Here you can find some old stuff that I wrote during the decades I was busily procrastinating with this blog, added as I read through it.
Worms and All: A Dead Mama’s Birthday
Nothing but Butter: A Living Dad’s Birthday
Hi, Mimma: A Dead Mama’s Deathday
Reading over these, I was reminded of Vonnegut’s prologue to Jailbird. In it, he writes of a young reader who had managed to sum up his entire body of work in one sentence. It happened to be, “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”
Luckily, I don’t have a studious young reader to disentangle my spiral into a single line, or I’d be out of a hobby.
Still, the bit that I wrote for my dead mama’s 70th birthday does a pretty good job. Especially this bit, in the original Hebrew:
“…והנה אני עם ילדה וילד. ועכשיו אני מבינה שימי הולדת הם עוגן לעבר, לרגע שהגחנו אל העולם הזה, לרגע שאמא שלנו הפכה לאמא, ולספירלה שהיא כל סיבובי הגלגל מאז. כשאת מתת, הראית לי, לקצת זמן אבל בווליום גבוה, שהמוות באמת יכול להיות, בפשטות, חלק מהחיים. וכשילדי נולדו הם הראו לי איך החיים הם חלק מהמוות – איך השניים רוקדים יד ביד ומסתכלים אחד לשנייה בעיניים.”
Or loosely translated:
“…and here I am with a daughter and a son. And now I realize that birthdays are an anchor to the past, to the moment we came into this world, to the moment our mother became our mother, and to the spiral that is the sum of all of the revolutions since. When you died, you showed me, for a fleeting but piercing moment, that death can really be, simply, a part of life. And when my children were born, they showed me how life is part of death—how the two dance hand-in-hand, lost in each other’s eyes.”
All of the Worlds 