favourite song starts up on the radio. It tackles the heart, brings the breath to suspension, silence to cacophony.

I have a little altar I made with Mendel’s ashes in a handwoven basket, a photograph of him at his peak, gazing at me (a gaze whose like I shall never find again), photos of his children, their partners and babies growing into young ones he will never know.

I add a candle holder, incense burner. The altar sits on top of a time-worn, olive-green metal medical cabinet with bevelled glass doors.

The altar memorializes. My life lives in and through memory and memory-making. The nine-year anniversary of Mendel’s death (it seems as if yesterday and also light years ago) arrived at the end of March.

I am many years older, but young in my heart when remembering our beginning — a first date in university during a snow storm that stranded us downtown after we had watched The Boston Strangler (Mendel’s choice), played a game or two of pool in a seedy establishment (Mendel’s choice), and enjoyed junk food (our choice).

I may forget where I park the car, where the water main shut-off is located, what I did with my hearing aid, but I do not forget the shifting balance in the galaxy all those decades ago when our eyes met in that deeper pool where love conducts her frequency. Bolts from the blue. Second sightedness. Recognition. A world turning. All those vibrant images whose currency spans lifetimes.

In my forgetting of small things (though I understand that locating the car, the water main, the hearing aid is significant), I remember through shifting sands the big things — the story Mendel told me of his family, a story alive in the photograph I cherish. It is a hard story, one that persists in fascist ideology and action despoiling and extinguishing children’s lives, dehumanizing us all if we fail to rise up and protect them.

arts@freepress.mb.ca