on the road again

& feeling lost & thinking about mortality (again)

It has been a bit since I wrote on here, in my journal, or anywhere, for that matter (other than some posts on children’s books for Good Trouble For Kids). I’m currently sitting in a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (about which the only thing I know is that Larry Bird played basketball here, and I only know that because I saw a street named for him on the university campus, where I walked with Bambam after almost 9 hours in the car, and because my sports fanatic friend Jason told me). I am on my way back to Boulder after more than a month on the east coast, where I rented an apartment in White Plains to be close to my dad and his wife, and got the big bonus of being near my sister’s family (with my four nieces being the major highlight). But, to be very honest, this has not been an easy time for me, and as much as I shared beautiful Instagram pictures of the sea where I spent a week on the Cape with my husband and kids, I am struggling greatly with how much of a liminal space I find myself in. I am not part of the sandwich generation like my sister — working, taking care of four younger kids, and taking almost daily care of my dad and his wife. I honestly do not know how she does it. My children are near grown — one almost 28 and out of law school; the other 19 and finished with two years of college. My husband is the breadwinner of our family. I have worked primarily as a volunteer for more than fifteen years. And still, I am feeling trapped, caught between a rock and a hard place — but it is trappings of my own making. I did not plan well for this stage of my life. I did not plan for the “what happens when your kids leave home.” I especially did not plan well considering that my husband’s job requires him to be away for months at a time (he’s a chief engineer on a ship - merchant marine). It used to be for 75 days, but since Covid it has been more like three to four months. The volunteer work that gave me the most pleasure — teaching at the prison and the vets center, and some individual counseling — mostly dried up during Covid. I didn’t pursue getting an MSW, counseling, or nursing degree, like some other quite incredible women I know. I did try to start a business, but have pretty unsuccessful with getting it off the ground. In short, I have not been doing much of anything — not even reading or writing. I have instead been caught up in my head with an endless loop of where am I supposed to be and what am I meant to be doing. Which means, really, what is the meaning of all of this, i.e., my life, my existence, my space on this planet. It is a level of self-absorption that only leads to serious bouts of depression. And I am old enough and wise enough to know that I am the only person who can change the direction of this thinking.

All this kind of thinking inevitably leads to contemplating the veil between this world and the next. The best part of this past month was getting to spend a week with my brother Josh, who flew in from Israel. He posed a scary question to me. I could not answer it then, and cannot answer it now: What will you do, Rachel, the day after dad dies? It is a brutal question, of course, but it was said to me with great kindness, and I knew exactly what he was saying, and why he was asking. But the question of seeking purpose is not new to me, and it is the question that came up over and over again with people I visited at the hospital as a chaplain intern, and with the people I counseled outside the hospital. It is the question they most wanted to parse through as they neared death. Because it is the human question. It is the question at the heart of Hemingway, of Carver, of Plath, of Baldwin, of Nina Simone, of Marilyn Monroe, etc. etc. etc. (Perhaps my other hero Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t aware that her art — and her face — helped answer that question, but I would hazard a guess that she knew full well she embodied her purpose, which is why she went to the desert, left Stieglitz, and died with that extraordinary weathered face).

Yesterday I drove to Altoona, Pennsylvania so that I could re-visit the house my mother grew up in, and visit the cemetery where my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and great aunts and uncles and cousins are buried. I wish I could have been there with my mother. The last time I was in Altoona was for their funerals in 1988 and 1990, and my memory of that time is very blurry, but I am can say with certainty that it was not a peak moment for me, and that I was not a good daughter to my mother. I was (again) too self-absorbed. I wish I could blame it entirely on youth, but I was 21 when my grandfather died, and 23 when my grandmother died, and I should have possessed significantly greater insight as to what the deaths of my mother’s parents meant to her. It is embarrassing for me to think about now. My own children were significantly more mature and respectful when they attended their grandfather’s funeral, and had deep insight into what it meant to their father to lose his father. It is painful to recall that version of myself. But this past month has forced me to confront how much of that version of myself is still contained in my now much aged body. I may see a different face when I look in the mirror, but the person inside — the one who so often felt trapped, scared, abandoned, unloved, etc. in her youth — is alive and kicking. I can’t seem to get rid of her no matter hard I try. I have lived much longer than Plath already, but there is a reason Lady Lazarus has always felt like a punch to the gut. I keep rising from those same ashes, but unlike the sphinx, I keep returning to them, when I really want to fly away and re-invent myself. I am unbearably aware of how little time is left.

I am writing this to try and heal myself, even if only for the small moment of now. There is a reason I was (am) drawn to bibliotherapy, why sometimes the only thing on earth that keeps me breathing is reading another person’s words (right now it is James Baldwin’s Another Country), or writing through the loops of my brain. I felt very sad at the Altoona cemetery, faced with the markers of the lives of two people I once really loved, who were good to me, who treasured my existence in the world. There were all these other histories in that cemetery too, some people I knew of only through stories my mother told, or names: like Jacob Max Halpern, z”l, Jan. 6 - Jan 7, 1944, the baby born not quite five years after my mother. My own brother Jake is named for him. I never knew the dates until yesterday. I had never thought about what that time was like for my grandparents, for my mom or for her sister, or of what it was like to live in small-town America as a Jew during World War II. All these immigrants from Eastern Europe living in this odd (to me) place of Altoona, Pennsylvania, perhaps most renowned for the famous Horseshoe Curve (which has its own weird World War II history, as it was apparently “targeted by Nazi Germany in 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius.” I wonder if my grandfather knew that, or if it was common knowledge). And now, marker after marker note these relatives of mine — my maternal family’s plot: most born at the end of the 19th century, or beginning of the 20th (my grandpa, Harry Halpern, z”l, was born in 1896; his father, Jacob Halpern, z”l, was born in 1864, and his mother Pearl Dvora, z”l, — we share the same middle name, something else I’d forgotten — was born in 1865. My American born grandmother, Gladys Halpern, z”l, was born in 1906). I wonder if Pearl Dvora ever knew how significant her birth year - 1865 - was to the history of the country to which she immigrated. She certainly never could have guessed how much that time in history would occupy the mind of one of her great granddaughters.

I had the strange experience today of pulling off the highway in Ohio to get out of the car to walk Bambam, to pace, to think, and bizarrely and absolutely unintentionally, ended up in another Jewish cemetery. It was literally on a side road off of I-70, and I sat on the damp grass and stared at these other gravestones, also arranged on a hill (although the cemetery in Altoona, gratefully, was far more peaceful). I wonder if some other granddaughter will drive up there thirty or forty years from now seeking a particular marker, remembering what it was like to get picked up by her grandfather, to be held by him. My grandpa always felt so big to me, and I think he probably was quite tall for that generation (although nowhere near as tall as his son, who would be 6’7”!) But if I shut my eyes very tightly, I can recall my mother handing me into his arms when I was a very little girl of five or six. We’d taken the train in, and it was snowing, and she was trying to hold on to my little brothers and maneuver luggage. I can feel the snowflakes on my face, I can see myself in my cream-colored fur coat, and the brown velvet muff, and my grandpa holding me high up in the air, and I imagine all the potential he must have seen in my face — and I am terrified that I have not lived up to it at all.