All the Love in All of the Worlds

Two weeks ago, sleeping in our off-grid cabin in the South of France, I heard a seal. The night before I had absentmindedly swatted a mosquito that was feasting on my shoulder in the darkness, only to find out it was a large, fluorescent green spider. I gasped and then giggled. We shooed it out politely, not before taking a photo. Perhaps I had been somewhat acclimated by the family of dormice living in the roof of our strawbale hut. That is, the family of dormice that stuck their heads and sometimes bodies out of our open ceiling, as regular as the village church bells in the distance, or as my 3-year-old baby still insisting he wants to nurse, nay cuddle, nay nurse, at 2am and 5am.

So when I first heard it, I decided the seal was probably okay and there was no reason to worry. I patted my 3-year-old baby, lying next to me in bed, and went back to sleep. But the seal wasn’t okay, it continued barking through my 3-year-old baby’s mouth, who was now sitting up in bed, frowning his deep, sad frowns. It was 2am on June 25th 2018, just three weeks short of the 1-year anniversary of our whirlwind, globe-trotting, home-seeking tour.

Tripping over toys in the darkness, I rushed to get him out into the cold night air, hoping it would calm his breathing. I smiled at my frowning baby and told him—myself?—that everything was okay. Everything was going to be okay. Mama—Nene—was here. Breathe, Chupie, breathe.

Two and half years earlier, circa January 2016, I was holding a whooping, barking ten-month old over our bottom freezer, telling him—myself?—that everything was okay. Everything was going to be okay. Mama—not yet Nene—was here. Breathe, Chupie, breathe.

I called my sister then, back in circa January 2016, back when Oliver was premièring his seal impersonation, and cried. I told her, Muz, I don’t know if I can get through this. How do I get through this? Help me get through this.

Do you pray? She asked. Only on airplanes, I whimpered. And, well, on a stormy January day six years ago, as our mom was dying, slowly, excruciatingly, meticulously, in her perfectly imperfect way. As mom lay laboring, giving death to herself, I sat up in my bed and chanted, “Fly, Mama, fly,” over and over again. That was the closest I’d ever come to praying.

That, and on airplanes. So she prayed for me. She summoned our ancestors, our dead mother who had flown, all the love—as Ella used to say, and I rarely had the heart to correct—in all of the worlds. And I did get through it, we all got through it, only slightly worse for wear.

Last January, in response to my annual “Why aren’t you here, Mama, I’m really pretty pissed you’re not here, Mama” FB eulogies, I was sent perhaps one of the most comforting and relatable messages about surviving the dead that I had ever received. It was this: “It is one of the hardest things to live with, the loss of someone as amazing as your mother. Keep talking to her. On the one hand, it is as if she is a million miles away, but in our quantum world, I believe she is right next to you.”

All the love in all of the worlds.

It was sent to me by a woman who,  twenty odd years earlier, had, in a misleadingly short period of time—bigger on the inside than on the out— managed to introduce me to so many of the things that I love, in all of the worlds. She showed me Ben Elton and Fry and Laurie and Black Adder;  She took me to a Kinks performance the night I found out about my mother’s first cancer. You Really Got Me. She played Blackbird for me over and over again on a record player in a living room in the suburbs of Manchester, a song my kids now request before going to sleep, or, when they’re freaking out on—you got it—airplanes. And last January she sent me that.

And it is the closest I’ve ever come to believing. But meanwhile, in the other January, in the other world where my mom lay dying, I was rapidly losing faith. Night was coming again and she had not yet flown. A storm was coming to get her, and Haff and I were walking in the rain, gathering our lost courage, and a feast.

We were standing at the corner of Ib’n Gvirol and Dizengoff, one of the many Tel-Aviv landmarks branded on my heart, when she came to me, my mama who was still practicing her perfect take-off.  I was holding a Styrofoam box of gelato in one hand and a bowl of seafood soup in the other, staring at the traffic light and bollards ahead. And there she was, hovering right above my left temple.

She said, Everything is going to be okay, Tali, everything is going to be okay. No longer Talkie or Talkile—the lost nicknames of a nearly ghost mother—I took the first few deep breaths in over twenty-four hours.

Why don’t we go buy whiskey? I asked, foreshadowing our grieving period drug of choice (that, and a fabulous Muppet Show rendition of Danny Boy), and we detoured to Teev Ta’am. My phone rang as we were waiting for the clerk to unlock the cabinet and hand me a bottle of Glenfiddich. Mama, too, had taken her first few deep breaths—three, if we’re counting—in over twenty-four hours. And then she flew.

But back (or forward) in circa January 2016, before all the love in all of the worlds had been summoned to unfray my nerves, I was standing in our dark urban apartment, holding a ten-month old seal over a freezer. Haff joined me from his quarantine with Ella for a midnight rendez-vous, as romantic and hopeful as it got in those long, dark weeks of the soul. His face lit by the dim freezer lamp, I looked at him and could think of nothing but baby goats and the rolling hills of the Golan.

And so, prompted by a seal and a freezer, began our semi-voluntary diaspora:  our flight from death and illness, our quest for a better-suited life-cum-pilgrimage to our unmanifested holy sites. Like comparative archeologists of the soul, digging out layers of psychic muck, we slowly unearth what we’re looking for, and compare it with what we find. Sometimes, most of the time, it feels like the gap is unbridgeable. Other, few, precious moments, the hum of our tuning fork is suddenly indistinguishable from the sound of the forest.

Standing in that forest with my seal, two weeks ago, there was no freezer in sight. He looked at me with his sad eyes, and Haff Googled the directions to the nearest hospital, using the last of my battery and the stray bits of reception sprinkled miraculously our way. Let’s try some steam first, he suggested, and filled up the wood-stove heated bath. As we silently gave thanks to the hose that burst earlier that evening and forced a late boiler fire, the seal finally took his leave. No longer possessed, Oliver took his first few deep breaths in eternity.

He put his sleepy head on my shoulder, and I said to him—to myself?—Everything is okay, Chupie, everything is going to be okay. And just before falling asleep, he lifted his head up to look at me, and pleaded, hoarsely, Blackbird.