Hoping for Better, 3 Years Since Oct. 7
· Time
My name is Rachel.
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And I will always be the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Hersh will always be my eldest child.
Hersh will always be my only son.
And Hersh will always be 23-years-old.
As one of the millions of parents around the world who have tragically and chokingly buried a child, I am stuck in time. I always will be.
Oct. 7 is approaching. That date upon which my son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival advertised as being for peace, love, and unity. Hersh was held hostage for 328 sickening, agonizing, and starving days until his captors executed him with five other young and luminous people in a tunnel underneath Gaza.
His majestic body, that I carried in my body many moons ago, was returned to me in a bag, skeletal, bearing signs of torture, filthy, missing his left forearm that had been blown off during his abduction, and with six bullet wounds. I awake every day to the confusion of this truth. I am glued to time's flypaper of stickiness. I cannot move.
People care about us and want my family and me to improve—emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, and otherwise. They desperately want us to get... better. I am told this is similar to the way people who lost loved ones on 9/11 encounter well-meaning comforters, in the quarter century since they lost someone core to their identity, in this layered and puzzling place called life.
I remember waking up on Sept. 11, 2001, in our house in Berkeley, California. My husband Jon was already in the shower. It was around 6:30 in the morning, and I could hear baby Hersh, just 11 months old, cooing in his crib in the room adjacent to mine. The clock radio (remember those?) was on. In my fuzzy moments of waking, I shot up in bed when I heard the announcer say something about an airplane flying into the World Trade Center in New York.
I ran into the bathroom and said to Jon in the shower, “Hurry up and come quickly, something terrible is happening in New York.” Everyone in the United States has their tale of what happened that day.
My mother used to say that the day President John F. Kennedy was killed, everyone remembers where they were. She had gone into the dry cleaners to pick up a blouse, and the man at the register was crying. She asked what happened, and he said, “Oh dear, do you not know? The president was assassinated.” I also recall my grandmother remembering where she was when the attack at Pearl Harbor happened.
In our generation, we now have another day of “infamy.” Oct. 7, 2023. The day my “before” ended. On that morning, Jon and I were thrust into an odyssey of hardship I wish on no one. No one. We, and all of the families of the 251 treasured hostages abducted that day, ran in excruciating pain to the ends of the planet, trying desperately and agonizingly to save them.
We wanted everyone back, including the hostages whom we knew had been killed on Oct. 7, whose precious bodies had been savagely taken to be used as bargaining chips. And we were desperate to get back all of the live hostages while they were still living. But that was not to be. We failed them. Dozens of hostages went in alive, survived horrifying conditions and torture for hundreds of days, only to be murdered before they could be saved.
The hostages taken on Oct. 7 were from 39 different nations. They were Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. The youngest hostage was a nine-month-old redheaded baby and the oldest was a mustachioed grandpa. They kept themselves alive. Somehow. Those sacred and cherished souls. But we did not get to them in time.
Hostages killed in captivity, in different but heinous ways, were tricklingly returned to their families in bags. Even the little redheaded baby and his four-year-old brother. In smaller bags.
And now we approach three years of the day these people were taken from us. Taken from themselves and their lives. And so many ask, “Are you getting better?”
The question comes from a genuine place of curious benevolence, kindness even. I cannot imagine anyone means to cause harm. But the answer is “no.” No, we are not getting better.
Actually, I want to be careful and only speak for myself. Because pain and suffering are deeply personal and tailor-made for the one wearing it. My personal garment of affliction is not even similar to others in my family who are missing the same person. Our forever Hersh. Oh, my delightful sunny sun of son.
So, dear inquisitive asker, I am sorry; I am not getting better. I aspire and try to get different. To adapt to this bewildering truth. To breathe in this world without air. To wander the desert without water. But I am trapped in a cage of suffering. It is where I live. You see me and not the bars that keep me in this prison of pain. And I can fake it. Boy, can I act, pretend, and lie. When people want and demand our healing, I have learned that is called “toxic positivity.” It is emotional barbarism and emotional denial. I understand it comes from everyone being fiercely uncomfortable with misery. Who wants to think someone is always with an ache lodged in their throat? In their chest? In their spirit.
I grew up in Chicago, not far from the Lincoln Park Zoo. We went there with school every year. I didn’t like it. It felt unsettling to me. I don’t know why. I have seared into me the black panther that would pace rhythmically back and forth, back and forth, in what seemed like a jail. I feel like a kindred spirit to that sad and handsome cat from the late 1970’s.
I have blessings and laughter in my cage. And I strive and yearn to get out. One day. Even though the thousands of parents who have reached out to me, who all put their children in the ground before me, have explained that it will not get better. They reach out from all sorts of places, describing treasured innocent lives no longer here; and those who are here have their breathing constricted. Inhaling is an effort.
Hersh was a curious, radical listener who dreamt of quenching his wanderlust by traveling the world. He had planned and saved for many years. His ticket was purchased, and the flight date was Dec. 27, 2023. Alas, Hersh was to miss the flight because he was still being held hostage, starving, tortured, and surviving on that date in terrifying confinement.
And, fascinatingly, he was hopeful. I know it because he told us in a video his captors made of him that was given to my husband, Jon, and me. I know it because some hostages who did make it home told us that Hersh told them he was hopeful. What a gorgeous gift, to remain hopeful even when in the bowels of hell. I hope I can muster that kind of hope. I hope.
Hersh had many compasses. On his desk, clipped to his many backpacks, in his locker at school, and ubiquitous compasses on his phone (which he referred to as “cheating” compasses). And now what I dream of is finding the compass that will offer me the road to another word similar to compass, a word that encompasses compass. I long for directions to compassion. For me, my family, my people, all people. Compassion from me and to me.
We have all been taught that history is written by the ones with the power to hold the pen. I have no power. Just love. I am holding and wielding love. I have learned that love is stronger than death. My love for Hersh continues blooming and is more intricate than when he was right here.
Love does not die. It grows. Not in a cliché way, but in a flooding and abundant way. If you have felt it, you know it. Grief is a badge of love. But it is pinned to our skin so it hurts when we inhale. Or exhale.
On this approaching Oct. 7, I think of the 11-month-old Hersh from 25 years ago, on September 11th, 2001, who had big brown eyes like cookies and a furry white polar bear he slept with. That Hersh, who is now buried in the ground, in a grave overlooking a forest, five miles from where I am writing this. That Hersh, who will always be 23 years old.
My Hersh.
I pray for all of us in sorrow that some day, somehow and someway, we become different.
Godspeed.