The Presence of Her Absence

There are three of us in this relationship. And I'm glad.

Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash

The war with Iran is finally over, and Gidon and I feel (nominally) safe enough to drive the twenty minutes to Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, where Gidon has deep ties. His eldest son, Yanai, lives on the kibbutz, as do his eldest grandson and two great-granddaughters. Today, Yanai’s sons, Noi and Shaked, are there, along with his daughter, Orin, and her three-month-old baby boy. There, too, in the kibbutz cemetery, Gidon’s beloved late wife, Susan, is buried. There is a spot next to her for Gidon.

Today is the first day the pool has been open again after the war. Incongruously, the Homefront Command has lifted all restrictions, leaving nearly everyone with a serious case of whiplash.

Gidon has not worn his bathing suit today. He says he is too tired to go in the water. I take him at his word and hop into my suit. Going into the water feels like a baptism after what we have all just been through.

After my swim, I return to Gidon and ask if he is okay. Even with the din of the pool surrounding him, he’s being awfully quiet. Gidon says he is fine, and I swim away again to move my weightless limbs after 12 days of horrifying gravity.

At the other end of the pool, I rest my elbows on the pool’s edge. The speaker is playing a Billy Joel song. I recognize it; I know the words, but I don’t remember the name of the song. I glance toward Gidon. Something is different about the way he sits quietly, at a remove. He is very still.

And I feel so profoundly sad. Sad because I want Gidon to be happy, and sad because I know he is preparing to leave this life. Yet, I am at peace with that, too. Because it’s natural. It’s the flow of life. And it strikes me that this is something new within me; a feeling of peaceful acceptance and maybe even the courage to face an uncertain future. One without Gidon in it.

“Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.” Nick Cave

Someone once told me that it is said that when you first move to Israel, you could write a book about your experiences of navigating this land and the people in it. If you have lived here for five years, you could write an excellent paragraph about it. Longer than ten years, and you simply become speechless.

Predictably, I began writing a memoir immediately after I arrived in Israel. I lived, at that time, about four long blocks from the Mediterranean in the wonderful, sweaty, noisy city of Tel Aviv. There was so much newness every day, so many delightful differences. Other people on Facebook who have also decamped to exotic destinations like Spain do the same thing - crow over the cafes, the local cuisine, the people! And that’s just right, that’s how you should feel - at first, in Stage One Expat. Then some of the less wonderful realities make themselves known, and one feels somewhat less inclined to write at length about them because - bummer. Thirteen years, countless “operations” against Hamas, innumerable pouring rain winters, and scorching summers, Gidon Lev, October 7th, and this so-called “12 Days War” later - well, I guess the street cats got my tongue.

Yet, as I swirl my legs in the blue blue pool and train my gaze on Gidon sitting tiredly, so many thoughts and feelings bubble up. Things that I need to express. What, for example, has Gidon taught me? But I swat that trite thought away. Because the thing is, Gidon has never consciously tried to teach me anything except how to park exactly the way he would (never mind that I’ve been driving for 45 years) or how to choose the best watermelon – which – again – I got it.

Truth be told, I can’t credit Gidon with having given me any magical, profound wisdom. He’s only human, and I, of course, bring my own life experiences to the table. And this experience, of living in Israel, has been one of tremendous emotional growth. One of growing up, really, and coming to know myself despite the noise and distractions of the life that surrounds me; the language and cultural differences, the exhilaration, and, yes, sometimes the frustration/hope/despair of living in the Middle East. And - not least, witnessing deeply alarming global upheaval within my lifetime.

Yet, now, a very specific new challenge arises; it is plain that the chapter I am in is coming to a close. Gidon is on the cusp of leaving this life, and this knowledge, this bone-deep intuition, takes my breath away. Because I have loved this chapter with him. But somehow, I know that I will be okay, that this grand, tragic, strange life full of small adventures and good chapters and not-so-good chapters and countless grumpy days and inconveniences and tiny wonders will carry on like a river. Because it always has and it always will.

Maybe Gidon came into my life to deliver this crucial/essential/beautiful realization. Or perhaps I couldn’t have that realization had I not experienced so many grumpy days and small adventures with Gidon at a time in my life when aging - mine and Gidon’s - was very apparent to me – when the fragility of life was made crystal clear to me by dint of the place and time in which I am living.

With the poolside splashes of children cannon-balling around me and a new song on the speaker, I think about the connectedness of life, of its plentitude of feelings and experiences. There is, Susan once wrote, “so much to think about, so much to feel about.”

I think and feel a lot about Susan, although I never met her. She died about three months after I arrived in Israel in 2012. It seems odd that she and I were in the same place during the same timeline for a brief time. Neither of us could have had the foggiest idea how much our lives would intersect and overlap. I feel, somehow, that she is a long-lost friend of mine.

As she lay dying, Susan helped choose which of her poems she wanted to share after her death, together with her youngest son, Asher. The poems were made into a beautiful book; a precious keepsake for the family. It is through this poetry that I have come to know Susan. I feel my own emotions echoed in her poetry; I identify deeply with her words. I wish I could have written them. Susan’s poems are elegant, vivid, and deeply emotional. I turn to her poems more than any other poet on my shelves.

Of course, there are other poets whose work I love - Dylan Thomas, e.e. Cummings, W.H. Auden, and oh - Adam Zagajewski -

Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine...

But I never saw the jacaranda trees and gardens of these poets, nor laughed with their children, or watched them argue furiously, then come together in devotion, again and again. Susan’s legacy - her family, friends, art, books, and poetry surrounds me.

Sue wrote:

When I take cuttings
From our conversations

And grow them 
in my own garden

Part of the bloom
Belongs to you. 

The hearts and souls of Susan and her family – her husband, Gidon, her children, and her grandchildren are deeply embedded in her poetry. As are her doubts, dreams, regrets, and, yes, sometimes anger, even rage. One poem is entitled “My Mother-in-Law, the Scorpion,” and it expresses Sue’s deep frustration with Gidon’s legendarily difficult mother.

Susan’s poems are a conversation with life as she interrogates its meaning and finds, over and over again, a carnival of riches. Her words are laced with tenderness and questions; she embraced ambiguity and nuance with, as she would put it, an open heart. She asks the same questions that I also wrestle with -

Am I an island?
A continent – or an ocean?

Is this the silence between or after?
Am I lost or found?

The pages of my copy of the book are marked with paper clips, dog ears, slips of paper, and Post-its. So much so that the once slim volume looks like an engorged porcupine; I can never find the poem I was looking for. Instead, over and over again, I find the poem I need.

The poems included in this book were written between 1994 and 2012. So Susan was aged 49 to 67 when she wrote these poems. Her kids were growing up, moving out, and getting married. She was entering a new period of her life – one of deep introspection and reflection.

Then it hits me - Susan was in the same period of life when she wrote these poems as I am now. That must be it - I think - that must be what captivates me about Sue’s poetry. Yes, there is truth to that. But there’s something deeper.

Sue’s poetry moves me so because I can see and experience the fruits of her poetic spirit in the lives of her children and in Gidon. Sue didn’t just write about her desire to know life and to try to understand it deeply - she lived it.

For Susan, expressing oneself was among the highest priorities in life; something essential and maybe even holy. She made every name card for every place setting for the Pesach table. She delved into the sometimes confounding intricacies of love, family, dinnertime, picnics, and birthdays. Year after year, she made beautiful papercut cards for Gidon and her children. In a birthday card to Gidon, hand-drawn flowers and ivy drape themselves around Susan’s words of love and profound appreciation. Every card was a work of heart. She didn’t judge good or happy feelings as better or even preferable to the inevitable sad or angry ones. They were all feelings in the great hurly burly of life, and they should be expressed. That was what life was for, and what's more, she believed that nothing could be broken in the process - only deepened.

Susan valued authenticity in all its imperfections, and in her writing, she was clear-eyed about herself -

When we first met, I was
A forest full of noise.
A city of distractions.
I couldn't hear your heart
Speaking to me from
The bottom of the ocean floor. 

The truth is, Gidon would not be Gidon without Susan. Not to diminish his own unique, rascally, powerful gravitational pull–oh no–but the Gidon that I encountered had been married to Susan Deborah Kashman for forty years–and known her another ten years more than that. Her inquisitive, demanding, emotional, poetic, and interrogating spirit surrounded and shaped Gidon in innumerable ways.

Susan gave shape, form, and challenge to Gidon’s kibbutz values of egalitarian teamwork as well as his Holocaust-learned instincts of survival and clever pragmatism. She asked a lot of him. And she let him get away with a lot, too.

To Gidon: The Question

What mischief have I done
Poking around in your heart?

Soliciting love for a worthy cause,
giving it mostly on my terms,

Irrigating deserts and
thinning forests, building roads

Digging canals and yet
hoping to be ecologically friendly?

Are you my beloved Hula Valley
where I drained swamps, only

To realize the damage done
and flood them again years later?

Have I been kind enough
To your water buffalos and wild boars?

Can love settle in a landscape
But also leave it intact?

The Gidon I met in 2017 was a kind of two-spirit Gidon-Susan. He was ready to bloom with creativity in his last years. But Susan had done the hard work – she fed five kids, kept the house in order, and got the family from point A to point B in spite of Gidon’s tumultuous, adventurous, sometimes reckless, and temperamental spirit.

Knowing Gidon as I do – the times when he frustrates me with wild goose chases or bad judgment – I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Susan with a houseful of young kids and dinner to make.

Yet, I realize, as I write this, that I too am doing the hard work - on the other end of Gidon’s life. That of keeping him safe and steady and loved when he is physically and emotionally fragile and has not yet accepted that his body is simply not able to change the tire anymore. I am attuned to him well enough to know when he is roaring in quiet frustration because age has finally come for him.

This sometimes manifests itself in a tirade directed at me very publicly in the hardware store, because he knows exactly which hose we need; would I stop interrupting? Or he might lash out at me because I brought home the wrong kind of plums. I am sometimes left hurt, and sometimes chastened, but I don’t take it personally. It is, as Dylan Thomas wrote, rage, rage against the dying light.

When it’s just the two of us, Gidon disappears inside himself more and more often. He sleeps a lot. He doesn’t reply when I ask him a question, whether it’s because of hearing loss or simply because he doesn’t feel like talking. That leaves my half of the partnership in a kind of companion or chaperone role. I am still engaged with life, but Gidon is dialing down the connection.

But Gidon being Gidon – is still able to surprise me. He reads an article about Vietnamese-American writer Ocean Vuong and speaks animatedly and at length about the article, the writer, and how he absolutely will read this book as soon as he finishes what he’s reading now, a James Michener book, which, he notes, is only mildly entertaining.

But altogether, I am exhausted from lurching from health crisis to health crisis, and I feel more and more alone in our home. I want to jump on the train and go to Tel Aviv; I want to go swimming in the Kinneret. I want to do something. But I don’t want to leave Gidon alone. I can’t abandon him in his old age. He could fall. He might be lonely or get confused. No small percentage of how Gidon is “doing amazing” is because I run offense by way of reminders, assurances, and gentle urgings.

But mostly, I don’t want to lose this blue-eyed lion of a man. I don’t feel ready. Gidon has defined an important chapter in my life – he has been a constant. Yet this constant gardener is walking toward the gloaming, and nothing could be clearer. Stop all the clocks.

I hoist myself out of the water and rejoin Gidon as he sits in his melancholy reverie at the pool’s edge. I take his hand in mine and ask if he’s okay. “I’m tired,” Gidon says. And I can see that his eyes are shining with tears.

I realize now that Susan has, in some ways, passed a baton to me. I met a more self-aware, creative, expressive, generous man than Gidon had ever been before – but he had only just begun the journey of aging in earnest.

Susan is with us, Gidon and I both - invisibly but unmistakably. In the presence of her absence, her poetic wisdom, sense of humor, longing, and heartbreak make me feel less alone. We are sisters in arms.

If women were like dogs
Who love to be loved
Rubbing their bodies in the grass
Hands and legs waving wildly;

If women were like trees
Laden with fruit and flowers
And so many branches
to be lost in and fall out of;

If women were like a river
Radiant with fish, glimmering
And glistening with the ecstacy
Of fireflies and dragonflies;

If women were like these,
The sky would crinkle and fall,
Rain would rise and this world 
Would implode now and forever.

I want to think that had Susan and I met, we would have loved each other; we would have talked until dawn over glasses of wine. We would have talked about literature, poetry, and culture until our words spilled over each other like slap-happy kids at a sleepover. Or maybe not. We were, in some ways, reverse images of one another – an educated, intellectual, emotional, demanding New Yorker and an autodidactic, people-pleasing, mellow Californian.

In any event, on some plane, Susan and I have become entangled like molecules. I find myself in her poetry, and I see Susan over and over again in Gidon and in her children.

If I could find myself
In the alleyways 
And in the dream streets 
Of all emotion,
In the raked gravel
In the stone gardens 
Of bitterness and gratitude;

If you could tell me 
Something about myself
If you could tell me 
Who I seem to be
If you could tell me who I am;

If I could find myself
Among the ordinary
Artifacts of every day
In all the motions
On the way to jubilation
I believe I could befriend myself. 

I ache to tell Susan somehow, through the ether, that her curious, engaged, vivid, passionate questioning is etched across hearts like the Nazca Lines.

Susan doesn’t know it (or maybe she does), but through her legacy—Gidon, her family, and her poems —she has helped me finally, finally come to accept life not as I want it to be, but as it is. And I almost believe I could befriend myself.

I will make sure that Gidon and his water buffalos are loved tenderly right up until the minute he decides to join you, Susan, in the place where we all meet again, in the alleyways and in the dream streets of all emotion.