The Summer I Grew Up

The summer I grew up was not a happy one. How could it be otherwise? It’s suffering and pain that transform us, not contentment and pleasure, however alluring and attractive they seem. At some point, the nursery and all its soothing safety and warmth have to be ripped away, and the child has to stare at the cold, hard, unfeeling facts of life with no one to comfort her.

For me, in that sweltering summer of my late youth, the cold, hard, unfeeling facts of life consisted of a white funeral hall, a silver and sable coffin, and my mother’s corpse.

How can I explain to you what it was like as a child, who up until that moment had been making castles for my princesses in the backyard sandbox, running through sprinklers and dashing along slipping slides with the neighbors’ kids, and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches prepared by my mother, to suddenly be staring at her in a coffin? The sheer immensity of the feelings inside me, stirring and exploding in me like a volcanic maelstrom, was too much. 

Even now, after the space of so many years, I can barely bring myself to recall the memory of standing beside her coffin. I remember running my fingers along her face and feeling it cold to the touch. I shook her shoulders, hoping against reason, that her eyes would suddenly flutter open and she would fold me in her arms as she always had after something awful had happened. 

But of course, there was no miracle. She was dead, and that was that. Pain ran through me like lava, burning and bubbling in my veins, and hot, salty tears streamed down my cheeks. They gathered in little pools at the base of Mother’s neck as I rested my face against hers. 

As a child, I only thought of myself. I wanted to know who would give me bandages when I fell from my bike and scraped my knees, who would wake me up on weekday mornings for school, who would read me bedtime stories, who would hug me when I felt sad for no reason, who would smile at me with a love that seemed to brim over from her kind, tender eyes. I wanted to know how she could have gone. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t seem real. It cut against everything I had been led to believe up until now. Mothers didn’t die and leave their little kids behind. What?

As an older woman now, I know the pain of death ripples through a whole community; its spasms and paroxysms were not just mine. They belonged to my father, too, and my little brother. But at the time, they only made me mad; I wanted to hurt them. What a cruel thing those emotions were. Not only did I have to suffer them but they drove me to want to suffer alone. They separated me from the one possible place I could find comfort. 

When my father tried to place his arms around me, dazed and grief-stricken as he was, I only pushed him away. And when my baby brother cried and asked where Mama was, I only cursed at him with the foulest words my little childish brain could come up with. Screw you!

They weren't, of course, very foul in comparison to the words I would learn in the years to come. But I was so innocent then. Mother didn’t let me use any words that could hurt or hold even the smallest hint of some dirty connotation. She was a poet. Words, for her, were meant to uplift and inspire, to lead us into the mystery of life, to weave beauty, and to express our highest sentiments. Not our happiest or most sophisitcated sentiments but our highest.

Staring at her corpse, bloodless and embalmed, ruined that for me. It all seemed so stupid. What was the point of life if what was best and most certain could be torn away at any moment... if Mother could die? 

It wasn’t until years later I began to see, though dimly, some wisdom in her words—although by then I could not even recall the sound of her voice. Human memory is such a terrible thing. It plays a feeble simpleton when it comes to moments of great comfort, letting them dissolve in a haze. But for those moments of agony, and fear, and desperation, oh, it remembers those so well.

After I cursed at my baby brother, everyone in that white, undecorated hall gave me dark looks—my father, especially. There was so much wrapped up in his expression: pain, disappointment, shock, anger... rejection. He went after my wailing baby brother to tend to him, to care for him, to make him feel okay. And I was left alone with my mother’s corpse with no one to look after me.

The worst part was that I knew it was my fault. I shouldn’t have said that to my brother. It was gratuitously and stupidly cruel. But the very fact it was my fault made it so much worse. I couldn’t even take comfort in being right. I was so alone.

My mind was elsewhere to the funeral. The fat, old pastor who presided mumbled words about ashes and death and things that made no sense to me at all. I was only vaguely aware when they lowered the coffin into the tomb, and the family tossed bits of dirt on it, whispering their final farewells and whimpering prayers. Instead, I was thinking about the stories Mother had told me in the twilight hours of the day when my consciousness floated along the boundary of sleeping and waking.

Somewhere, in that liminal place, her stories still lived—not in the way that conscious memories exist, all neat, linear, and comprehensible. Instead, the stories where there like a luminous presence, a golden sphere with no center, in which every point is as close to every point, and past and present are all one. It sounds so awfully confusing to try to put it into words—but that experience was not made for words. It comes from a place beyond words. 

In the weeks that followed, I clung to that warm sphere with the desperation of someone dangling over a chasm by a bare rope. Mother was gone, and however often I wandered through the fields behind our house to visit her grave, I felt an infinite chasm between us. And also, I could shake the image from my imagination of her body decaying beneath the ground. If I could see her now, I knew she would stink of death, and I would turn away in revulsion. But the sphere, that golden sphere of memory, was always beautiful, bright, and pure.

There was no easy ending, no definitive moment when some sudden insight revealed itself to me, and I learned how to cope and be happy. The path that leads out of psychological collapse is long, crooked, and dark. It often turns back upon itself until you wonder whether you’ve made any progress at all, or if you’re not descending deeper into the pit. 

But eventually, the world becomes a bit brighter. In each Autumn, the changing leaves are more poignant, and in each Spring, the fresh blossoms smell sweeter. You learn to smile more and not antagonize people because of your pain. And when you’re kinder to them, they in turn are a bit kinder to you. My brother and I are very good friends now, and as often as we have faced trials since that terrible hour in which we lost our mother, we have leaned on each other for love and support. 

Through it all, you learn—and I think this is probably the most important lesson—that pain can open your heart the way spring rain opens flower buds. And although it can hurt to open your heart, especially when it is in pain, it is the only way to make life bearable and indeed happy. 

My mother, poet that she was, left behind one last legacy for me: a love of words. Here are two to sum up my messy and untidy tale—one from Italy and one from Israel. The Latin word for compassion, misericordia, weaves together two words: miser and cordia. Suffering and heart. The Hebrew word for compassionate, nurturing love is rachamim, and it derives from the word for womb, rechem. 

After much reflection, I came to see in my own memory of the liminal, luminous experience of love, embodied in that golden sphere, rachamim. I only fully appreciated it, and could share it, when this pure beautiful concept of rachamim collided with the messy, hurtful one encapsulated in misericordia. 

Growing up is about learning the meaning of these two words, and what it means to put them together. And that’s what, in a long and roundabout and difficult way, I learned from the summer I grew up.