How to get up from the floor

Dear friends, I'm taking a few weeks off from The Wrong Globe to make progress on two other projects of mine: the wordless picture book I’ve been working on for a while and a language learning app I just started making recently. If you want to know more about the app (and sign up to be a beta tester), come over to my other newsletter, The Language Obsessive. And I’ll see you back here in September 💜

The Wrong Globe is a newsletter about language, culture, and belonging written by a Russian-born, Israel-based essayist, linguist, and single mom raising two trilingual kids.

If you’re disillusioned by the current state of humanity, but still secretly hope that curiosity can fix the world or at least make it a less horrible place, this space is for you. Welcome.

There are three volumes of Bunin on my coffee table (volume 1, 2 and 5 of his entire collected works. I also have vol. 3 on the shelf but not vol. 4 for some reason). Dad would be proud. Or not. I use these books every day, just not in a way he’d have predicted.

I put three volumes on the floor and sit on them, cross-legged. Then I try to get up from this position, without using my hands or knees, and without uncrossing my legs. Then I sit back down the same way. They say it’s a good predictor of longevity — one of many I’ve discovered lately, longevity being a thing I’m a little too obsessed with these days — and so I’ve been at it every day.

I am making progress. It used to be volumes 1, 2, and 3, but then I swapped in volume 5, which is thinner, and found I could still do it.

I’m going to keep doing it every day until I’m good enough to replace the last volume of Bunin with a thin volume of Akhmadulina’s poems — and even after that, with no books at all, at which point longevity will be pretty much guaranteed.

Tomorrow will be exactly a year since my mom died. A year since Bunin’s entire collected works (minus volume 4) moved to my apartment.

I only took a few books. There were too many — even after they trimmed their five-thousand-book library before moving to Israel and again after my dad died. I’m not sure why Bunin made the cut and so many others didn’t.

I must have read Bunin a while ago, in Soviet school, and reread him in my twenties, and maybe I even liked him, so I took the books — but I haven't read more than a few lines since. The sentences are long and full of unfamiliar Russian terms that have to do with Russian peasant life, and the font is tiny, and I’m spoiled now, with ebooks where I can make the font as big as I want.

The main reason I saved these books, and a few others, was because I value them as objects. I grew up seeing them sitting on the shelves in our living room in Russia. They hold memories from childhood but I don’t need to read them.

It still doesn’t feel quite right that they’re sitting on my shelves and not on the shelves in my parents’ apartment, but this is just one of the things that haven’t felt right in the last year. Or, well, in the last five years.

On the morning of August 4^th last year, I was sitting in a hospital room, finishing a post for The Wrong Globe, while my mom dozed off.

Does it sound insane? I have no idea.

She had been deteriorating rapidly for the last few weeks, and steadily for months before that (she had advanced dementia, even though she was only 76). She had just been hospitalized with pneumonia.

It was clear by then that even if she survived that hospital stay, she would come home in very bad shape, probably unable to eat and breathe on her own. But how should I say this… it was simply impossible to think that sentence from beginning to end. Especially not the “even if” part. So I wasn’t thinking.

This was different from when my very healthy dad was hospitalized unexpectedly with COVID four years earlier. Back then I was choking on uncertainty. With my mom — I was worried, but by then worry and uncertainty had been our normal for months, and I had become somewhat numb to them.

So I thought I might as well catch up on things — client work and my own writing — while she was sleeping.

I said those words to a friend (‘I might as well catch up on things while I can’) and my mouth knew what they meant but there was no way my head would catch up.

At around 2 pm my sister came to take over, and a friend of mine came to pick me up. I had a strange feeling of not wanting to leave. Mom didn’t wake up before I left. In fact, I’m not even sure she was awake at all during those couple of hours I was there. I had this strange voice in my head — if I’d been able to interpret it clearly at the time, which I wasn’t — telling me that if I left now, I might never see her awake again. But it didn’t seem reasonable to stay. I knew I’d have to come back for another shift the next day, and I needed to save my energy for that, and for whatever needed to be done at home in the meantime.

I came home and checked my email and maybe put away some dishes, I don’t remember. Maybe 20 minutes after I got back, my phone rang.

It was my sister.

She said, in a voice I’d never heard from her before or after: “Tan’ka, mama umerla.”

There is just no way to prepare for this message, even if you know, in some part of you, that it’s coming.

I heard the words pour out of my mouth and into the phone: why didn’t I stay, why didn’t I stay, why didn’t I stay… As if I could have said goodbye.

I texted my dog park friends’ WhatsApp group asking if anybody could drive me back to the hospital because my mom had just died. What a strange message to send in a dog park chat. Not “Shiloh is coming out to play,” but “My mom just died, can someone please give me a lift to the hospital?”

Five minutes later, a friend’s car was outside my house, and thirty minutes later, I was back at the hospital, where my sister and brother already were. All of us newly orphaned.

It still doesn’t really sound true when I say it: “My mom died.” It feels like I’m writing a story.

At some point during this past year (I don’t remember when exactly, maybe it was during the war in March), grief transformed into frantic making — a picture book, a second newsletter, the app (that I haven’t yet told you or anyone really, about) — because life is short, apparently, and I wanna make all the things I wanna make. And somehow, all this making has pushed the awareness that both my parents are dead to the edges of my consciousness.

It will register again tomorrow, when we go to Jerusalem to visit their graves, because my brain will finally have undeniable proof: we’re not driving to their house in Gilo. We’re going to a totally different part of the city.

***

I came home one day and saw that Shiloh (my lab) had destroyed two volumes of Bunin, which I’d accidentally left on the coffee table.

I must have stood there for a good three minutes, absorbing the sight of the living room floor covered with hundreds of torn pages. I might have cried a little bit. Suddenly, I desperately wanted to read what was in those pages. Maybe I'd read those stories before, maybe I hadn't. Either way, this isn’t how I wanted my dad’s books to end up: torn apart by a dog.

So now there are only two volumes of Bunin left (vol 3 and vol 5), and I can’t bring myself to use them again — or any of the other books I inherited from my parents — for my cross-legged to standing exercise.

Now I get up from a yoga block. It doubles as my cats’ scratchpad, but I don’t care.