How to Live Before, During & After War

This sunny spring day is day who-knows-what of Schrödinger’s ceasefire.

Gidon and I have stuff to do. We need to go to the Israeli version of the DMV, to pick up some photos and… I’m muddled, I can’t remember what else. But the day is beautiful, and sirens are the last thing on my mind as we set off into the wilds of Northern Israel.

I am a bit anxious because in the past two months, during the war with Iran, my emails piled up and business was left unattended. Bills to pay, things to sign, scan and return, to whom?

But most important of all, my new book. Don’t ask me how it’s going. It’s not. And it needs to be. Why can’t I seem to buckle down and get started?

I feel as if I am moving underwater. A bit out of it, as if I’m having trouble waking up from a long sleep.

As we enter Yokneam, we pass a sculpture of a big, red heart. October 7th, it says. Photos of those abducted and murdered take refuge in some scant shade in a nearby gazebo. We go by too quickly to see if there are also pictures of the hostages who came home alive. I wonder how they are doing.

When the hostages first started coming home, they were welcomed like national heroes and greeted by crowds. We were told how they were doing in the hospital as they recovered, how much weight they’d lost, how they had suffered.

A number of former hostages gave interviews to the local news shows, mostly profile pieces with soft music, showing their return to normal life. It was so odd to see them free, instead of in a picture, bloodied and terrified, frozen in time.

Some told shocking stories of physical and sexual abuse. Others melted quietly back into Israeli society.

I thought of Liri Albag and how she’d said Ani Liri Albag, mispar echad! (I’m Liri Albag, number one!) when she greeted her parents after her release. It was such an endearing moment.

I wonder how she is today. I wonder if she has managed to return to any sense of normal life. It’s as if Liri and the other hostages have faded, not from the public imagination, but from daily life itself, as if they are ghosts in a long sleep.

That was what the end-of-life counselor asked Gidon last year when he struggled to recover from double pneumonia.

Thankfully, Gidon had no intention of exploring the undiscovered country just yet. It wasn’t yet his winter.

There is a narcotic quality to life in Israel these days, as we Israelis try to wake from our slumber and get through those emails, with one ear cocked for the sirens. I wonder to myself whether we are now “after the war” or not.

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Yes, I decide, this is after the war. I’m just going to go with that for now. It seems to me that before, during and after the war is the new normal in Israel. I have to come to terms with that. Life, as it must, goes on.

It has been decided, at the Ministry of Transportation, that Gidon will not be renewing his driver’s license.

Enough, he said.

Now he is worn out, and he sits quietly in the car, gazing out over the Jezreel Valley as I drive us home, past sprawling fields criss-crossed with dirt roads, toward the nubby, sunbaked hills in the east, toward Jordan, and the green Carmel Mountains in the west, along the Mediterranean Sea. The seasons are changing. Glorious spring is beginning to wind down. The emerald green of the fields is being replaced by the golden, honey-colored fields of summer.

Today, sof sof (finally), I opened up my writing software and, having no idea where to begin, but knowing that beginning at all is an achievement, I simply typed in what I wrote in Gidon’s 91st birthday card:

To my dearest Gidon, on the occasion of his 91st birthday:

To my kibbutz man, my motor mechanics man, my farmer and taxi driver man,

To my hero.

It is the honor and adventure of my life to have spent the last nine years with you.

You are magical and lovable.

You radiate sunshine and starlight.

You don’t have a lucky star, you are a lucky star.

May your true adventures continue on and on and on.

I love you so.

The war is, in fact, before, during and after. The emails still need answering. The fields are turning from green to gold, and the man I love is entering a new season in his life, and so am I.