Restless Spirit

A friend’s father recently passed away. I’ve never liked that expression, passed away, preferring the hard simplicity of died. But I suppose I want to soften this post, before I’ve barely begun. So. Died. Yes. Last week, while she and I were having lunch, she looked across the table at me, trying to put words to her thoughts and feelings. She’d had an immensely complicated relationship with her father.

“I supposed I preferred it,” she said, “when his spirit was contained in his body. Now he’s gone, and it feels like his spirit is unleashed.”

I knew what she meant, felt it with a shiver. When my father died twenty-two years ago (he has now been dead almost as long as I knew him) I felt as if I had a guardian angel, someone watching over me, giving me signs, helping me along the way. I don’t know if I actually felt this, believed it–or made a decision to believe it. But I do know this much: my father’s death formed me, as a young adult, turned me into a person I wanted to be, a person I respected and liked. Before taking an action about which I was unsure, I would ask myself whether it was something that would make my father proud. I lived my life by the answers to those questions, and slowly I grew up, built something out of the sadness and dust of my childhood.

But when my mother died just a few years ago, I found I was having a very different experience. Like my friend, I worried about my mother’s unleashed spirit, even though I’m not at all sure I believe in spirits. I didn’t want her looking over my shoulder. I avoided the whole notion that she might be able to affect my life in any way, from beyond the grave. I tried not to consider the logic that whatever laws of the great beyond would apply equally to my father and my mother. That if he was able to keep an eye on me, so would she. Still, when something particularly good would happen in my life, I’d credit my father. And–fairly or not–when something bad would happen, I’d secretly fear that my mother had a hand in it. I remember something a therapist told me, as my mother was dying: “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he said. “People who would, at the moment of their death, choose to press a button and take the whole world with them, and people who wouldn’t.”

I’m thinking about all this because of a discovery my husband made a few days ago. In our basement, for the past years since my mother’s death, we’ve kept many boxes of slides and micro-cassette tapes that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at or listen to. At times, it has felt to me that our basement is throbbing with it all, with the detritus of my mother’s life, the stuff of my parent’s marriage. Finally, Michael started to take a look. He began to go through the tens of thousands of slides, throwing away the meaningless vistas–mountains, oceans–and keeping the ones with the people: me with my father in London, outside the Dorchester Hotel, dressed for all the world like a five-year-old princess in a burgundy-and-white checked Marimekko coat. Me, at the same age, at my half-sister’s graduation from Brandeis. He picked a micro-cassette at random, and played it to see what it contained. He came up to my office, sat heavily down in the chair near my desk.

“Your mother recorded her own therapy sessions,” he said.
“What?”
“She recorded herself in therapy,” he repeated.

So that’s what I’m left with. Hours of my mother’s voice, on tape, as she talked to her therapist in the early 1980’s. I’ve started to listen, and I can hardly bear it. The sheer weight of her unhappiness. What daughter gets to have this knowledge of her mother? How do I explore it, how I think of it? In the years since her death, she has become more human to me. In the absence of her overwhelming presence in my life, I have found room to be more sympathetic to her. She was a profoundly miserable woman who could never get at the source of her own misery. She skated along life’s surface, stumbling, tripping, hurting herself and others–never able to stop. To look, really look. Instead, she pointed her finger, always blaming. The source of her frustration and unhappiness was out there. Not inside, never inside. These therapy sessions, which she taped for some inexplicable reason, are the closest to the inside that she ever got.

I remember the first time I ever heard the expression: The only way out is through. Intuitively I got it. I had to go through. I had to take a hard, hard look at myself. I somehow knew that there was freedom in that self-examination. In the willingness to say: this is me. And part of being me, the most uncomfortable part, is being my mother’s daughter. I can’t get away from it. I can only try to understand.

Different Selves

Something about being on the road is turning me into a daily blogger. Well, at least I’m blogging two days in a row, which is a record for me. I’m writing from Boca Raton, where yesterday I spoke to nearly five hundred women at a country club luncheon, as part of National Jewish Book Month. Now, I figured that a few of the guests would probably know me slightly, given the amazing reach of Jewish geography (we are a people who love nothing more than establishing a connection, no matter how slim) and the fact that my Aunt Roz, a big golfer, had lived in Boca. But what I hadn’t counted on was the huge overlap between the tri-state area and Boca, as if, at a certain age (retirement) the entire Jewish population migrated south to this very particular place.

Yesterday I learned the difference between “snowbirds” — an expression I had heard before, meaning those retirees who go south for the winter — and “snowflakes”. Snowflakes are those who flit back and forth, like…well, like snowflakes.

But I digress. At the luncheon, I had women coming up to me right and left hugging me. Women who had known my mother. One woman who had actually visited my mother in the hospital after my parents’ car accident. Another woman who had been a neighbor of ours in Hillside, New Jersey. Still another, whose son went to high school with me. It was a lovely feeling, being embraced by these women as their collective daughter, or long-lost niece, as one of their own. Whenever I meet someone who knew my parents, it always makes me feel warm inside, slightly more connected to the earth.

So when I got up to speak, instead of my customary terror–especially in front of a crowd of that size–I felt bolstered. Supported. The crowd was with me. I gave my talk, made them laugh, made them cry. I felt that thing that perhaps comedians or dramatic actors feel regularly, but for a literary writer is rare indeed: I was in control of the room. After I finished, people started asking questions. A microphone was passed around. After the seventh or eighth question, the microphone was handed to a thin, blonde woman with bangs. She stood up and smiled at me.

“I don’t know if you remember me, Dani. I was a close friend of your mother’s.”

And then she said her name. Which I won’t repeat since this isn’t a nice story about her. Still smiling, she went on:

“You seem very changed to me. Like a completely different person. And I’m just wondering why you seem so very different. Something changed you. You’re so different,” she went on somewhat redundantly.

“And I’m also wondering if you regret what you wrote in the past. If you wish you could have softened some of what you wrote in your earlier books.”

She sat down, looking for all the world like a thin, blonde cat who swallowed the canary. And I–for once in my life–had a comeback. Usually, in a situation where I’m being dissed, I think of what I should have said, oh, a few hours later. But as she was speaking, something occurred to me:

“Lovely to see you, X,” I said. “You know, as you were speaking, I realized that you never once saw me without my mother. The few times I was in your presence, of course my mother was with us. And I was a very different person around my mother than I was in any other aspect of my life.”

Around the room, I saw nodding. Agreement. And continued support from the hundreds and hundreds of my benign, surrogate mothers in the audience. Later, I discovered that I had struck a chord. Many of us feel like we’re different people in different situations. (Particularly around our mothers, where we may regress, revert into being their daughters and nothing else.) But many of the women at the luncheon found themselves musing about this. In work situations, with our husbands, our children, our friends, we can seem like we’re being different people. Does this mean we’re acting in some way fraudulent? That we’re creating false selves? I don’t think so.

In my case, I didn’t like the person I became around my mother. I was shut down, angry, withdrawn, withholding. I was these things because I needed to protect myself from her, and I didn’t know any other way. But the person on that podium yesterday is the same person as the glum, miserable woman I was around my mother until her death. We are all made up of many different selves.

Devotion

One of the reasons for my recent radio silence (and a big thank you to those of you who wrote and gave me a gentle nudge to get back to blogging!) has been that I’ve been busy trying to start a new book, and I’m not so sure that blogging and book-writing are happy bedfellows. Though in this case, it may turn out that they are. My new book, which I just sold to HarperCollins and will be hitting the shelves in a couple of winters, is called Devotion and though I hesitate to call it a memoir, it is, at least, memoir-ish. In many ways, Devotion will be about motherhood, daughterhood, sisterhood, midlife (gulp), anxiety, and a search for meaning. It will be about trying to find shape and depth within the randomness, the chaos that is life. And one of the coolest things about embarking on this book is that I get to read a lot of great stuff, books that I have bought over the years intending to better myself by reading, but have somehow never managed to get to. I finished one of those books last night on a plane flight: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea. Though she wrote it in the 1950’s, it seems so deeply relevant today. Here’s a passage:

“Vague as this definition may be, I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be ‘in grace’ and other periods when they feel ‘out of grace’, even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide, and in the opposite state one can hardly tie her shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string whether one is in grace or not.”

It seems to me that so much of being a grown-up is in finding techniques to tie the shoe-strings, no matter what. It’s true of being a writer as well. There are days in which I feel inspired, on fire. And then there are days when the words feel like they’re trapped somewhere inside me. But nonetheless, if I sit down at my desk–no matter how I feel–I will have a writing day. I will live my life. I will tie the shoe-strings.

Grace Paley

The world lost one of its brightest, fiercest, most intelligent and compassionate souls this week when Grace Paley died at the age of eighty-four. I had heard that Grace was ill, but it seemed impossible to me that she would die. She was just too damned tenacious to die. Too alive. It seems impossible, too, that her pen has now stopped moving across the page. While it’s true that she wasn’t exactly prolific, a Paley sentence was its own animal. It couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s sentence, though plenty of writers imitated her–consciously or unconsciously. She influenced generations of writers, myself among them. Mostly, she was one of the handful of people I encountered in my twenties who taught me how to live.

I remember, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, the first time I wound up on the floor of Grace’s office. You didn’t sit in chairs around Grace. Everything somehow ended up grounded and earthy — she was a powerful maternal presence. We students curled up in her lap–sometimes literally–or lounged on pillows on her office floor, safe in her capacious embrace. To be with her was to learn. I remember things she told me. She told me I was a writer. She told me I should stay at Sarah Lawrence and go to graduate school. She helped to make that happen. And she also told me something that I have repeated to countless students myself: Grace said that she did her best writing in the bathtub.

The bathtub! At the time I imagined an elaborate scenario in which Grace lounged beneath the bubbles, note pad and pen clutched in her fist. Years later, I realized that she had meant simply this: she took baths. She took time. She never wasted time, but she took it. For Grace, shelling beans, passing out leaflets, teaching a class, taking a walk, making soup — all of it was valuable. It was valuable because she paid attention. Nothing escaped her notice. But even though she missed nothing, even though her intelligence was razor sharp, she herself remained soft and porous, open to the pain, the injustices, the magnificence, the indignities of the world. Her outrage wasn’t intellectual–it was personal. It came from the same deep wellspring of feeling that gave birth to her gorgeous prose, those inimitable sentences.

She made me want to write, to teach, to become a wife and mother, to cook beans, to pass out leaflets. To be an authentic person. She was one of the best role models out there, though she would have shied away from the term with a quick smile and a flick of her hand. She shone because she had a light. She had to shine. Those of us who knew her were beyond blessed. And it is small consolation–though consolation nonetheless–that her sentences, her stories, her lessons, her voice will live on and on.

Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Previously thought to be a characteristic only of the brains of the very young,…this capacity for rewiring of the neuronal synapses to allow for re-development of entire regions of the brain is present in adults as well as children.

At a reading from Black & White the other night at Stockbridge Booksellers, a cozy little bookstore in Stockbridge Massachusetts, the Q&A; afterwards turned into an interesting discussion–who knows why?–about neuroplasticity. A fellow in shorts who was sitting in the rear of the audience asked me in my capacity as a student of the human condition (those were his words) whether I believed adolescence to be the time in life when we are most able to withstand trauma, when our brains are most elastic. It was clear from the way he phrased the question that he believed this to be the case.

I emphatically didn’t agree with him. And it got me thinking, both about adolescence, about development in general and about the whole subject of developmental milestones. (I guess this is what we students of human nature do in our spare time.) Do we all grow at the same rate, as if we’re on a conveyor belt being stamped with certain criteria for growth at certain precise moments along the continuum? This thinking seems more and more prevalent in this wacky culture we live in. Take the books that mothers of young children read. For instance, What to Expect: The First Year. What To Expect: The Toddler Years. And so forth. I could have saved myself a few gray hairs and a few sleepless nights as a mother of an infant and toddler if I hadn’t poured over those books as if they were an owner’s manual to my child. Developmental milestones such as stacking blocks, putting two words together, pulling up to stand are very clearly delineated by the authors into categories such as:

Should be able to:
Probably is able to:
Might Even be able to:

Not taking into account the vastness and complexity of human nature, even–or perhaps particularly–as it relates to babies. Not taking into account that there are children who don’t talk until they’re five (hello, Einstein?) and children who literally never crawl but just get up and walk one day (my own dear boy). This idea that there are markers on the marathon of life that we each pass precisely at the same clip (if at all) strikes me–based solely on my own personal experience–as ludicrous. And I said as much to the fellow in the shorts. Using myself as an example, I told him I had been a late bloomer. That I had been a tremendously screwed-up adolescent. (I even have proof! See my memoir, Slow Motion.) That I didn’t come into my own true self until I was past thirty. That–like the wonderful character of Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie–I hit my prime well into my thirties, and that I feel more aware now of my own capacity to adjust than I ever have in my life.

If new age wisdom holds that there are no crises, only opportunities, it seems there are those among us (and again, who knows why?) who are able to grow from their crises at any age, at any point in their lives, regardless of the crisis. And others who fold. Who stop growing. Who ask: why me? I’m thinking now of my mother, who after suffering terrible injuries in the car crash that killed my father, was able to heal physically–in and of itself, a remarkable feat–but never took hold of the life- changing opportunity she had been presented with to become a different (happier, more fulfilled, less angry) kind of person. And I’m thinking of the man I (along with the rest of America) have been haunted by for the past week: Dr. William Petit, the endocrinologist in Cheshire, Connecticut who has just suffered the most unthinkable, impossible, monstrous loss of his wife and two daughters at the hands of murderers. There was a photograph of Dr. Petit in The Hartford Courant yesterday, speaking at the memorial service for his family. He stands gripping the lectern, the gash on his forehead from his own injuries still visible. Dr. Petit exhorted the people in that auditorium to do good in the world. To love one another. To take care of another human being. To reach out to a neighbor. He was able to impart that message less than a week after suffering the worst kind of loss. Neuroplasticity, indeed.

Instinct vs. Impulse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately–my mind unleashed like a hungry, mad dog–about the roles of instinct and impulse in my life and how to tell the difference. We are creatures of impulse, all of us, and often impulses become habit. For instance: when I wake up in the morning these days, I go straight to the computer and check my Amazon number, as if, perhaps in the middle of the night Terry Gross or Oprah have interrupted regular programming to praise the virtues of Black & White, and I have shot stunningly and instantly to #1. And so, on these mornings, after I check my (so not #1) Amazon number, I type my name into Google. I check book reviews, blogs, you-name-it, for up-to-the-minute news about the state of my book’s publication. And given that my book’s publication is now three months old, very little news is to be had. There might be a mention of a book club choosing it as their next pick. (Fleeting small surge of pleasure.) Or there might be a blogger tearing it apart into tiny, bite-sized morsels. (Devastation, the certainty that of course this blogger is right and everyone else is wrong.) By the time I have finished this insane sprint through cyber-world, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes have passed, but my mind has become fragmented and buzzy. A cartoon version of me would have my eyes swirling madly and bits of lightning escaping from the top of my head. I know I shouldn’t start my days this way, and yet I do. I do, because after three months of doing very little other than publicizing my book, I am used to a certain pace. A fast, exciting pace full of news and people and nice outfits. I am used to getting up in front of audiences and performing. It was hard to get into that mode–but now it’s even harder to get out of it. I fight against the idea that it’s time to go back into the cave. To start all over again with a single word, a sentence, a page. A glimmer of an idea…so delicate, so easily blown away. So hard to trust or believe in.

When I am following my instincts–rather than my impulses–the inside of my head becomes quiet enough so that I can hear the whispering voice that tells me what to do next. That voice–which of course is my own best self talking–tells me it’s time to read, or take a drive, or practice yoga. It’s the voice that will eventually tell me what my next novel is about, if only I can be still enough to listen. Writing a novel is a devotional act–Annie Dillard describes it as following the line of words. This devotion, this following, cannot be done in a frenzy. And it most certainly cannot be done in the same hyper-self-conscious universe in which Amazon numbers and anonymous bloggers take up valuable, semi-conscious morning time–time time when the mind is at its softest, most open. It has always fascinated me that some of our finest, most lucid writers have also had some of the noisiest, most painfully cluttered, dare I say damaged minds–and I stand in awe at the sheer courage, discipline, determination that it takes to heave all that noise away as if it’s a solid mass, a boulder.

All I know is this: whenever, in my life, I have followed my impulses, it’s never led me anywhere good. And when I have followed my instincts–whether in falling in love at first sight with my husband, or realizing, one summer morning, that it was time to have a baby, or hearing the whispering voice through the fog telling me just enough to begin again, and again, I have been rewarded beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

On Being a Working Mom

In an hour a car is coming to pick me up and take me into the city, where I am taping a radio show — part of the slow and steady trickle of book publicity that I continue to do two months after Black & White’s publication. And this evening, I’m giving a reading at a Barnes & Noble in New York with ten (you read that right, ten) other writers for the anthology The Other Woman, in which an excerpt of my memoir Slow Motion is included. These are two non-negotiable things that I have to show up for, for a variety of reasons, all having to do with my career.

And so, early this morning, I sat down with my eight year old son on the bottom step of our staircase, and–after wrestling his “twenty questions sports trivia” game away from him–told him that I would be going to New York today. That I would be sleeping over in the city tonight, since I have no way of getting back to our home in the country at night. (There are no trains, one of the things I like about living here on most days– except for today.) And, worst of all, I told him that I will not be able to attend the Montessori School’s second grade performance of “The Terrible Leak” at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

His little face fell. There is nothing sadder than an eight year old boy’s little face falling, crumbling into momentary crushing disappointment. And I’m not even sure I should be writing about this, since it is my policy not to write about him — but really, right now I’m writing about myself, and about the dilemmas that face working mothers everywhere.

“Why?” he asked.
“Because I have to work, honey.”
“This book publication is taking a long time.”
“I know.”

I thought I had “The Terrible Leak” nailed. I had called his second grade teacher a week ago to ask when the performance would be, so that I could do everything I could to work my schedule around it. She told me the date, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I realized (so I thought) that I would not have to miss the performance. The delicate balance between my life as a mother and my life as a working woman would remain exactly that: balanced. Everything getting somehow accomplished, no one or nothing getting lost in the shuffle. And so, when the little slip of paper appeared in our school mailbox announcing that the performance of “The Terrible Leak” would be at nine in the morning–the very morning I would still be in New York– I felt it like a physical blow. That voice that I am convinced visits all mothers at least once in a while, that voice screamed: see–you’re failing, you’re not getting it right, you’re a Bad Mother.

But here is my question, and I know it’s an inflammatory one, my small contribution to a term I deplore, the Mommy Wars: why would a performance of a school play be scheduled for nine o’clock in the morning? Where does the assumption come from that parents would be able to arrange their lives in order to be there when most people are at work? Granted, my family and I live in an unusual community where a lot of people make their own hours and have an inordinate amount of flexibility — but what about those who don’t? Why are we penalized — and much worse, why are our children penalized — by the notion that the stuff of real life (in other words, working to make a living) can be dropped at a moment’s notice?

Fortunately for us, my husband is able to go to tomorrow’s performance of “The Terrible Leak”. As a screenwriter who is, at the moment, not on a crushing deadline, he’s able to take the morning off. In fact, he’s taking three mornings off in a row: this morning, as I write this, he is at the Montessori School, showing the first-through-third graders slides from his years spent in Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then as a foreign correspondent. And the day after the play is the last day of school, which means the school picnic, which takes place at eleven in the morning. And of course I will be there.

I know this isn’t a problem limited to my son’s school, or to the community I live in. I hear these stories from my friends in New York and LA. But this blind spot seems to be spreading, rather than diminishing, and I found myself wishing that the people who make these decisions–the teachers, school administrators, even the stay-at-home moms who arrange some of the school events–had been able to see that little face crumbling this morning, that child’s voice piercing the air, asking why?

Why, indeed.

Blogging Elsewhere

I was excited to receive an invitation from the folks at The Huffington Post asking me if I’d like to occasionally blog there. My first blog post appeared this week, and here it is and it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop blogging here — so check back soon!

Mother’s Day

Earlier this week I was in New York City to tape a segment of “Weekend Edition” with Scott Simon. I have always loved Scott Simon’s interviews, and the prospect of being on his show was both thrilling and terrifying–mostly because the way it works is, he interviews you for a half-hour or forty-five minutes, and then–depending on a combination of world events and your own ability to string sentences together in an eloquent manner, a segment either a) doesn’t run at all, b) runs for three minutes, or c) runs for up to ten minutes. So my own personal eloquence was on the line. Now, I’m certain that one of the reasons I became a writer is because I never feel, when I’m speaking, like I’m getting it right. I never say quite what I intend to. I tend to feel like I’ve landed slightly to the side of the point I’m trying to make. The words flee, they have no heft, unless I’m committing them to the page. I like to control my ideas, to hone them and craft them–arrange and re-arrange words until they fall into a precise order, like a line of musical notes. And you can’t do that on the radio.

Before heading down to NPR’s offices, I took myself to lunch at a restaurant called E.A.T. on the Upper East Side. I settled into a seat against a mirrored wall, ordered a ridiculously expensive salad and cappuccino, and realized that I was thinking about my mother. E.A.T. was a restaurant where, for many years, I used to meet her for lunch. We probably had fifty E.A.T. lunches, my mother and I. The bread basket with its raisin nut bread, it’s ciabatta and sourdough, are like Marcel’s madeleines to me. As readers of my non-fiction know, my mother and I had, to put it mildly, a contentious relationship. (One magazine editor who shall remain nameless even carped behind my back that I have only one subject: my mother.) Be that as it may, for many years it is true that I turned my difficult mother into my muse — it was all I could reasonably do with her. And now–as I sat in this improbable, noisy restaurant filled with well-turned out women in complicated designer jeans, their sapphire-and-diamond solitaires flashing–my mother, who died almost four years ago, appeared before me. Not quite an apparition, she was nonetheless very much present. And she was not pleased. How could she be? I was here. She was not. I was about to go on NPR. She was not. I was about to have an essay come out in the June issue of Vogue, about HER. She was not. I had become the author, not only of my own destiny, but, in a deeply uncomfortable way, of hers as well. The mother of my memory quivered with rage. Her jaw shook. She seemed to be telling me that I am a terrible person and deserve nothing good. I felt myself shrink. I began to disappear.

I paid the check, bolted out of the restaurant, and began to quickly walk downtown on Madison Avenue, trying to leave my mother behind, in the cathedral of memory that is E.A.T.. As I headed south, I had no way of knowing that in just an hour, Scott Simon would ask me to read a passage from Black & White about a little girl who wants to shrug out of her own skin, to leave her shell behind the way the cicadas in her backyard do. But what I was thinking, on that beautiful spring day as I headed off to do battle with my own fears and my own sense of deserving, was that my mother will always be lurking in the cathedrals of memory: Jean-Georges, where my husband and I first introduced her to my future in-laws. Edgar’s Cafe on West 84th Street, where she first met my husband after we had been dating for three weeks. The hushed, airy floors of Bergdorf Goodman, where I used to walk with her–our shared love of fashion one of our only true bonds. My mother–all of our mothers, whether we had it easy with them or not–is like a phantom limb. I feel her presence–and her absence–when I least expect it. I will never be able to totally shrug out of the skin of my childhood and leave her behind. Honestly, I don’t even want to. Not exactly.

God Is Not Great

Which is, of course, the title of the brilliant Christopher Hitchens’ new book about religion. It is also, lately, the ground zero of my deepest confusions as a mother. What am I supposed to teach my son about God? What do I do about the fact that I am, at best, on the fence when it comes to the spiritual life? My basic relationship to the whole notion of God is a lily-livered, poorly thought-through, pathetic melange of Buddhism, self-help, nature, the Hebrew songs and melodies of my childhood, the transcendence of great music, and little bits of my dead father’s voice that float around in my consciousness. I could have drifted along in exactly this stupor for my whole life if not for motherhood. If not for the fact that it is my responsibility to expose Jacob to the religion of his heritage–if only so that he can later reject it.

When I was Jacob’s age, I went to a yeshiva. I spent half a day learning in Hebrew, the other half in English. On Shabbat, the Sabbath, I went with my father to temple where I played with the tassels on his tallit, and listened to the passion in his voice has he swayed back and forth, davening. I spoke Hebrew so fluently I thought in it. When I traveled to Israel with my family, at the moment we disembarked at Lod Airport my inner life, my thoughts and random daydreams took place in a language I no longer can speak, nor understand. The language of Hebrew eludes me, much in the same way I am eluded by an understanding of faith, or of God.

But since we live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut — the land of white Protestant people — since we live in a house with no mezuzah on the door, a house where my parents Shabbat candlesticks are on display on the dining room table only because they’re beautiful, old Tiffany ones, and satisfy my aesthetic desire for lovely silver–since if you saw us, my husband and son and me, riding the winding Connecticut hills, you might be forgiven for mistaking us for characters in a Cheever novel–I end up embroiled in what feels like a moral dilemma. My concern has grown over the last couple of years as Jacob has begun to ask questions. What happens when we die? he asks regularly. Where do you go? What does it feel like? And then, just last week, when Little League practice was canceled because of rain four times in a row: “There’s a man in the sky who’s making it rain.” A man in the sky? Where do we go when we die? How am I supposed to guide him through these questions when I myself don’t know how I feel about any of it. And as for my husband, it’s easy for him. He’s an atheist. End of story.

But for me, it can’t be the end of the story. The faith that I grew up with–that faith is inside me still, not as a belief in God but, rather, as a part of me that gives me a tangible access to my childhood. My father has been gone for more than twenty years–and yet, if I want to hear his voice, if I want to feel the way his short hair bristled against my small fingers on the top of his head, if I want to see his eyes–hazel-green and kind, as he gazed at me–all I have to do is go to temple and a door opens. Memory floods through, unstoppable. And that is the closest answer to what happens when we die that I ever get.