Tag Archives: death

 
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Halva with Tea

Bahar Anooshahr

Bahar Anooshahr, her father, and her two brothers in front of a birthday cakeIt’s a small coffee shop, a Shingle-style shack with blue trim, listed by Yelp as one of Laguna Beach’s best. Cookies and biscotti lie in a basket in front of the order window. The barista, an upbeat blonde woman in her late fifties, early sixties, comes over to me. As I’m trying to choose what flavor to put in my coffee, we start talking. She finds out I’m from Phoenix and asks what brought me to Laguna.

“My friend passed away two weeks ago. I’m here to clear my head,” I tell her. Hal, a pastor, was one of the first friends I’d made after moving to Phoenix a year and a half ago with my fiancé. He had helped us through some tough times.

She’s curious about where my accent is from. I tell her I was born in Iran. “But I have lived here longer than I have lived there,” I quickly add.

It’s a cool, sunny November morning. As she’s making my coffee, the woman spots the book I’m carrying in my hand, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, by Hooman Majd. She asks me what it’s about. I tell her it was written by an Iranian immigrant who had left Iran when he was eight months old. When he turned fifty, he decided to go looking for his grandmother’s house halfway around the world, hoping to find his roots. He found the area, the familiar scents, the leftover mud walls. But he couldn’t find the actual house.

His story is not much different from mine, I say. Several years ago, I visited the neighborhood where my family used to live in Tehran. For the first time in more than two decades, I walked our old block, looking for the home I had grown up in. But it wasn’t there anymore.

Describing my trip to Iran reminds me of a passage I read in Majd’s book: Maybe it was better that the house and even the street weren’t there. Reality could not possibly rival a childhood memory, and my memory was intact, if rose-colored. Not finding the house also kept me somewhat rootless—now there truly was nothing for me to directly claim as mine.

“My grandparents emigrated from Denmark,” the woman tells me. She starts talking about how her grandparents worked hard, how they worked their way up—until one day they owned their own business.

I expect her to go on about her family, yet she abruptly turns the conversation elsewhere. “I don’t see my culture here anymore,” she says, testily. At first, I think she’s talking about Danish culture. But I’m mistaken. “Have you been to Heisler Park?” she asks me.

“No.” I know from my friends in Laguna that Heisler is the park Iranians go to for their New Year celebrations.

“When I went to Heisler Park, I had to pass all these Asian tents to be able to celebrate my Memorial Day. Before the Asians, it used to be Mexicans.”

There’s an awkward pause. I’m not sure how to respond. “You know what?” I finally say. “It’s too cold to sit outside. I’ll come back later.”

As I turn away, I feel disappointed with myself for not saying what’s really on my mind. I want to tell her that she should have compassion for those who leave their countries to come here. I want to remind her that her ancestors were also immigrants. But I don’t have the courage to speak up.

Instead, I walk away, thinking about what I should have said, feeling like the outsider I still imagine myself to be—twenty-seven years after coming to America.

• • •

I was born in Tehran. When I was seventeen, my family decided to leave Iran. We immigrated to America not because of conflict—the Iran–Iraq War had already ended by then—but for opportunity. My father was an engineer, and my mother had studied law before becoming a stay-at-home mom. They wanted their children to have a good education.

Growing up in Houston in the nineties, I fought with my mom because I didn’t want her to pack Persian food in my lunchbox. The salt-laden Lunchables would do—anything to fit in among my new classmates. During lunch breaks, I used to hide in the piano rooms to avoid the humiliation of not speaking English. At home, I practiced pronouncing words properly, without the thick Iranian accent. “The,” not “de”—so what if we didn’t use the sound th in Farsi? We were living in America. We needed to respect its language.

As I grew older, I distanced myself from the Iranian community and embraced American culture. Though I was born a Muslim, most of my family and friends had lost interest and trust in religion, thanks to Iran’s Islamic Republic. From early on, I had steered clear of mosques. Yet in America, whenever friends invited me to church, I went. Defying my parents and their Iranian values, I dated American boys without plans to marry. Once, my mom—playing matchmaker—asked me to meet her friend’s son, who had traveled from Switzerland to see me. I refused to go.

When it came to school, however, my two brothers and I were good Iranian children. My father, who had gone from building factories to manufacturing blinds, had no time for nonsense, and demanded hard work and excellence in whatever we did. He was the type of immigrant dad who, if I got a 98 on a test, would ask me, “Who got the 100?” Once the managing director of an engineering firm in Iran, he had been forced to take a job as a low-level supervisor at the blinds plant when we moved to America. He expected much more for us, and his high expectations paid off: two of us earned doctorates, and the third, an MBA.

At dental school, I’d been one of a large number of immigrants in my class. Being around people who shared my experience as a newcomer had been good for me, and by the time I graduated I was no longer as anxious about sticking out as an Iranian. After I finished school, I started an oral and maxillofacial surgery residency at a hospital in New Jersey.

I was in my second year there when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened. A few days afterward, a group of us were in the operating-room holding area waiting for a patient. News streamed on a small television set. We congregated around it, watching footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers over and over.

Soon the anesthesiologist and nurses were peppering me with questions about why the terrorists had done this. “You are from the Middle East, aren’t you?” someone asked me.

For years, every time I traveled by air, I was pulled out of the line for a “random search”—something my then-husband, also Iranian, avoided because of his light complexion.

After my hospital residency, we settled down in Atkinson, a tiny New Hampshire town along the Massachusetts border, and I became a US citizen. When I was finally able to vote in 2008, I felt such a sense of joy as I waited at the polling station to cast my ballot—only to have that feeling vanish when I overheard someone in line say, “We oughta show these towelheads who’s the boss.”

Let it go, I told myself. Why bother about what a couple of people in a small town think?

• • •

In Iran, we grieve the loss of a loved one for forty days, with ceremonies on the third, seventh, and fortieth days. We even have specific foods for funerals—halva, a sweet dish made with flour, butter, sugar, and rosewater and decorated with pistachios, is often served to mourners with tea.

In America, a culture of positivity, I don’t really know how to mourn. Right after Hal died, I disconnected from my emotions. Eventually, I became angry—at others for their platitudes, and with myself for how long it was taking me to get over his death. I needed to get away from it all, and so I went to Laguna Beach, where many of my old Iranian friends live.

I tell them how much Hal’s death has shaken me—and how much I’ve struggled to properly grieve for him. I need the ceremonies we used to practice, I tell them. I crave the taste of halva with tea.

They listen. Ironically, out of all my Iranian friends, the one who has the least nostalgia about her former life best understands the pain of that old wound. “You know, our parents are Iranian,” she says. “Our children are American. We, I’m afraid, are neither. We are orphans.”

I think back to my search for my childhood home in Tehran. I remember coming to the block where my family’s house had once stood, and seeing the sterile apartment complex they had built in its place. Good, I told myself. Who has the energy to feel emotional?

Afterward, a friend drove me around the neighborhood. We passed my middle school. The old mosque. The pastry shop I used to stop by on my way to school.

Suddenly, tears started streaming down my cheeks.

It wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t there.

Bahar Anooshahr is an Iranian American writer and recovering oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Twitter: @banooshahr

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Interviews

Lost and Found: A Conversation with Writer Philip Connors

Best of In The Fray 2015. In his first book, Philip Connors went to the woods to learn what it had to teach. In his latest work, he delves into the dark memories of his family’s past, rooting out the meaning of a tragedy.

Susan Dunlap

Philip Connors wearing a fedora

Earlier this year, forest-fire lookout and nonfiction writer Philip Connors came out with his second book, All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found. It’s a beautifully wrought memoir about his brother’s suicide, which happened when Connors was only twenty-three. In the Fray’s Susan Dunlap talked with Connors over email in the spring about the way his brother Dan’s death shaped the trajectory of his own life, the approach he took to writing about a taboo subject, and the comforts of solitude.

You started out as a journalist and avoided getting an MFA degree. Were you daunted when you first set out as a creative nonfiction writer?

I first started writing nonfiction because I tried and failed to write quality fiction. A good deal of my apprenticeship—aside from working for newspapers—involved writing terrible short stories that no one has ever read, nor ever will. I just couldn’t write a good one. I couldn’t seem to finish a story without getting bored with it. And I never had the desire to subject myself to the torture of the MFA workshop, which Louis Menand memorably described as “a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy.” At some point, having failed for years to write any decent fiction, I thought, “Why not try to write a true story? The thing happened; I know how the story begins, I know how it ends.” And my first attempt was decent enough to be published in a little magazine, the Georgia Review, which was, of course, encouraging. I haven’t written a word of fiction since.

All the Wrong Places is a very personal book about a dark chapter in your family’s life. You say that you felt inspired to write about your brother Dan because your mother shared her diary with you. Was it hard for your family to see the entire story when it went to print?

Parts of it were very difficult for my parents to read, as they would have to be: I’m writing about their only other son, who chose to end his life with a bullet from an assault rifle. But they’ve been remarkably supportive of the book. My sister told me she loved it. That meant a lot. My mother told me she couldn’t put it down, even as she cried through the whole second half.

As you mentioned, it was her brave act of connection and sharing that originally unlocked the book for me. She’d been keeping a diary of her thoughts about Dan, and in one of our rare moments of conversation about him, she had the impulse to share what she’d written. I found it very moving that she would offer up something so intimate. By then I had come to understand how difficult it is to talk about suicide—so difficult that it’s among our last taboos. It was not something we talked about much in our family, even though it sat there like the elephant in the room. And after my mother shared what she’d written with me, I thought maybe I could also write something that chipped away at the taboo.

It feels like you are saying in the book that your brother’s suicide shaped your adult life, both in the mistakes you made but also in the fact that you became a nonfiction writer.

It happened when I was still in the process of crafting an adult self, so I think it’s only natural that it affected everything that came afterward in my life. And I do think it’s a major part of what made me the sort of writer I became. Because the subject of suicide is so taboo, I found that the only place I could talk about it was in my own private notebooks. For years and years I had a running conversation with myself about it; if I didn’t, I feared the fact of Dan’s death would eat me alive. In some perverse way, the fact of his death ordained my becoming a writer. In order to live, I had to write—and so I did.

The sense of lost connections, or a failure to connect, gives the book a sense of poignancy, without it ever becoming maudlin.

Yes, that was a trap I wanted to avoid. I didn’t feel a need to accentuate the tragic nature of suicide. The reader is going to get it. What I wanted to do was write a quest story—a quest for how to be in the world after something like that has happened in your family.

The suicide of a family member is like a bomb going off, and it leaves everyone left behind with a lot of shrapnel and a lot of questions. How could my brother have believed that a bullet in the brain was the answer to what troubled him? And what was the thing that troubled him? For years, I didn’t know. It took some searching to unearth a plausible story, and in the meantime the fact of his death was close to unbearable. I thought about it every day for years, and it made me what I suppose a doctor would call clinically depressed.

But finding a way to live with the unbearable can result in comedy, at least in retrospect. Making the unbearable bearable is a real-life run at improvisational burlesque, and often a massive exercise in self-deception. I made counterintuitive choices. My life became deeply weird, sometimes even farcical. I managed to work myself into the wrong situation—the wrong neighborhood, the wrong job—over and over again.

The details of that impulse allowed me to laugh at some of what I had made of my life in those years, and that was crucial in writing a readable book, one that didn’t take the reader by the scruff of the neck and rub her nose in endless misery. I like to think that parts of it are pretty funny, perhaps unexpectedly so.

Part of the book is also about clandestine phone sex, which adds a touch of ribald humor but also is closely tied to the theme of an inability to connect. Was it hard to write about something so personal?

Not really. Those parts of the book were among the first I wrote, and they came pretty easily, because the experience was so strange and vivid, and so rich in narrative potential. If you’re going to write a memoir, you’ve got to be willing to confess. Having grown up Catholic, I know a thing or two about confession.

I was especially riveted by the story of your friend who developed a phone relationship with a dying man. I think that could fall under the “you can’t make this stuff up” category of nonfiction. Yet with this book you managed to do what I think good fiction generally tries to do—capture an emotional truth through telling a story.

Life is almost always stranger than fiction. How to capture some of that strangeness in a true story—and how to impose a certain shapeliness and beauty on the chaos of lived experience—is a motivating challenge for me. In both of my first two books, I wanted to write nonfiction that had a depth of feeling and an emotional impact similar to the best fiction.

Was there another memoir writer you’ve met or read who inspired you to think about your own book the way you did?

[The semi-autobiographical novel] A River Runs Through It always spoke to me because it mingled the comic and the tragic so beautifully, and deftly managed big jumps in time. But as a memoirist I was dealing with the raw material of my own life, so the challenge was to sift through my experience to discover what about it had the shape of a story. I wanted the book to have a kind of relentless narrative drive. The goal was to create that unlikely thing: a page-turner about a suicide. Mostly that involved writing and rewriting, again and again, and stripping away anything extraneous so that all that was left was essential.

Your first book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, could be called a modern-day Thoreauvian account of a solitary life in the wilderness. Solitariness is also a theme in All the Wrong Places. Do you think solitude is a necessary condition for you as a writer?

I’m not sure solitude is a necessary condition, but it is without question helpful. Back when I lived and worked in New York, I wrote in the mornings before setting off on my commute. I think what I’ve written since then is better, deeper, and more thoughtful for the time I’ve been given as a Forest Service fire lookout, living and working in solitude, with plenty of mental elbow room for thinking or not thinking, being creative, allowing things to bubble up unexpectedly. Part of writing, for me, is sitting and doing nothing. In order to write for an hour, I often find I have to sit doing nothing for three. Then a phrase comes, and I’m off.

What’s next for you?

Check back in six months and perhaps I’ll have an answer. This book left me feeling that I’d scraped from the bottom of the well. Now I need to allow the well to fill again. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

You’re about to head back into the Gila National Forest to work as a fire lookout for another season. Are you looking forward to a respite from the pressures involved in being a public person?

Absolutely. I’m far more comfortable sitting alone in a lookout tower than I am speaking in front of strangers in bookstores. I’m very much looking forward to sitting quietly, communing with the birds, studying cloud shapes. It’s what I do best.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Susan Dunlap is the natural-resources reporter for the Montana Standard. 

Correction, August 10: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story mistakenly said All the Wrong Places is Connors’ third book; it is the second he has written, though he edited and contributed an essay to a third book. The story also said the suicide of Connors’ brother occurred when he working as a reporter; he was actually a college student at the time. We regret the errors.

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Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr
Blog

This Is How We Celebrate Our Dead


Día de los Muertos altar lit by candles
Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr

Last week when my two young nieces were in town, we went to a local theater to watch Jorge R. Gutierrez’s The Book of Life, an animated children’s film that is part heavy-handed love story, part love letter to Día de de los Muertos, the holiday on which those who have died are celebrated, a ritual that goes back 3,000 years. On NPR, journalist Karen Castillo Farfán wrote that the practice was developed by the Aztecs, who believed one should not grieve the loss of a beloved ancestor who passed. Instead, “the Aztecs celebrated their lives and welcomed the return of their spirits to the land of the living once a year.”

The Book of Life is one big visual representation of everything we have come to associate with the holiday: “dark” Mexican folk art, sugar skulls, papel picado in every color, and altars adorned with seven-day candles, orange marigolds, and pan dulce. The movie is bright and visually stunning, despite being about death—and the same could be said about Día de los Muertos.

A child in the movie who is unfamiliar with the holiday asks, “What’s with Mexicans and death?” As soon as the line was said, I looked over at my nieces, who I instinctively knew would be looking back at me. They were, and they had their hands over their mouths, stifling giggles.

Watching my nieces watch the movie was more interesting to me than the story line itself. My Mexican brother is out of the picture, and my nieces are being raised by their white mother and white stepfather in a white suburb in Utah. They are little brown girls who are painfully aware they are little brown girls in a sea of white faces. When they visit Los Angeles, they are hungry for ties to our culture, no matter how seemingly surface-level. Each time they are here, they want to go to Placita Olvera, the birthplace of Los Angeles. They want my dad to speak to them in Spanish. They eat menudo with my father, watching him out of the corners of their eyes; they roll up the tortilla in their hands just like he does, dipping it in the soup’s red broth.

During the movie, I watched their eyes flash with recognition every time they understood a word in Spanish or recognized the significance of a visual element. Afterwards, my nieces sat across from me at a restaurant, chatting about the movie. The oldest, who is eleven years old, said, “What is it with Mexicans and death, though?”

Growing up, the only thing I remember my dad telling me about Día de los Muertos was that Mexicans are passionate people who love in big ways, and the tradition of celebrating our dead was an extension of that. As a child, my family did not partake in any festivities.

The hunger my nieces have for Mexican culture is something I understand deeply. As a biracial Latina, I know what it feels like to have a tenuous grasp on your culture—and there are few things holier to me than culture. It encompasses family, traditions, and food, all the things that make me feel whole and human. Since the death of my mother four years ago, Día de los Muertos has become monumentally important to me and something I consider sacred, but every year there are more and more reminders that it is a tradition that belongs to Mexicans less and less.

Recently, much has been written about the appropriation and colonization of the tradition, which is increasingly treated as an extension of Halloween. There was that one time Disney tried to trademark Día de los Muertos. Each year, there are more stories of corporations promoting the co-opting and whitewashing of a sacred Mexican holiday. This year it was discovered that beauty retailer Sephora was encouraging employees to show off their “Halloween faces” using a step-by-step makeup guide for a Día de los Muertos-inspired look. This year we also saw an online petition created to stop the “Fiesta De Los Muertos Scare Zone” at Knott’s Scary Farm.

This year I saw Día de los Muertos displays for Cheetos. In Halloween stores, I saw “sexy” Día de los Muertos costumes for women, featuring a calavera mask, a sombrero, and a short dress embroidered with colorful flowers. On Halloween this year, I saw white children trick-or-treating in jeans and hoodies, their faces painted like sugar skulls. That was the entirety of their costume. Last year I walked into a local bar where white women had their faces painted similarly as they tried to talk customers into trying the pumpkin beer. I walked out.

There are many levels to the appropriation of the holiday, though generally speaking I’m most dismayed by the way white Americans pick and choose the pieces of us they want. Mass deportations in which Mexicans are the most often deported don’t seem to get a rise out of the same people painting their faces like calaveras for Halloween. When there is a mixed-status immigrant family about to be torn apart, I don’t see Disney, the supposed bastion of family values, advocating for family reunification. In my hometown of Los Angeles, white Angelenos love taco trucks, but don’t care when undocumented loncheras are targeted and criminalized for making a living. Of course, all of this is just to say that Día de los Muertos is just another instance in which white Americans want to claim the pieces of Mexican culture that appeal to them, while violently erasing its origins.

I have spent the past few days thinking of my mom. On the altar I made for her, there are flowers and candles; there are the many rings she wore and the small pumpkins she and I always bought together at this time of year. Yesterday at a panadería, I watched my aging father lovingly pick out all of my mom’s favorite pan dulce. He came home and thoughtfully arranged it on a plate, placing it on her altar and lighting a candle. Over the past couple of days, my father and I have eaten pan de muerto together, swapping funny stories about my mom. We have visited her grave, leaving bouquets of marigolds. Today, on the last day of Día de los Muertos, we will make mole together. Her favorite.

I don’t suspect I will ever stop mourning the death of my mother, but Día de los Muertos provides a rare opportunity to celebrate her in a way I’m not usually capable of. This is not a sad time of year for me. I spend these three days reflecting on how lucky I was to get such an unconventional parent who was deeply invested in my happiness. I spend these days thinking about how grateful I am that I was given twenty-five years with my mom.

I suspect this is the case for many of the Mexicans who celebrate Día de los Muertos in the US. In this celebration of those who have passed, we can reflect and honor our dead. We can feel more attuned to the ways in which they continue to make their presence known in our lives.

Everyone has traditions. Día de los Muertos just happens to be ours, and it is sacred. Please respect that.

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Blog

May Is the Cruelest Month


The author as a young child held by her mother on a bed
The author and her mother.

May in Los Angeles is breathtaking. I know this because it’s all people talk about when the city explodes in Technicolor and flowers rip open. Everything is lush and living, or so they say. I live in Los Angeles too, but I don’t see it the same way. Not anymore. The sunshine is harsh. The colors unkind.

When I walk to the corner liquor store with my sunglasses on and hoodie pulled up, hoping to be left alone, neighbors still yell out, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I smile politely, nod. Always polite.

I stood on this same street four years ago, a few days before Mother’s Day. It was early in the morning, around 3 a.m., and I was on the phone with a steely 911 operator, wondering why she was being so cold to me. I realize now it was probably better that way, but in those moments I hated her. I remember saying, “This doesn’t feel real. This feels like a movie. Is this real?” There was silence on the other end of the line.

As the ambulance turned onto my street, I sucked in air like someone drowning. There were no sirens. No flashing lights. I wanted to see the EMTs rushed and sweaty. I wanted adrenaline. But they were calm and slow-moving.

It was my fault. I’d already told the 911 operator I knew my mom was dead.

During the month of May, I will give myself permission to self-destruct. I will drink more than I should. I will sleep more than I should. I will want to do things I’m not wired to do. Sometimes I will. Mostly I won’t.

I will spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood, that dark little strip club that has the power to turn my brain off. I will think about sipping double Crowns and mindlessly throwing crumpled bills onto the stage. I will think about the women and how I want to make eye contact with them in a way I’m usually not capable of. I will think about all the hours of work I need to put in to make a trip to Jumbo’s a reality. It will exhaust me and I will go back to bed.

I broke up more fistfights in my family home than I can count, and I never threw a punch. But this month, there will be days when I wish someone would dare to say something about my dead mom. I will fantasize about how that first punch would feel. And I will think about what my dad said after the EMTs confirmed that my grey-faced mother was dead and probably had been for hours. In front of these men we did not know, he said, “We didn’t even care about her.” It took everything in me not to jump across the bed and murder him.

Mostly, I will search for that hollowed-out feeling I get from Xanax on those days when the anxiety feels like it’s going to burst my heart. That sensation of floating unwittingly through my day, serene and untouchable—not sobbing in a grocery-store bathroom or sitting on the curb in an unfamiliar neighborhood trying like hell to steady my breathing and stop the tears so that I don’t have to deal with a stranger asking, “Are you okay?”

Last May, I lost my mind. Every day, I fought the urge to lie down in the spot where my mother’s body lay for hours before the coroner came. I went on long, meandering walks, listening to the same Perfume Genius album over and over again. (A word of advice: Do not have a soundtrack for your mental collapse. You will never be able to listen to those songs again without being snapped back into that headspace.) I tore apart a pink Bic razor the way I used to in high school. Those flimsy things do an impressive amount of damage. As I watched the blood rise to the surface of my forearm, I thought, “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”

This May, I don’t know what will happen. But I know there will be days when she is all I think about.

Four years ago, I bought my mom a pair of turquoise earrings for Mother’s Day. I had found them at a street fair. My dad and uncle and I had tried to talk my mom into going with us, but at that point she only left the house for doctor’s appointments.

So we left her behind and talked shit about her at the fair. We sat on a green bench on Third Street, the sun beating down on us, the smell of roses everywhere, and talked about forcing her to go on walks, forcing her to quit smoking, forcing her to get it together.

At the fair that day, I took pictures of my dad and uncle beaming, standing in front of glorious restored cars from the 1950s that shined Larkspur Blue and Goddess Gold.

When I look at those photos now, I think about how my mom at that moment had less than twenty-four hours to live. I look at every picture taken before her death the same way. My favorite picture of us smiling with our big, bright eyes? We only had twenty-two years left together. Those pictures from her birthday in 2009, those pictures of her hanging ornaments on the tree, those pictures of her looking dazed in the background as my nieces danced around the living room? She would have less than 365 days left. She didn’t know it. Or maybe she did.

I write this on the anniversary of her death. It’s a beautiful May day. When I walk out my front door, I actually hear birds chirping. The smell of honeysuckle and orange blossoms swirls around. All this afternoon, my dad and uncle have tried to talk me into going to a street fair, the same fair where I bought my mom those Mother’s Day earrings that I would later bury with her.

I was going to give her those earrings. I was going to cook her favorite meal, those bloody steaks she loved so much. I was going to get her pink roses, the kind she bought me on my birthday. I was going to, I was going to, I was going to. But I never got to.

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Jerusalem
Commentary

A Stranger in Jerusalem

I had come to Jerusalem to remember my grandmother’s life and mourn my marriage’s demise. As I made my way to the Wailing Wall, a shopkeeper stopped me with a question.


Photos by Kyle Trafas
Men standing in front of the Wailing Wall
Visitors to the Wailing Wall take part in the centuries-old Jewish tradition of placing slips of paper with prayers into the cracks of the wall’s broken stones.

The hot white wind whistled quietly as I walked through the rows of Jerusalem’s labyrinthine cemetery, built on a mountainside.

I would have never found my grandmother’s grave here if it weren’t for Inna, her lifelong friend. They had met in college back in the Soviet Union, where we all had once lived. I had called Inna as soon as I landed in Israel, the last stop on my solo journey around the world.

Inna led me past a wall of tombs until we arrived at one bearing the black granite letters of my grandmother’s name.

The last time I had seen my grandmother was more than two decades earlier, before she bought a one-way ticket to Israel in hopes of curing her Alzheimer’s. It was a tumultuous time. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and many were heading abroad. My grandmother, a literature professor, had started to notice early symptoms of her condition. Rumor had it that in Israel they knew a cure. My grandmother decided to leave everything behind and make the move, joining Inna in Jerusalem.

There was no one else in this section of the cemetery, and in the morning stillness I felt my grandmother beside me. The warmth of her skin. Her round, tanned face. Reddish curls that bounced when she moved. A laugh that rang like wind chimes.

I didn’t want to leave her, but the taxi was waiting.

As our car weaved through the cemetery and back toward the city, Inna said, “I’m really glad you came to visit your grandmother. I see a lot of similarities in you.”

I felt the same way. My grandmother and I had shared a sense of independence that had propelled us to leave one life in search of another. Twenty years after my grandmother made her life-changing decision, I also bought a one-way ticket, leaving behind family, friends, and a marriage that no longer worked.

Now, on the final lap of a journey meant to help me put myself back together, I wished I could ask my grandmother about her life and gain a little wisdom to live my own. But she was gone. I wanted to ask her friend more about her, but there was no time. Inna had to rush home for the Jewish holidays, and I had to meet my brother at the Wailing Wall.

When I entered Jerusalem’s Old City through the ancient Jaffa Gate, the scene was dizzying. A boiling river of tourists flowed down the alleys of the street market. I was running late, so I hurried past the shopkeepers doggedly hawking their wares. Red carpets. Wooden crosses. Miniature chess sets. Green carpets. Gooey baklava. Silver jewelry. Evil-eye charms. More carpets.

Looking down the covered walkway of a bustling street market
A street market in Jerusalem.

“Can I ask you a question, miss? Excuse me, miss! I just wanted to ask you …”

I flew by them, weaving my way through the tourists haggling over souvenirs, ducking under giant trays of fresh sesame-seed bread carried by deft young men.

Then, something stopped me.

I was in front of a shop selling unpolished silver antiques—oil lamps, samovars, menorahs. But what caught my attention wasn’t the merchandise. It was the old shopkeeper.

His eyes matched the deep blue of his simple work shirt. They exuded the calm of someone who belonged under the shade of an oak tree in a peaceful meadow, not in the madness of an urban bazaar.

There was something entrancing about this Middle Eastern Buddha who smiled at me and said, “Come, take five minutes inside.”

“But I’m in a hurry, someone is waiting for me,” I said skittishly, without moving.

“Our whole life passes as we hurry,” he replied. “When we are kids, we hurry to grow up. Then, we grow up and hurry to …”

“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, remembering the hectic life I had left behind. “Everyone always hurries. But actually, I’ve been traveling and haven’t felt hurried this whole year.”

“And? Did you find yourself?” he asked, as if he knew exactly what had sent me away from home and brought me to his doorstep.

“I think so,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, anyway.”

He considered me quietly. “You keep a guard, but you shouldn’t. You’re beautiful, intelligent, sensitive, and a little stubborn. Come,” he gestured toward the depths of his silver cave. “I want to talk to you.”

I could have said no and left for the Wailing Wall, where my brother was probably already waiting. Instead, I walked to the back of his store and sat on a soft cushion. He sat in front of me, his small figure framed by rows of ivory bracelets. An antique clock slept above his head.

“Are you in love with yourself?” he asked.

Wait, what?

I considered his strange question. It seemed that I’d been able to leave my marriage precisely because I loved myself enough to save what remained of me. And yet the experience of the divorce had made me feel like a failure.

The most truthful answer I could give was, “Sometimes.”

“Why sometimes?”

I paused again, my eyes focused on the bracelets hanging in front of me. “Can you love yourself even though you feel that no one else loves you?”

The skyline of Jerusalem's Old City, with the Wailing Wall in the foreground and the Dome of the Rock in the background
The Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock in the distance.

To my embarrassment, I felt a tear roll down my cheek as I said the words. I despise self-pity, so I turned away and pretended to look around the store. Trying to find something else to talk about, I made a comment about an old samovar on one of his shelves. But the shopkeeper made no reply. When I finally turned to face him again, he was looking at me with curiosity, not pity.

“To love yourself doesn’t mean to be selfish,” he said. “To love yourself means to be at peace with your body, your soul, with who you are. I see that you’re hiding yourself because you feel ashamed of your tears, but even with tears you are beautiful.”

My tears now started streaming down my face.

“Love is simple,” he said, pressing his hand to his heart. “I know I haven’t known you for very long, but … I love you.”

He said it so naturally. Looking into his serene eyes, I believed him.

Who said that love is the lifelong emotion that wives feel toward their husbands and mothers toward their children? Why can’t love be a sudden burst of sunshine in a dusty shop in Old Jerusalem?

The two of us sat there. I could hear the clamor of the market, just steps away.

Three women walked into the store, and the moment passed. I looked at my watch. I was now an hour late.

Wiping away my tears, I rejoined the crowds in the street, making my way to the Wailing Wall.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a writer based in New York City. She was born during a cold Russian winter and grew up in the golden hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays and articles on art, culture, business, travel, and love have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Russian Newsweek, Oakland Tribune, and Flower magazine. She received the 2013 North American Travel Journalists Association silver medal for her Los Angeles Times cover photo "Barra De Valizas." She is currently working on a collection of essays about her year-long solo journey around the world.

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Losing Mama


At the height of my teenage apathy, my mom made me squeal with delight by smuggling a kitten into our home in a cardboard box she’d found at work. She burst into my bedroom excitedly and shoved the box toward me. When I saw its tiny, grey nose and bright, yellow eyes, I fell in love just like my mom.

Mama the catMy dad, however, had a strict “no pets” policy. Caring for a cat would cost too much money, he said. He and my mom already struggled to afford food. For days, my parents fought over the kitten while I held out hope I could have this one little, good thing in a house that all too often felt devoid of good things.

Shockingly, my mom won the fight. I was given the task of naming the kitten. I chose “Cindy,” sort of as a joke to make my best friend Cindy laugh. That was the cat’s name until a year later when she gave birth to a litter of kittens in a cupboard in my parents’ house. We kept one of the kittens, Jacky, and gave the rest away. Overnight, Cindy became “Mama.”

When I talk with friends who aren’t “animal people,” it’s difficult to articulate just how big a part of your family a pet becomes. For thirteen years, I knew I could walk into my parents’ living room — no matter how unpleasant that experience could sometimes be — and there Mama would be. She would sit on my lap, rub her face against mine, and purr. If I spoke to her, she’d meow in response to everything I said.

Mama helped my mom to cope, too, during some hard times. Ten years ago, my mom was laid off. She had worked for over two decades as a janitor at a hospital. It was the only job she’d ever known.

After she was let go, my mom’s world became very small. Once a woman who had refused to leave the house without a face full of makeup, long nails painted bright red, and a cloud of perfume around her, my mom stopped caring about her appearance. She stopped leaving the house. She stopped talking. She stopped getting dressed. Her life stopped.

I thought she was horribly depressed — and I’m sure that was part of it, but physically, she was also broken. I made doctor’s appointments for her and refilled her prescriptions. I wrote her doctors pretending to be her, hoping they could tell me what exactly was ailing her. It all fell flat. She’d spend her days sitting on the edge of her bed, watching TV and chain-smoking, seemingly unconcerned about the state of her life.

Mama, who was without a doubt my mom’s cat, sat beside her. Or on top of her. Or somewhere on the bed with her. She was always near.

Three years ago, my mom died. The night before, I cried for hours, knowing in my gut that something was very wrong. I called my older brother and told him I needed help. I didn’t know what to do, I said. I was panicking, and we were losing our mom.

My brother was wrapped up in his own life, battling an addiction I wouldn’t be aware of until later. He offered me no advice and little comfort. Afterward, I sat on my bed and cried even more. Mama sat by my side, rubbing her face against me and intermittently meowing.

When my mom died later that night, she was alone. Not even Mama was in the room with her. The only indication my mom ever existed was in the few things she left behind: a hairbrush, some expired makeup, pajamas, and her cat.

The rest of my family couldn’t pull it together after my mom’s unexpected death. My two brothers left their children in my care in order to go out drinking into the early morning hours. It was even worse when they stayed home and drank themselves into a stupor, crying unabashedly about how my parents didn’t love them enough. My dad sat on the couch, frozen.

As for me, I’ve never felt safe letting myself be vulnerable in front of my family. When you grow up in a house where basic needs — such as knowing you’re loved — go unmet, you learn to make it appear as if you don’t have needs. To do otherwise is setting yourself up for disappointment.

In other words, falling apart after my mom’s death wasn’t an option for me. Instead, I hustled to pay for the funeral, shamelessly hitting up my editors for advances and scouring Craigslist for affordable plots. I sat through excruciating sessions with a Catholic priest who scolded my family for not being Catholic enough — while happily taking $300 to appear at my mother’s funeral. I cared for my nieces and cooked for all of the family that had suddenly come out of the woodwork, showing up at our house bearing sympathy and expecting a meal in return.

I didn’t cry in front of anyone, ever.

I would lose it when no one was around. No one, that is, except Mama. She always seemed to be there. When I howled in pain on the floor, she would look panic-stricken. When I got up and composed myself, she’d settle on my lap, purring.

Animals are so powerful in their love and kindness. Very few people have provided me with the kind of comfort Mama did after my mom’s death.

Eventually, Mama became a free agent, loving everyone and belonging to no one. After a few months, she settled on my great-uncle Willie, then seventy-nine years old, who had been homeless before my mom invited him to live with our family. Fast friends, they soon spent every moment together.

I, of course, had Jacky, Mama’s baby. He’d stuck with me through bad relationships, family blowups, and even a move to the Arizona desert that made us both miserable. He consoled me as I was grieving.

Three years after my mom died, Mama became seriously ill. Last October, I went out of town for two weeks. When I returned, Mama had dwindled away to skin and bones. I had the same gut feeling about her that I’d had about my mom. When I saw the vet the following week, I was blunt: “You need to tell me what I already know.”

It was cancer. The vet gave her a few weeks to live.

I knew it would be rough, but what I didn’t expect was how much my experience caring for Mama would mirror the final months of my mom’s life. In the weeks leading up to her death, my mom had often asked me to sit in bed with her. At the time, I felt that being in such close proximity to my fading, ill mother was too overwhelming. After a few minutes I would come up with an excuse and leave the room. In retrospect, I deeply regret not spending that time with her. It wasn’t really her illness that frightened me; it was my need for her. I needed my mom to return to who she was, to become my mom again — not this sick, depressed person I didn’t even know how to sit next to.

I wanted Mama to feel loved and comforted by my presence, but I couldn’t shake that same selfish need for her to return to normal, to fatten up and follow me around, meowing. I knew it wasn’t a possibility and never would be again, and that sense of loss made me hesitate, just as it had with my mom.

Late at night, when no one was around, I held Mama, crying as I traced her brittle bones with my fingertips. When I spoke to her, she looked up at me, but could no longer respond the way she used to. Her mouth would open, but no sound would come out.

Soon, Mama could barely walk. She ate voraciously, but it was never enough. She rarely moved. She lay on a pile of blankets on the coffee table, a place she was never allowed before. For whatever reason, it was the only place she wanted to be — and so we let her be.

We scheduled her to be put to sleep on December 14. That day, in a rare display of energy, Mama pulled herself up, jumped/fell off the coffee table, and stumbled to the front door. When she was well, she would stand in that same spot meowing, demanding to be let out into the front yard, where she would stretch herself out and slow-blink in the sunshine. I picked her up, and together we lay down on the lawn. She rubbed her face into the grass. The last few days in Los Angeles it had been forty degrees. That day, it was seventy-five, and Mama soaked it up. I sat there in pain, knowing what she didn’t.

One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life is my dad and my uncle Willie crying over Mama, running their hands over her bony back, telling her they loved her just moments before the vet gave her the injection. I had to leave the room. I couldn’t bear to see the men in my life so fragile, couldn’t stand to see Mama die right before me. I walked out of the room without saying a word, walked through the hallway and out past the waiting room, smiling at the receptionist as I passed, only to turn a corner outside the building and burst into tears.

When I got home, I crawled into bed and held Mama’s collar close. I traced its edges with my fingertips, thinking about how little of the physical world we really leave behind. Soon, Jacky jumped into bed with me, purring into my neck. As I drifted off to sleep I thought about how we’d both lost our mothers and how we would find comfort in each other.

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Iraq in 2006


As revelers rang in 2007, the Iraqi ministries released grim statistics for 2006: 14,298 civilians died violent deaths. Add to that the violent deaths of soldiers and police and the number rises to 16,273. The AP reached an independent count of 13,738 deaths.

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The odds of dying


As children across America greedily tore open presents on Christmas day, the Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani announced a grim statistic: 12,000 Iraqi policemen have died since the US-led invasion began in 2003. With the total number of police numbering at approximately 190,000 officers, that means the odds of an Iraqi policeman dying are around 1 in 16.

Despite the odds of dying, joining the police offers a prospect of employment, and according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, “when we call for new recruits, they come by the hundreds and by the thousands.”

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