The Blessing of a Broken Heart

By SHERRI MANDELL

Chapter Nine: Potato Chips at the Funeral

Your funeral is no more real to me than a fire made of water, than an ocean made of stone. My friends in New York see us on TV, my body bowed over your coffin. But I don’t believe, and I will never believe, that you are in the cemetery.

We begin the funeral procession in our town. The wind has been blowing all day, ferociously, so strong that friends help me find my winter coat, which is already packed away, so that I can wear it to the cemetery. I step out of the house and have to hold on to my friends because the wind is pushing me back. The social worker has designated an adult responsible for each of my children. They walk alongside us to the main road in our town. I hold my kids’ hands. People line the street. There is an ambulance and a line of cars. Where is Koby’s body I wonder. Where is my son?

As soon as the funeral procession begins, the wind dies down. I hold my husband, my children, my friends. The rabbi’s wife takes a knife and slices a rip in my shirt from the collar, rends my husband’s shirt and my children’s as well. The tear is like the tear in my heart. I do not faint but my legs don’t want to accept the weight of my body; my body wants to collapse, wants to plunge to the earth; wants to disappear. But I don’t.

I feel like my heart has stopped: this moment is the moment that will stand as forever in my life.

Somebody brings me a folding chair and medics take my pulse. The rabbi speaks. I look out and see the pale gray color of the wadi, the rugged cliffs. I stand and hold my children. I don’t hear a word that the rabbi says. Somebody gives me a drink of water. Cameras push their way toward me like burrowing animals, trying to expose my pain. I walk to a car and as soon as I get in the back seat, I scream at the horror and the pain and the fact that I am in a car with my husband and three innocent children and we are on our way to bury their brother. There is a long procession of cars. We drive through an Arab village and then we pass the neighboring town of Efrat. Throngs of people fill the road. We drive through them and they part for us like the Red Sea. They are praying, heads down, bowed. They have come to say goodbye to Koby and Yosef. Later, I am told that they have waited for hours.

We stop at a junction for a public ceremony before proceeding to the cemetery. Thousands of people join us. Limor Livnat, the Minister of Education, and some other politicians speak, and I see two stretchers on metal stands. I can’t breathe. I had no idea that my son’s body would be laid out here, exposed. On top of each stand is a body wrapped in a tallit, a prayer shawl. Written on a tag at the bottom of the stretcher is the name: Koby Mandell. This is the last day I will see my son, and this is the last touch I will give him. I lay my face on top of his body and wonder where is his head; where are his legs? He is so tightly wrapped I can’t tell. I hold him and try to hug him and remember how the nurses swaddled him tightly when he was born, bound him so he would feel secure. And now he is swaddled again, and I hold him and feel nothing, and suddenly I understand death. He is a body without a spirit. I know his soul has gone somewhere else; is no longer with us. There is a huge throng of people but I am alone with my son’s death. Take me into the earth, I would like to pray. But there is something in me that keeps me upright, that keeps me walking, that keeps me alive. The life force that led me to my closet to pick out an outfit for the funeral; the life force that keeps me from collapsing. We get back in the car. A convoy of cars containing Rena and Ezra and their family drives away from us to the Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem. Our friend Avraham drives us to the cemetery in Kfar Etzion. I think: I can’t bear this; I can’t live anymore. I don’t know how I will live with evil; how I will explain evil to my children; how we will live with death as our companion, how we will live without Koby.

We arrive at the cemetery and are about to open the doors of the car. This is a moment of sheer terror for me, pain that is so intense that I feel that my soul has also left my body. I am disconnected from my limbs, from my heart, my breathing. A mother should not have to watch her son put into the ground. A mother should die before her child. A mother should not have to bear witness to the terrible fact that much as she loves her child, she can’t protect him; she can’t save him from a death so brutal we had to provide dental records so that my son and Yosef could be told apart.

I wonder where I will find the strength to walk to the grave. As I open the car door, Gavi, my six-year-old son says: “I’m hungry. I’m hungry, Mommy.”

“What?” I ask. “Didn’t anybody feed you?”

“No, I’m hungry,” he says.

A policeman makes an emergency run, siren blaring, to a nearby market and brings Gavi potato chips and we remain by the car as he eats. Hunger. Simple hunger. Even at the moment of death. Even at the most tragic, cruelest hour of life, God is pulling me out of my pain by giving me a son who is alive and hungry. God is reminding me that life is all around me, even here, surrounded by dead souls. Gavi is crunching potato chips, enjoying them.

There is a life force that makes us breathe, that calls us to look up to the stars at the most tragic moments. There is a life force that demands our attention. As Rachel Naomi Remen, a doctor who has done extensive work with cancer patients, says in Kitchen Table Wisdom: “That tendency toward life endures in all of us, undiminished, until the moment of our death.” Though it may be impermanent, life is not fragile. The drive to life is strong.

We walk down to the graveyard. The darkness is a gift that keeps me from seeing too clearly. Thousands of people surround the grave and fill the space between the grave and the parking lot overlooking the graves. Without having told us, my eleven-year-old son delivers a eulogy, crying out to the crowd in the midst of his tears. He tells Koby: “I wanted you to be there when I got home. What will I do without you, my best friend? Who will tell me what to do? Who will I laugh with? Who will I talk to? How could they have killed you, a thirteen-year-old boy?”

Rabbis speak. Koby’s teacher speaks. A friend speaks. I hold on to Eliana and Gavi as my husband speaks. “This is not our script,” he says. “This is not the story we came here for. We came here to be close to God. We wanted to be part of Jewish history but we forget what Jewish history means, we forgot the suffering and murder that are part of our history. I remember when you were a baby, I used to hold you as I studied and learned the words of the Talmud and I hoped that the holy words would enter you and fill your being. As you got older, I taught you and taught you. But there’s one thing I never taught you—how to die.”

I hear without listening. I see with my eyes closed. My son’s shrouded body is lowered into the ground. As in all traditional burials in Israel, there is no coffin because we want the body to naturally return to the earth, to the dust. We don’t want to impede the process of separating the body from the soul, because the body needs to go through a period of purification so that one day, in the time of the resurrection, in a new form, the body can be reunited with the soul. The men begin to shovel dirt over my son and people line up to toss rocks on the open grave. 

I am at someone else’s funeral, someone I don’t know. I don’t cry. I walk up to the parking lot, a procession of men standing on either side of me, lining our walk back to the car. They chant a prayer and I walk past them and through the darkness, my friends holding my weight as my body collapses into itself. I feel nothing. Because Koby is not here. Koby is nowhere near this grave. Koby is not in the air and Koby is not in the ground. I would know if he were here.

He would be poking me with his elbow or shouting in my ear. He would be lifting me up to show me how strong he is. He would be stepping on my toes to get my attention. He would put his arm around me and hug me. I would feel him.

Excerpted from THE BLESSING OF A BROKEN HEART by Sherri Mandell. Copyright 2003. Published by the Toby Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.