Her words were not a prophecy but a fact: the happiness is near.
The condolence I remembered most when my mother, Mira, died was a short sentence, of only three words. A female cousin phoned from overseas and said, “Mother is mother.”I thought of that for days afterwards. I think of it still. The perfection of those words comes to me whenever I’m trying to describe Mira.
I was so wrapped up in the busyness of her sickness that I didn’t anticipate the gap she would leave behind once she was gone. She had been the main adult relationship in my life for some time, and with her departure, other things slipped away.I felt sluggish; I could not concentrate. When I visited my hairdresser – asking for the one thing I always request during a dramatic life change: a dramatic haircut to match – I noticed a visible swath of scalp. “What’s that?” I asked.
Once, I quizzed her about this: wasn’t she traumatised by what had happened to her and to her family in the Holocaust? But she never dwelt on the pain she experienced. Rather, incredibly, she used to say that in the Holocaust, “I learnt about the goodness of people.” So many people had helped her during that time, and it was that which she chose to remember.
Determined to let grief go, I reached for happiness in other ways, allowing slices of light into my days. I started noticing when fallen flowers beautified the pavement on my walks; I patted the soft ears of panting dogs when they passed me; I marvelled when I read something so beautifully precise that I would weep. And, sometime during the pandemic, I also fell in love.
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