07 March 2014

"I Carry Your Heart With Me, I Carry It In My Heart"

Looking back over my blog posts, it's fair to say that I complain a lot about the army. It's boring sometimes, the bureaucracy can be overwhelming, I clean a lot... You know, the usual stuff. But for all the complaining I do, I actually have it pretty easy. I've wanted to make Aliyah since I was 10, so even when I inevitably have things to whine about, I'm whining with the smug elation of someone who waited literally eight years to complain about those things. When you fulfill your dream, you're left with  this profound happiness and satisfaction that make inconveniences like being stuck on base for 21 days or waiting for a bus that's over an hour and a half late seem absolutely trivial. Even the hardships that are slightly more than trivial don't seem to matter so much. When my budget forces me to choose between buying vegan food or a warmer blanket for base, or when I have to sew a button on my uniform myself because my mommy isn't here to do it for me, of course I see that fleeting image of my life if I lived at home or went to college instead. Of course I feel that tinge of sadness. But it's only a tinge, and it's quickly and easily subdued by the thought that Oh my God I'm deciding what to bring to my army base, or, I'm sewing a button on my IDF uniform! Yes, there are moments and thoughts that sometimes make me sad, but it's a sadness that comes about only because I'm finally living the life I waited eight years to live. As you read my blog, you should take all my complaints with a grain of salt, because no matter how often these trivial difficulties arise, I can't honestly say that army life, or even life in Israel in general, has ever actually been hard. 

Except for once. 

There was one time, one week in the entire year and a half I've been in this country, that my fulfilled dreams and profound happiness didn't outweigh the hardships of living here. 

Tomorrow will be one year since my cousin Lauren passed away from brain cancer, and one year since the first and only time I hated living in Israel. 

What I've heard most about Lauren since she died is that she had an unmatched ability to connect with anyone on an individual level, to give a special piece of herself to everybody she met. And since she had such deep connections with everyone, a lot of people took her death really hard, and really personally. It wasn't just the inspiring woman with a beautiful and fiery soul who died. It was much more personal than that. It was Lauren the cousin who passed away. It was Lauren the daughter, Lauren the mother, Lauren the sister, the niece, the friend, the sister-in-law, the aunt, the Eagles fan, the synagogue congregant, the enthusiastic Facebook user, the childhood friend, the patient, the Israel supporter, the mentor, the life of the party; it was all the pieces of herself that she gave to everyone she loved and everyone who loved her.  If she had been just any one of those things, her death would've been an incredible loss. But she was all of them. And it's the pieces of herself that she never had the chance to give, all the pieces that she would have given if her life hadn't been cut so tragically short. If the number of people who attended her funeral is any indication, Lauren touched more people's lives than probably even she could ever imagine. 

But that number isn't a good indicator. Because there are some people who were forever changed by Lauren and who loved her very deeply, but still couldn't be at her funeral. 

During Lauren's funeral, I was sitting in my room on kibbutz, my knees pulled up to my chest, facing a computer screen. I watched over Skype as my family members delivered eulogies, as my own sister spoke of feelings that I didn't yet have the time or tools to register. I listened as the rabbi chanted a broken El Malei Rachamim and I held back a wave of sobs every time my Internet failed me. I watched from 6,000 miles away as her casket was lowered into the ground. I heard my family's tears over my computer speakers. I watched people huddle around Lauren's daughter Ava as she released a new mournful wail with each shovel of dirt that filled her mother's grave. But I couldn't hug my little cousin. I couldn't comfort her or offer her my shoulder for support. And for the first time ever, I truly regretted moving to Israel. 

Logic has no place in the grieving process. If it did, I wouldn't have found myself after the funeral writing in my journal that I'm a selfish coward. Those were my exact words. "Is that why I wanted to move to Israel?" I wrote. "So I wouldn't have to face the heartache and the pain and the suffering that comes with being close to the people I love?" I didn't just make it harder for me when I doomed myself to be far from the people who could help me through this. In my selfishness, I effectively relieved myself of any responsibility to be there for the people who need me. That train of thought morphed into another: "Was it worth it? Did I even know the price of moving to Israel before I paid it?" I had known I was going to miss birthday parties and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and Passover Seders -- but celebrations are so easy to plug into from afar. How did I not think about this? Am I really so naive, so simply stupid, that I never even considered the possibility of tragedy? I realized that when anything ever happens in my family, I've put myself in a position where I'll be the last to know. The hardest to reach. The least likely to be able to come home. 

And as soon as I started hating where I was, what I was doing, and the decisions I had made, I went to an even darker place. I convinced myself that my eight years of yearning and longing and dreaming were based on a delusional fantasy, on a 10-year-old's complete inexperience with reality and heartache. I began to despise the army. I refused to take a test and my commander threatened to put me in jail. The worst part was that I had no one to talk to about it. I have people in Israel that care about me as if they were family, but in my bitterness towards the country, I found that it wasn't enough. I spent the entire week of shivah alone in a sour whirlpool of self-pity and unfocused rage. 

And then, a few days after shivah ended, I was on my computer again, reading all the messages that people were posting on Lauren's Facebook wall. I looked at all of her pictures. I read all of the things that she had posted throughout her battle with cancer about finding an inner strength that everyone around her already knew she had. And then I found something she posted on my wall. I found this. 


And this. 



That's the piece of Lauren she gave especially to me. When I was younger, she was the cousin who made me feel ten feet tall, even though I was the baby of the family. She was the first to treat me like an adult, a friend. When I decided to follow my heart to Israel, she gave me a new piece: She gave me her support and her unconditional pride. She bragged about me to her friends on Facebook. She listened when I called right before I made Aliyah, when I was questioning if it was the right thing for me to do. She stood up for me when I didn't know how to stand up for myself. She spent two minutes of a long-distance call telling me about her health, and ten minutes asking about my new life. It felt so wrong to me that I wasn't at her funeral when my piece of Lauren was so special, but then I remembered that she loved that I was in Israel. She admired me -- her own word!! -- for giving up basic comforts like being able to mourn with my family in order to live in and serve the Jewish homeland. I found a weird comfort in realizing that she probably expected me to not be at her funeral. And I realized that I had gotten to do something even more meaningful to me than attend her funeral. You see, the army has many strictly enforced rules about when and why soldiers are allowed to leave the country. You can't go before you're eight months into your service. Emergencies only apply to immediate family. You need at least a month's advance notice. You can't leave during a course. Literally not one of the exceptions applied to me in February of last year, and yet in what I swear was a case of some kind of divine or supernatural intervention, I found myself at home in Philadelphia for an entire week. She was confined to bed, she could barely speak, and sometimes looked like she was in pain, but it ended up being Lauren's last full week of consciousness. Of course it was hard seeing her like that. There were few physical similarities between this bedridden Lauren and the Lauren who came to my going-away party to see me off before I moved. But I got to say goodbye. I got to tell her about the army and watch as her eyes lit up with the familiar love and pride in her family that I had seen in her my entire life.

And I realized that she wouldn't have wanted me to go to army jail for refusing to take a test. She wouldn't have wanted me to minimize the relationship I have with my almost-family in Israel. She wouldn't have wanted me to regret this thing that I'm doing -- this thing that she was so proud of. Lauren's death forced me to face serious issues that in my blessed and inexperienced life, I had never really had to face before. But the things she did and the person she was in her life showed me that I'm strong enough to handle those issues. 

That realization didn't make handling her death any easier. When someone like Lauren dies, it can never be easy. But as soon as I stopped feeling guilty and calling myself names and convincing myself that my family felt I deserted them, I could focus on Lauren and on comforting my family and myself. I found that I really am strong enough to handle this, though it's the hardest thing I've ever had to handle. There are times when I still get flashes of it - these waves of regret, this inexplicable physical sensation of my heart literally being pulled back to the life I had in America, my life in the place where Lauren was always just an hour-long drive away. But I just have to remind myself that although the cost of what I did was high, nothing can ever diminish the pride that Lauren felt for me or the pride she made me feel for myself. I've set myself up to face a lot of heartache in the future, but Lauren has shown me that I can't ignore my dreams or the causes I believe in just because they're going to be hard. If I'm doing the right thing for the right reasons, I'll always find a way to make it through even the most trying of times. 

Tomorrow will be one year since the world lost someone so incredibly beautiful and compassionate, but every day of my life, I can feel her guidance and her love and her spirit. Every single person who held even the smallest piece of Lauren's soul knows that her gifts would cross galaxies to comfort the people who love her. 

I'll never stop thinking about you, Laur. I'll never stop being grateful, and I'll never stop wanting to make you proud. I love and miss you more than anything. 

Lauren Pearl Halper, z"l








"I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
my heart),
I am never without it."
- e. e. cummings






1 comment:

  1. Rebecca, I cannot express my reaction to this. I cannot formulate the words. I need to process. I am so proud of you, and I love you very much. Shabbat Shalom. Be safe. Love, Daddy

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