No one said anything about it during the service, but we all clearly understood that the fates of mother and daughter were one and the same that was the sum of it. We stood in a group and conducted the memorial.

But Ran was tongue-tied this time, since in fact he was hopeless at directions, and was always getting lost when he drove around Jerusalem.Īt last we found her grave. At some point everyone turned to my older brother Ran, who was famous for his flawless memory that kept our family history safe. “No, it’s all the way up there, next to the black tombstone,” my uncle mumbled wearily as he dabbed the sweat from his face. “Plot C, Row 4,” my father, whose memory was his greatest pride, claimed. On a hot July day in the final year of her illness, we wandered around the cemetery looking for my grandmother’s grave. She squabbled with fate, demanded an explanation (I’ve never harmed a soul, she insisted), and quoted the Psalm we always recited at the annual memorial service for her mother, my grandmother Sarah: “Princes have persecuted me without a cause.” Ever since her body was consigned to the disease, my mother had been melancholy. Bending over to squint through the keyhole, I could see my mother’s slight body huddled on the right side of the bed underneath heavy covers, her head disappearing among them.

I can hold it off enough to let me fight in the morning, but not to let me fall asleep at night.” Photograph Courtesy Nir BaramĪt night I used to pad up and down the dark hallways in our house and stop outside my parents’ bedroom. “I started understanding death when I was little,” my mother said in the final year of her illness.

A brief history of time