The Blessing of a Broken Heart by Sherri Mandell

I try to remember my son's face. It is difficult for me to picture him clearly in my mind, to retrieve his physical presence. I will no longer gaze at his beautiful face, admiring his almost-man's contours with the eyebrows that were beginning to fill in, becoming more feathered at the inside edge. I took pleasure in his growth, admired his ever increasing height. I enjoyed his first sprinklings of pimples, the smell of him as he became a man. I felt that as he grew, I grew. As he grew, I too was bigger, stronger, more powerful.

Just the night before he died, he lifted me up in his arms, showing me how strong he was. Then we measured and compared ourselves in the mirror, standing back to back. He was a fraction of an inch shorter than me. And now he will never reach me. I am left to do the growing for both of us. I remember his birth, the joy of being pregnant. In 1987, when I was pregnant with Koby, I felt like I was walking around with a special secret. I wondered why nobody had told me how precious I would feel carrying a baby in my belly. It was like there was a jewel inside of me, shimmering and beautiful and full of lights and colors.

A few weeks before Koby was born, I had a dream where I was in a hospital bed. I'd just given birth and was filling out a form which had one question: condition of mother at birth. I wrote: Bliss.

And when he was born, after 13 hours of labor, that is exactly how I felt, holding him to me. Bliss.

Even though Koby was blue and had to be slapped so that his breathing started, I hardly worried. I recognized him immediately as mine, as a soul that was connected to me. He looked just like my father's family, a little old man, the grandfather I'd never seen. He looked like he was all soul and had traveled to us from a distant land to which he was still clinging.

Now, my beloved son, you have returned to a distant land and bliss is a word that has been erased from my life. Yet I believe you are in bliss. You became part of Jewish history, dead because you were in an isolated place where Palestinians steeped in hatred found an opportunity to give vent to it.

Jewish tradition tells us that when a righteous person's soul returns to God, the soul is in a state of bliss, reuniting with God. I imagine God's joy in seeing you, in meeting your sparkling intelligence, your lack of artifice, your basic goodness.

I imagine you, the family historian, recounting the days of our years. I imagine you pleading with God to bestow blessing on your family.

When you died, part of me died too. I couldn't eat anything for three days. My friends begged me to eat something. Finally, I said: "I'll eat watermelon." I didn't remember that I had eaten watermelon at your birth. But as I ate it, I remembered being in the hospital room with you the day after your birth. I nursed you and held you to me, and then ate the watermelon my friend Ella had brought me. As the sun rose and the birds called out to me, a chorus of cheeps and squawks, you and I nestled together like a mother bird in her nest with her baby bird, and I felt that the whole world was nursing or suckling.

Now, after your death, the watermelon reminds me of fertility, a pregnant belly, the rosy flush of creation. But a circle has closed. I eat watermelon again. It feels as if I am giving birth to your soul, a soul free of the constraints of body, a soul that can fly up to God and bask in delights. I am giving birth to the new purpose in my life-to live with an awareness of the soul, to recognize God's hand in my life. It is a labor fraught with pain, a labor that will continue for months, for years-maybe for a lifetime.

The pain is a cave in which you can lose your path and never find the opening. The pain is quicksand; in a minute you can drown. The morning after the funeral, my head was pounding. I lay in bed, crying, and my friend Leah, a nurse, came up the stairs. She said: "Here take this," and tried to hand me a valium. "No," I said. "I gave birth without drugs and I'll do this without drugs."

I want to feel the pain-for if I go into my pain and truly experience it, swim in it, there is a chance I will emerge on the other shore of my loss, still pained and struggling, but with a different vision. And if I don't, I will always be living in the land of suffering. One who enters this pain understands that death is part of life, and is here, always. Death now is something that will release me and allow me to see Koby again. Death no longer scares me.