Dayenu: Picking up the Pieces

The cold, limp body of Barbara’s sixteen year old daughter, Rachel, greeted her in her laundry room the morning of March 9, 1998.  That day, the puzzle of her life shattered for the second time.

Barbara faced it before, when the bodies of her parents were strewn across Mount Fuji in Japan thirty two years earlier.  She was sixteen then, in the process of defining life.

Ten years later Barbara faces the third worst year of her life; a year in which the wandering hands of her father-in-law, family feuds, and her inability to comfort her daughter’s sorrow with infertility buffet her.  For a time, she believes her own faults cause the troubles that assault her and she seeks solace in self harm – an answer once sought by Rachel.  The self-mutilation shames her, but temporal arteritis, an autoimmune disease, thumps her to the floor of the wrestling mat that has become her life.

With friends, faith, an undiminished sense of curiosity, and gardening dirt entrenched under her finger nails, Barbara devised ways to create a new puzzle from the remaining pieces – a puzzle that left spaces for those she could no longer touch.  She came to understand life is sometimes an avalanche of pain and loss, but also yields boundless joy to be harvested and cherished. 

In this memoir, Barbara meets heartbreak, grubs for the buried treasure, and determines that which remains is “dayenu” (enough).

Chapter 1: Rachel

It began as a day like so many others, steeped in the ordinary and the mundane.
I will never understand why I did not know.  Why didn’t I wake in the night?  Why was there no premonition?
It is March 9, 1998 and, as a tax accountant, I am deeply imbedded in tax season.  My children all acquired the phrase “tax season” as part of their earliest vocabulary editions.  It means: “Mommie has less time to spend with you.” 
I regiment myself.  Up early, I work before the phone rings and there are any interruptions, work only two evenings a week, and try to take Saturday off but work Sunday.  We are, after all, Jewish.  This weekend, however, I worked Saturday, too.  I want some extra time off this week.  My daughter, Rachel, will be performing in the elite Minnesota Chorale.  I want extra time to bask in her achievement.  Normally an adults - only choir, Rachel, at 16, auditioned and was accepted.
Rachel usually readies for school quickly - she does not primp much.  She braces for morning with a jolt of coffee laced with sugar and cream and little else.  She can sleep in a bit yet. 
I do hear groans and thumps from Joel, our preteen, black haired, Korean son. He is up and about. 
My husband, Norman, is enthroned in the bathroom.  He routinely spends 15 minutes there each morning before he is fit company.  After that he will dress, wander downstairs and read the newspaper.
In the throes of tax season, laundry frequently jams the upper reaches of the laundry chute.  It is low priority.  But today, I want to move some wash to the dryer to be certain Joel and Rachel will have clean clothes for school.
As I gird myself to begin my day, my thoughts, as they often do, flicker to what our eldest, Hannah, may be doing today as she attends her second year of classes at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.   I reflexively love Hannah, as I know she does me, but, even though she is twenty, she remains in the throes of teenage rebellion.  She rejects me and my hopelessly outdated values at every given opportunity.
Attired in my long night-time t-shirt with uncombed hair, I sport morning breath.  I wear white socks to protect my feet from the shock of the unheated cold of the concrete laundry room floor.
I trudge downward, two stories from the bedroom level, past the kitchen and living room level of our home to the basement.  At the bottom of the stairs, if I turn left, I will be in my home office, once a garage, now converted to an office replete with a separate entrance.  Instead, I turn right to pass through a hallway, family room, and finally the unheated concrete bunker which is our laundry room. 
I could never be prepared for what I see.  In that basement laundry room, I discover my sixteen year old daughter, Rachel, hanging, quite dead.  Her body is not suspended.  Her body is leaning forward with a cheap white cotton drapery cord constricting the main arteries bringing blood to her brain.  The cord is knotted to a simple wooden door frame leading to a toilet.  Her tongue is swollen and blue, distended from her mouth.  Her face is also blue.  I am unable to make myself touch what must be her now cold body. 
I emit a primal scream of agony, ripped from the depths of my being.  I charge up one and a half of the two flights of stairs toward the bedroom level of our home.  I collapse before I reach the top of the second flight, and wait for Norman to respond.  In this moment, I neither know nor can make my mind wonder where Joel might be.
I am barely able to communicate to Norman: Rachel is dead, her body in the laundry room.  He is clad only his underwear: a white v-neck t-shirt and tightie whities.  His full head of dark brown hair is in morning disarray, his face lined with urgency and disbelief.  His footsteps pound down the flights of stairs.  And then he also screams.  All too soon, he returns and I hear him call 911.  To write this, even so many years later, wrenches. 
Eleven year old Joel materializes to the sound of my scream.  He is dressed, without need for any clothes I had intended to dry, now forgotten.  His brown, almond shaped eyes seek my face, a question.
“What is it?  He asks, his voice quiet and concerned, his face anxious.   He knows it will be awful, but he doesn’t know what, for in all of his existence I have never screamed like that.  My face has been buried - I struggle to respond.
“Have you been in the laundry room?”  I manage.  Even as I logically know he has no knowledge of the scene I have witnessed, I am now obsessed with the idea he may have been in the laundry room before me.  I recoil at the thought of Joel seeing her body.  I don’t want him to ever see anything like that, ever, so long as he lives.  Never.
“No” he says.  “I’ve been upstairs, dressing.  What is it?  What’s happened?”  He has caught my distress, and Norman’s distress.  To speak the words I must admit the truth.  I am forced to tell him.
“Rachel is dead.  Her body is hanging in the laundry room.  Are you sure you have not been in there, but didn’t want to tell me?”  I can’t seem to let that go.
He struggles to think of something to say and comes up short.  He hugs me and shakes his head.
“You will not be going to school today.”  I don’t think to ask him if he wants something to eat.  I will not eat for the next three days, not until after the funeral.  Even then, I have no desire to eat, but make an intellectual decision: I have a daughter and a son who inhabit this side of whatever divides me from Rachel.  After the funeral I will eat one egg.
“I don’t want to go to school.  I don’t know what to say to people.  I don’t want anyone to ask me about this.  I know they’ll want to help me, but I don’t want to talk about this yet.”  Joel says.  He sounds ashamed, but I don’t think he is.  I think he just doesn’t know how to relate to the pity of others.
“I will let your friends know you don’t want to talk about this yet,” I say.  “I am sure they will respect your feelings.”  I am surprised he doesn’t want to see anyone.  Joel has a zillion close friends and is rarely by himself.  Joel goes upstairs to his room.  I believe this is for the best.
Before the police arrive, I make a call to my brother, Jim.  Jim and his wife, Gretchen, live less than a mile from us.  I will wake them up to help us. 
The police respond to the 911 phone call.  I have no idea how long it takes them to arrive.  But they stay a long time, or so it seems.
“Norman, you have been talking to them.  Have they cut her down yet, what are they doing?”  I wonder.
“They need to make sure we did not murder her.  They are doing a forensic investigation.” is his response.
This is initially inconceivable and something of a shock, but I turn this thought, examine this piece of information.  My logical mind places this in perspective.  Yes, I understand they must.  I could never in a million years intentionally harm my daughter, but I suppose the authorities can’t assume that.  Ultimately, they do put her remains in a body bag and remove her to send her first to autopsy for further examination and following autopsy, to the funeral home.  I know this happens, but I do not watch.  I am disoriented, paralyzed.
We are interviewed by the police.  Two policeman sit with Norman and I in our formal dining room at the large Mediterranean style wooden table.  The table is littered with several days of newspapers and junk mail that I have not yet put in the trash.  I push the mess to one side.  Joel stays upstairs in his room.
A policeman questions “Tell us about your daughter, was she suicidal?”
I offer “She was on medication for depression.”
“Was there a note of any kind?”  one of the two policemen asks.  I have no recollection of what either one looked like.
“She wrote lyrics to songs that show her depression and obsession with death.”  I go to her music area and pull out a note book of lyrics Rachel has written.  I shove it at them. 
“This is not a suicide note.”  They both state.
“No.  It is not a suicide note.”  Norman concurs, his eyes widen as he cuts short any further discussion; he wonders why I even insert this - he finds my mention of this superfluous.
After some additional questions, their on-site paperwork complete, they prepare to leave.  As Rachel’s body, ensconced in a large plastic body bag, is wheeled out on a stretcher, Jim and Gretchen arrive.  Gretchen briefly entertains the thought of accompanying Rachel’s remains to the van and asking for a brief glimpse of what was once Rachel but shakes her head: no.
Joel, Norman and I are alone, Rachel’s absence acutely felt.  Norman and I sit on the staircase, side by side.
Jim and Gretchen walk the few steps through the front door and narrow formal entrance, past the Pepto Bismol pink dining room on the left and the off white living room on the right, to find us slumped and deflated like two punctured balloons on the formal staircase.  Together but alone.

We receive a phone call from a neighbor who has a son, Derek, just a little older than Joel, one of Joel’s good buddies.  I have known Michelle, Derek’s mother, casually for many years.  I know her to be a small woman with short blonde hair.  She and her husband have five children in all, the ages of their oldest three layer with the ages of our three.  Derek, the youngest of the boys is a close friend of Joel’s.
“I couldn’t help but notice police cars and an ambulance at your home.  May I ask what happened?”  Michelle asks.
“We found our daughter Rachel’s body this morning.  She is dead.”  I respond baldly.  If I say it enough times, maybe my numb mind can process this.
“Oh my God, how awful.” Her voice registers shock; I am sure she hardly knows what to say.  “You will let us know when the funeral will be, of course? Derek will want to see Joel.  Can we do anything?”  After the initial shock, her voice now fills with compassion.
“Please tell the other neighbors.  I know they will also be curious.  Joel isn’t ready to talk about this yet.  When you talk to Derek, make sure he and their friends know Joel doesn’t want to discuss this.  That may seem odd, but that’s how he feels about it right now.  Please have them wait for him to bring up the subject.”  We say our goodbyes.  I have many painful phone calls to make.

It is still early in the morning, Rachel would usually be on her way to pick up her friend, Jeannie, in our rusted old Fiat on her way to South High School.  I must call Jeannie’s mother, Silvia and let her know Rachel will not be coming.  I imagine Silvia break this news to the dark-haired, olive skinned, slender Jeanne.  I hope Silvia will know the best way; I do not. 
Soon after, we receive a call from another friend of Rachel’s, Laura.  Laura, fair haired with freckles, a pianist like Rachel and also a dancer.  “Is it true? It can’t be true.  Is Rachel dead?”  She is breathless, in shock. 
“Yes, it is true.”
We search for Rachel’s good friend Darla, who once lived with us - we love Darla, but cannot reach her.  She has a new boyfriend and avoids contact with nearly everyone, her mother included.

So many phone calls.  So many times to say the same painful thing - the thing I can’t accept.
“We must tell your parents” I say to Norman.  I have been making mental lists of everyone we have to notify.  It gives my mind a place to go.
“Yes, but I don’t want to tell them over the telephone.  It’s still early.  Dad won’t have gone to work yet.  I want to drive over there and tell them in person.”  Norman’s voice a tremulous whisper. His car salesman father will continue to work well into his eighties.  He works more evenings than mornings, so both his parents tend to sleep late.
Norman’s parents, Irving and Naomi, have a small ranch-style home in Bloomington just 8 miles South on 35W from our own.  Their home is unlocked; we simply open the door and walk in.  We do not ring the bell or knock.  The home smells strongly of the accumulated cigarette smoke of two heavy smokers. We find Norman’s parents each in their own side-by-side twin bed, newly roused from sleep by our footsteps.  Naomi is in her thin, flowered nightgown, dark stone gray hair mussed on the pillow, Irving is in his light-weight striped pajamas.  We apologize for our unannounced entry and our early morning arrival.  Both lined faces show their concern.  They know this early morning arrival presages something bad.
Without any preamble, Norman tells his parents that Rachel is dead, a catch in his voice. 
Naomi shakes her head, no, and her words echo her denial. “Are you sure?”
It seems an odd thing to say, but it is a common reaction; I will hear this many times.  There can be no doubt, how could there be?  Would Norman and I make some sort of poorly considered joke?  Of course not.  I come to understand the statement is only an expression of the shock people feel, an unwillingness to accept an untimely death.
Irving draws inward and says little. 
We see rabbi Offner in her small office at Shir Tikvah Synagogue to discuss arrangements for the funeral.  Shir Tikvah (translation: Song of Hope) is a small white synagogue with pretentious Greco-Roman pillars less than a mile from our home.  The female rabbi nods her head in sympathetic understanding, her naturally white hair bobs gently with the movement.  Rachel attends (attended?) a confirmation class there. 
Rabbi Offner’s voice is soft with compassion, she offers “I am so sorry I did not know Rachel was suffering from depression - if I had known, perhaps I could have helped.”  She in no way intends to make me feel guilty, but, sadly, that is a result.  I should have thought to make Rachel talk to the rabbi.  Maybe that would have helped.  An infinite number of “could have done, should have dones” pummel me.
My mind churns with other possible courses of action that might have made a difference, all too late.  I should have gotten Rachel a cat when our cat, Amanda, died.  I knew I didn’t want another cat, but I shouldn’t have been thinking about what I wanted.  A cat would have helped Rachel.  She could have had a small animal to take care of.  Surely that would have made her better. 
Unfathomable guilt drowns me.  If I weren’t a CPA working 60 hours a week I would have been focused on what would have helped.  If I could have forced my mind to accept the reality that my daughter was truly ill, I would have been able to find a solution.  I would have been able to make her feel loved and erased any self-doubt she had.  Her death would never have happened.  Rachel is lost forever, and everyone hurts because of me, because of my failure to face the problem and find a solution.
Hannah flies home from college in New York.  The death of her sister is unreal to her.  She needs to see the concrete evidence of Rachel’s body.  This will not be provided at the funeral.  Jews do not have open-casket funerals. 
I am sympathetic with her need.  My parents died in a plane crash out of country many years previous.  As a result, my sister, brother and I were never allowed to see their bodies.  Caskets came back, those we saw, but what did that mean?  For years, I engaged in fanciful day-dreams: Helen and Ralph were not really dead, but simply chose not to return.  You would think the return of my Mother’s wedding bands and engagement ring, on her body at the moment of death, would be enough to dispel any such day-dream.  Not so.  It is possible to cleave these realities and engage in whatever thoughts are the easiest to bear.
We arrange for Hannah to see Rachel’s body at the Hodroff-Epstein mortuary.  At the last minute I decide to see Rachel’s body also.  A mortuary staff person wheels the casket to a simple chapel designed to hold services.  The chapel holds rows of wooden pews and a raised area at the front with a lectern used for funeral services.  Rachel’s casket is rolled just in front of the raised apse area.  Rachel’s tongue has been stuck back in her mouth.  Her skin is now whitish-gray instead of blue.  Her body is clothed in the traditional, simple, white Jewish shroud.  Her head covering is a plain white muslin scarf arranged to fall to her shoulder from her head.  The long, cotton dress covers her arms but not her hands.  Her hands are tastefully arranged at her sides.  I am glad I have seen her body this way.  It is easier than remembering her blue corpse in the laundry room.
Other family arrives from out of town: my sister, Kathy, and her husband, Jerry – Norman’s sister, Faith, and her husband.  All of this seems distant from me, activities for which am not entirely present.  My world, usually so all-encompassing and inclusive has contracted to little more than the space occupied by my body.  Even Joel, Hannah and Norman seem part of a different world - one I cannot reach.
I take my sister aside because I must plumb her memories for details about Mom and Dad – their death.  The mathematics of all of this is confusing and I must organize it somehow if possible.  Reading and making sense of numbers is no different than learning to read words – perhaps this numbers type of reading is easier for some than it is for others.  But the organizing of numbers into a format that tells a story and interpreting the stories told by numbers has been my lifetime’s occupation. 
I know I was 16 when Mom and Dad died.  Rachel is sixteen when she dies.  Mom was 47 when she died, though, not the 48 that I am when Rachel dies.  I know too, that my Father, Ralph, was born a twin.  His twin sister, Tamar, was 16 when she died of cancer.  The math clearly indicates sixteen is an age and a number that now fills me with terror.
I know that Mom and Dad’s plane crashed on Mount Fuji, early March in 1966, the remains of my parents and all other passengers strewn across the slopes of the mountain, but I don’t know the exact day for I have blocked this intentionally.  Now it seems critically important; I want to know if Rachel died on the same day as Mom and Dad.  Kathy is the only one who will know.  I have put a great deal of the shock of my parents’ death in an emotional box “over there” and separated it from myself because I needed to function and it didn’t help me to open this box.  It is far worse than a sore tooth; I have learned it is best not to wiggle this with my tongue.  My parents have been gone for a long time, but now I need to open that box and match it up with Rachel’s death.  It isn’t very Jewish to block this off; Jews are supposed to remember and honor the death day for family. 
Our brother Jim remembers even less.  My sister and I agree that somehow, either by happenstance or similar design Jim has obliterated a good portion of his childhood memories.  Kathy has often wanted to talk about our parents with me, but, when I have tried, I have found myself overwhelmed.  Now I must know.
“Kathy, when did they die, Mom and Dad I mean?” I press her.
Kathy tests my resolve “Are you sure you want to know? You know how many times I have tried to talk to you, but you aren’t able to do that.”
“Yes, it could have been the same day Rachel died.  I have to know.”
“It was close, but not March 9th.  Mom and Dad’s plane went down on March 6th.” Kathy’s voice is husky with unshed tears; this discussion is a difficult task for Kathy, too.
I don’t know if this makes it better or worse; there is no noticeable click with addition of this numeric information. Why do I need to know?  I just did.

I remember the day of the funeral.  It is March; the weather transitioning to spring.  It is still cold, but not unbearably so.  The synagogue is packed with people attending the funeral.  Rachel has many friends, music teachers, all people who loved and cared about her, all mourning her loss.  Others, who didn’t know her well, hope to provide us succor. 
At the cemetery, the early spring ground crunches under my feet, my weight fractures the light layer of frost.  There is a small green canvas erected over the grave site that covers a few folding chairs next to the grave.  As immediate family, we use these folding chairs.  As is a tradition in a Jewish service, all mourners in turn shovel earth onto the casket.  A bit of dirt is raised using the wrong side, the convex side, of the shovel.  Covering the casket with earth is a necessary part of the Jewish interment ritual.  Using the wrong side of the shovel symbolizes it is hard to do this.  The mourners reluctantly accept the burial of the deceased. 
During this ritual, Norman’s Father, Irving, looks around, confused. 
“Where are we?  Why are we here?” He says loudly and begins to wander off.  Norman and Naomi stifle a flash of anger that he is unable to provide support to us and instead has entered a fugue state.  Irving has temporarily blocked acknowledgement of the grim reality we all face.  A life-time friend, Peter, takes Irving’s arm and guides him to a car.  
After the brief service at the grave site, I do not want to leave.  Norman watches as everyone else departs.  He has filled these few days between her death and the funeral following the traditions.  Traditions furnish the pattern to follow when our mind doesn’t work properly and we can’t figure out what to do.  He has talked to others and determined what will be served when we are sitting Shiva and for a luncheon after the funeral.  I have participated in none of that.
“Barbara, it is time to go.”  He coaxes, gently pulling my hand.
“I don’t want to go.”  I whisper.  If I leave the cemetery, one chapter, the Rachel chapter of my life, is closed.  I don’t want that chapter closed.  Her life is irrevocably torn from me.  He carefully but firmly pulls me away and packs me in the car.
At the receiving luncheon following the funeral, many people offer their sympathies.  I appreciate this, but find it difficult to respond.  These people are small and strangely distant.  There is a tight curtain surrounding me and separating me from taste, touch, smell, sound, and blessedly, from anguish.
I remember one woman approaches me to offer her sympathies - someone, I think, who works with Norman.  Her ex-husband is a CPA and she believes he can help me get through the final push of tax season, preparing returns, doing extensions, and so forth.  I know she wants only to be kind, but I can’t make myself say anything.  Finally I nod and say “thank you”.  She finds the silence deafening.  She fills it awkwardly “Actually, I don’t like tax accountants very much.  I don’t like the profession at all.  He worked too much, that is why we are divorced.”  It should be amusing if I could find anything funny.
Chris, Darla’s mother has unearthed Darla and they both attend the funeral and the reception.  Darla has struggled with her own demons - drugs, alcohol and depression.  In recent months Rachel and Darla have become less close, perhaps estranged.  I have worried for Darla and am able to rouse myself enough to be relieved she is here now.  I hold her close and remind her I love her.

It is hard.  I have made many mistakes and wish I could do this, just this one thing, please, please, please G-d[1], over.  Have another chance to do it right.  It is a big “thing” -- for it is the raising of my daughter.   I am still not certain what changes would be needed.  I would try a thousand things at once to achieve some other outcome.  Of course, that is not possible.  A small feeling of anger pursues me.  I think many others have made worse mistakes and not paid the price I have had to pay.  I know it is self-pity to think that.  But there it is.
For me, it is physical.  I wonder that others can’t see the gaping wound in my body that is Rachel torn from me.  I have always felt invisible silken strands tying me to all the living individuals I love and care about.  Sometimes these strands pull on me, the person to whom they are attached needing something from me, or simply sharing with me the joys and sorrows of our lives.  Sometimes I pull on them, needing, wanting something of them, yet these silken webs always join me with that other person, distance irrelevant to the pull of the silken strands.  The strength of a connection reflected with thicker, stronger strands, but the strands always supple, shiny and unutterably beautiful.  Now Rachel’s strand is yanked, hard, the silk lies limp, dangling, and the place where it connected to me is torn and bleeding, huge. It is impossible to believe no one can see it when they look at me.  How can no one see the physical hole in me?  How can this loss not be plainly visible?
For several months I am numb.  The numbness is similar to losing your breath when punched in the stomach.  All the air is forced out of me and I don’t know when it will return.  I lose 25 pounds; that part I don’t mind.  I get up each day and work.  I take care of Joel; I consciously spend somewhat more time each day with him.  I research his activities, more than before.  I task him to select a book we will wade through together, a bit each night.  Bizarrely he chooses “A Night to Remember” by Walter Lord.  This is a nonfiction book about the sinking of the Titanic.  This is hardly a joyful read, but he has the right to choose, so we slog through this.
I try to discuss Rachel’s death with him, but he is not ready to do this, at least not with me.

To use the past tense, to me, somehow negates her existence.  It is true, in this time frame, she is no longer alive.  But she did exist in another time frame, and she will always be there.  She is always with me: in my thoughts, in my soul, a presence that I stubbornly refuse to release even if I could. 
Sometimes I stand in her bedroom, I study her collection of small troll dolls cradling my favorite, a Jewish troll doll in a blue and white polyester dress, a star of David prominently displayed on the chest of the dress, the typical troll face topped by a shock of blue hair. 
A collection of china theatre masks hang on the silver walls of her room – the color she picked.  The emptiness is a vacuum and crushes me.  I think, if only I could travel in time, she would be there to hold, to touch. 
What is this fourth dimension that causes me untold consternation?  We move simultaneously so readily in three of the dimensions, those three are malleable to our will.  We make objects fatter, thinner, wider, taller, deeper with so much ease.  We throw the objects we made high in the sky and embed them in the earth.  We manipulate those objects, guide them carefully to different planets.  Yet time moves inexorably in its one and only direction, stubborn and inflexible, it resists any attempt to move within it.  It dominates, taking us whether we will it or not into the future as the present becomes the past.
Joel is eleven and then he is twelve.  A simple measurement of the passage of time.  When we become parents, isn’t that how we begin to measure time? 
It functions like this: “the trip to Washington, D.C. – no that wasn’t in the late eighties, think about it Norman, let’s see, that was the summer Rachel turned four and Hannah was seven.  Joel wasn’t born yet, just Rachel and Hannah.  Remember, Rachel’s hair was cut short, and it was ash blonde then, it darkened when she got older.  Remember how the short hair showed off her blue eyes – her hair was so straight and she hated when I curled it or tried to do anything with it.  So we cut her hair shorter and she liked that.  Hannah’s thick, chestnut colored hair, of course, was always long, just cut away from her grey eyes, bangs tapered toward her ears to join with the rich fullness of the luxurious long hair.  Hannah always let me braid her hair this way and that – sometimes pigtails, sometimes just one braid, sometimes many braids.  Oh, remember in Washington how they had a display at one of the Smithsonian museums on cockroaches and Hannah held out her hand and held that cockroach that filled her entire palm?  She tried to get Rachel to hold it, but Rachel was oh so Yech! No way.  So when did Hannah become terrified of insects anyway?...….Oh yes, focus.  Washington, D.C.  Well, Rachel was born in 1981 and she was turning four, so the trip was 1985.  There you have it.  Summer, 1985.”
As Joel grows older I measure the distance to Rachel alive by Joel’s age.  Inexorably, I am drawn farther and farther from the living Rachel and I can do absolutely nothing to alter the flow of time.  I see myself struggle against it.  I am a large, fat carp yanked from the water and thrown unceremoniously on the sand.  The hook that dragged me is torn from my mouth, but the wound remains.  I struggle to breathe, my mouth opens and closes to take in water to rush past my gills, but my excellent gills won’t help me breathe, they were created to take oxygen from water, not from air.  I can deal with the rough sand on my mucous covered scales and the insult the hook as made in my mouth, but to breathe here in this noxious air I must grow lungs.  How can I do that?  I want to swim in the water of the past and breathe in the green water that contained an alive Rachel.  I want the cool water over my scales, not this rough sand.  I don’t want to live on this land where there is no living Rachel, only the memories of Rachel.
The water is just over there so cool and refreshing and full of Rachel living but I can’t get there.  I struggle, gasping, but my struggle changes nothing.  And every tick on the clock takes me farther and farther from the cool water of the past.

What is Rachel?  Who is Rachel?
Rachel, to my Mother’s eye, is beautiful, but I will let Rachel describe herself from a diary entry:
….Which brings me (Rachel) to the subject of this episode of “diary theater” What’s it about me that turns guys off? I mean, it’s more than a little hurtful to my ego to think that no guy in his right mind would ask me out LET ALONE go with me.  Of all people you should know that I am not bragging, but looking at it from an objective viewpoint, I have a nice body, the legs are great, the chest is pretty good, and the waist, well, it is acceptable.  Let’s just say, a bikini does NOT make me look like the Goodyear blimp.  And my hair (when in a good mood) is fairly attractive and my features are pretty good, highly accented and attractive, especially when slightly sunburned.
My personality, well, it’s kind of weird, and I have a bad temper (in short, I get very  angry, very quickly,) but that aside, I think I’m a diplomatic type, good at resolving arguments that aren’t mine, with a sharp wit and a knack for making people laugh.  When I’m not depressed…..

I will add these things to her own description: her hair, light brown, or rather, her hair is light brown when it is in its natural state.  We go through blue, green, bleached platinum and red as the mood pleases her.  She has self-pierced her belly button, and her ears are pierced for earrings, but most of her remains unskewered, by parental demand.
She is intelligent, excels in all classes except gym.  This is measured in intelligence tests so it is not just motherly pride.
An athlete she is not.  On the soccer field she is more inclined to lie on the ground and do bicycles than chase the ball, although she can be wickedly brave in the goal. The ball blasts toward the goal to be interrupted in its flight by her face and no complaints. She endures judo when I enlist us all with wistful thoughts of a wholesome family activity, and embraces scuba diving with Norman.  For the most part, she avoids sports.
She delights in all things musical, her passion.  Her fingers ply the keys on the piano and her voice serenades all with opera.  She auditions and is accepted for the Minnesota Chorale, a professional choir composed mostly of adults.  She envisions a future as a professional singer and composes music. 
Rachel relishes writing.  When she is in first grade, just barely 6, the teacher assigned all the students to write a short piece on being old.  This is what she wrote:

Being old.  I am saggy baggy.  I look ugly.  I am an old gray geezer.
When I’m older I’ll get smarter than I do now.  No one will take care of me.  I’ll have my own money.  I’ll have new friends and I’ll travel to Disney World.  I’ll do whatever I want.  I won’t have to do essays any more.
Maybe I won’t have my own teeth.  My Dad might die.  I might be in a nursing home in bed all the time.  I’ll forget too much stuff.  I’ll shrink, I think.
But my eyes will still be blue.  My brain will still be the same.  And I still will be loving.

True, it isn’t great by an adult’s standards, but she is six.  Not bad.  It is published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune along with other child submissions of merit.  In bitter irony I note she never became saggy baggy.
Important to me, Rachel is named for my father who died, along with my mother, in that plane crash on March 6, 1966.  Jews often have Hebrew as well as English names, and often name their children after someone, usually a deceased family member they want to remember, to carry into the next generation.  Rachel is a name Norman and I liked and agreed to beginning with the letter “R”.  My father was born Raphael and so Rachel’s Hebrew name is Raphaela Jacoba for my father and Norman’s Grandfather, Jacob.
The name is what we chose.   As Rachel grows up, she begins calling herself “Rae”, I notice this and remember my mother’s middle name was “Rae”.  In her brighter moments Rachel says, “Here is Rainbow Rae come to brighten your day.”  I think maybe she is named simultaneously for both my mother and my father, carrying this small piece of them into the future.  I don’t see much of either of them in her appearance; Rachel is a mixture of Norman and I, but uniquely Rachel.  She is no throwback to grandparents that I can see.

When she is little, Rachel is constant movement.  When she is thinking about things, she ambles on a large, Mediterranean style, wooden coffee table in our living room. 
One day, she obsesses on the death of my Grandmother, Margaret.  Grandma Margaret was 93 when she died.  She lived in an assisted living facility for a couple of years before her death.  On my weekly visits, I would bring her candy, my two daughters in tow.  The candy Grandma Margaret would put in a candy dish in her room and my young daughters achieved a weekly sugar high as we chatted.
Then, Grandma Margaret was hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia.  When Grandma was lucid and we thought she would return to the nursing home, I brought Rachel and Hannah.  But Grandma Margaret did not recover, nor, truthfully, though I loved her dearly and still do, did I wish her to recover.  Her mind and her body were both failing simultaneously.  She had more difficulty with any movement and could not even recognize her daughter, Phyllis.  Had she survived, she would not have been allowed to return to assisted living.  She would have needed a much higher level of care.
It was, as we often say, “her time”.  We had a modest funeral; most of her friends had passed sometime before.  Those who attended were solely family; there was no viewing of the body.  At some point, Rachel must have overheard conversations I had with my Aunt Phyllis and my Uncle Ray concerning the cremation of grandma’s body.
Rachel traverses the edge of that heavy, low blocky Mediterranean style wooden coffee table in our living room, deep in her three year old thoughts.  I sit on our frayed floral patterned sofa and study her; I wait for her to voice those thoughts.  Presently, she expresses “I don’t want to be burned.”  An amazing concern from a child just three years old.  It meant she could understand if other people died, she could also.
I pull her off the table onto my lap, rocking her, kissing the top of her head.  “My little Raela, it will be such a long time before any such decision will be made for your body.  And I will not be the one to make it.  I will die a long time before you.  I would prefer my body be cremated, burned if you like, but that is my body, no longer me.  If it bothers you, do whatever you like, you can bury me if you like.  It will be your decision to make, not mine, because what is really me will be somewhere else, not in my body at all.  Someday, an incredibly long time from now when you are old like Grandma Margaret was, your own children will decide what will happen with your body.  I am sure they will do whatever you tell them you would like.”  I had no idea how much of this she could possibly understand.  Perhaps she could only understand being held, kissed and comforted.  She seemed content again and went off to play.
Painful, bitter, irony.

I will let Rachel describe Rachel’s inner feelings.  This abbreviated entry shows the typical teenaged side of Rachel.

A partial diary entry from January, 1994:
7th grade started a few months ago! I got contacts for Hannukah and may be on the verge of getting a new friend, Leon.  I’m going over to her house on Friday.  I have been really depressed lately, I don’t know why.  I guess maybe because I’m 12.  I’m kind of nerdy, but I’ve gotten prettier, and hope maybe that boys will be more interested in me now.  I found out from Leon on the phone today that Ryan H. likes me.  I don’t even know who the hell he IS? Anyway, I’m excited SOMEONE is interested in me. 
The boy I’m interested in, though, is Nick V.  He sits next to me in geography, and he is just finelicious.  I know he is a total asshole, but a girl can dream, can’t she?  Besides, I know I act like a total butt whenever he tries to talk to me (which he’s done twice). I just get really nervous. 
Typical conversation:
Nick: I saw you yesterday, at home.
Rachel: So? What were you doing?
Nick: I was at Grant’s house.
Rachel: That’s Jay’s older brother, right?
Nick” Yeah. Do you think Jay is a jerk?
R: yeah.
N: so do I.
But I am, like, totally, hopelessly in love with him!  How can I talk to him without freezing? Oh, Well…..

The richness of her writing the next day shows how deeply Rachel feels things.  In this passage, Rachel wrote about Talmud Torah (her after school Jewish religious education) and the bus taking her to Talmud Torah:

I will have to go to Talmud Torah in an hour.  I am both apprehensive and dreading the moment when that yellow mouth comes to take me inside, to the throat where I will be swallowed whole and not let out again……  Now I am sitting on the toilet in which I dropped your key yesterday.  I had to reach in to get it. Yuck!
I wish I could talk to people like Hannah can.  Hannah is open and happy and sparkles, people like to talk to her.
I am defensive and secluded and silent.  I’m gonna have to brace myself and put on a mask if I’m ever gonna go with someone…..
To show you how good I am at writing, let me leave you with an on the spot poem:

Helpless, falling
Cravings fading
Eyes will close as minds do sleep.
Forever.
And only your eyes do not weep.

This entry is from June 4, 1994, when Rachel is turning 13.
For purposes of context, this follows an episode when Rachel and her sleepover friend invaded the liquor cabinet in the middle of the night, got quite drunk, Laura vomited, got hysterical, parents were called, and so on.  This shows the problem with guilt she inherited from me:

Well it’s June.  It’s about midnight now.  I’m crying.  I’m still overcome with guilt about the liquor incident.  I still cry myself to sleep at night thinking about it.  I close my eyes and see phantoms of her vomiting under the bed, screaming in pain, and she won’t leave me alone! I can’t get away.  I try to rationalize it, everyone does this sort of thing at least once.  Why should I be an exception?  But I still can’t stop.  I keep thinking I should be different.  I shattered my parents’ illusions of me.  And the fact they aren’t mad at me makes it worse.  At least Laura had a hangover.  At least she can feel she was punished harshly enough.  I can’t even feel that.  I want to die or be hurt or something, something to make me feel like I’ve done penance for the sin.  But I have the feeling that no matter how much I suffer it will never be enough for the pain I caused her.  Will the torment never end? I can’t sleep this night.  She won’t go away.  The image of her frazzled half-naked self haunts me, won’t leave goddamn it won’t LEAVE!!! She just stays looking pitiful and won’t leave me alone…. When will it fade?  I don’t want this.  I want it all to be fine and it can’t because I screwed it up.  I doubt I can ever drink a sip of alcohol again.
Signed (but perhaps soon to be dead due to suicide)

                                           Rachel Steinberg

And a passage to make me feel really awful:

…..Adults are so prejudiced against kids.  Think about it.  Adults think kids are messy, small annoying creatures who must be put up with.  That we are carefree and have no problems.  Look at this pretty pickle.  Many adults have no clue as to what kind of stress we are under (and believe me, it is considerable) and they call us pigs.  I’ve heard you, you mean, ugly creatures.  You run the world, and we are your slaves.  You think you understand us. HA! If I was in charge of the world, you bet I’d handle it better.  Take a good look around.  Which one of us is the pig? …….We have dreams and worries you can’t even imagine!  Future me, don’t be like the rest.

I never called her a pig, ever! I swear.  But now that I think -- I may have called her room a pig-sty.  Yes, I could have, in a fit of pique, done that.  She was responsible for cleaning her own room.  And, truly, there were times that the room was not hygienically habitable.  Half-filled pop cans, large previously sucked jaw-breakers, burned incense sticks and mounds of returned homework papers littered the tops of any flat surface.  The nicely folded clean laundry that was supposed to be put in her drawers would be thrown onto the floor of her room with the discarded dirty clothing.  I was trained in the parenting language of today: you don’t tell the child she is bad, you tell her she did a bad thing, and stress that the child should do better next time.  I would always be careful in my language that way, but do children, honestly, hear that slim difference?  Could she hear the room is a pig sty and she must clean it, or did she hear me call her a pig?

My sweetest memories will always be her musical evenings with her good friends, Laura and Jeannie.  Laura also plays piano, but her preference is ballet. Laura has the slender frame and the troubled feet of a ballet dancer.  Laura, with her fair freckled skin and light reddish brown hair, wants to be a professional dancer, but her hips and knee joints, already, at her young age, suffer damage. 
Jeannie, dark hair, perhaps a bit longer than shoulder length and light olive skin, is a gifted cellist.  She plays cello in the Minneapolis Youth Symphony.  She is required to have some vocal training as well but has a vocal range of possibly one octave.
Rachel and Laura alternate at the piano while they all sing.  Rachel’s nimble fingers glide smoothly over the keys, quickly translating some new piece of music.  Sometimes Jeannie plays her cello.  The music is wide ranging, some opera, some Broadway, the Beatles, folk, rock, whatever suits their fancy at the time.  Like a voyeur, I drink in the magic of their creations.
Darla and Kristin are close friends, too.  But they don’t do the musical evenings. As Rachel turns sixteen, Darla has found a boyfriend and spends less time with Rachel, but I still hear Rachel chatter on the telephone to Darla.
We all tell her how proud we are, how much we appreciate all she is, but she does not believe this.  She, like her father, suffers from depression and anxiety.  To make matters worse, she gets a pervading sense of guilt from me.  This is a toxic combination.
When she is grounded or punished for misbehavior, she welcomes the punishment.  She believes she deserves severe punishment for even the smallest infraction, even as I question myself, was I too harsh?  This entry reflects the truly absurd level of underlying guilt she carried, as well as her well-developed sense of sarcasm:

Well this summer has been a treasure trove of fun and excitement.  Everything has just been perfect.  First Mom totals the car, which, I suppose could be my fault because she was coming back from dropping me off somewhere.  Guilt!  Then Hannah gets in an accident-car again, taxi.  Gets sued.  It’s alright though.  So was Mom’s.  I get in a bike accident and scrape off the skin between my ankle and my knee and I slice open my finger and get stitches, but that’s okay, cause I deserve it, of course.  Joel bikes into a tree.  …….  Kinda like God is punishing me for having my bat mitzvah and being happy.  I’m still crying.  If God wanted me unhappy, he succeeded.  Something interesting happened.  Mom offered to let me see a shrink.  Strange but true.  I might agree.  Might not.

Rachel starts to cut herself, large intricate curved designs on her arms and legs, quite artistic really, at age 15.  I am not sure to this day of the best way to deal with this, although I wish for another try.  I haul her to a psychiatrist and she reluctantly begins anti-depressive medication.  Norman and I are unaware she stops taking her medication.
I found it difficult to face Rachel’s depression.  A part of me believed her psychological problems must be a result of my own poor parenting.  I wanted to find a simple solution where there was none. 
I found my own mind wanted to run away from it and put it someplace far away.  It was like looking at a slimy dead animal filled with maggots in the alley.  I just didn’t want to believe it could be true. A good part of me pretended it wasn’t there.  It didn’t go away.  There are consequences.
Norman and I rarely talk about any of this.  It seems that to share our feelings hurts more than helps.  To watch my pain makes it harder, not easier, for him, as watching his pain makes it harder, not easier, for me.  We search for comfort in others rather than each other.
“Do you blame me?” I often ask.
“No,” he always answers; his arms envelope me, they provide what comfort they can.
But my emotions tell me I am to blame.  I will never blame her friends or Norman or anyone else.  I am The Mother.  My brother says I am simply not that all-powerful.  Jim tells me I exaggerate my ability to guide or control what is; my intellect tells me that is a rational thought and perhaps true.  Emotions are not rational thought, they will not be ignored nor will they be thrust aside.  Rational thought walking on a quiet beach will be overwhelmed in a moment as a fierce wave of emotion pummels my being and carries me where it will.  I will be adrift and unable to find my footing.
When the numbness fades, the pain of loss becomes searing.  The agony is a part of every breath I take, every movement of my body.  It fills my dreams and invades my waking thoughts.
There is a hearing condition called tinnitus; those who have the condition have a ringing in their ears that never stops.  I have that condition.  The ringing noise is there every moment, without end.  The knowledge of my guilt is like that but so much stronger.  At times the raucous noise is so loud I am unable to do anything whatever except hold myself and rock back and forth.  At other times it is a mere whisper that can be pushed to the back so I am able to function, but it is never more than a breath away.  As the years pass, the cacophony ebbs.  Warm memories can be summoned without the intrusion of painful memories.
Of course, it is not just me who has suffered.  Such things never are one person.  All the people they touched lose.  Our image of the future violently twisted, we struggle to refocus on what now is.  Hannah, Joel, Norman, Kathy, Jim, Gretchen, Jerry, Grandma and Grandpa Steinberg, Norman’s sisters Faith and Susan, all Rachel’s friends, on and on, we all lost Rachel, the absence different for each.
Two days after Rachel’s death, Gretchen incautiously removes boiling oatmeal from the microwave.  Her hand is covered with hot cereal and third degree (full skin thickness) damage charred into much of her left hand.  I am certain this incaution is a result of Gretchen’s own grieving process.  Gretchen bears scars of that time to this day.

Hannah wrote this:

We hurt differently, we the family, we the close bereaved….
My Mother hurts from the womb, since that is the place where mothers feel their children, primitive, nurturing, deep, red.  My father holds us, and so he hurts from his hands, which have never before been useless, and his empty, empty arms.  My brother hurts from his legs, which are childhood, simple and healthy, and should never feel the pain.  My grandparents hurt from their hearts, because grandchildren are the solace and the reason and the joy.
And I hurt from my senses, but mostly from my eyes, because we held our eyes in common.  Rachel was one eye and I was the other.  Now one of my eyes looks only into darkness, dead with my sister, my sweet one, my other half, and I see everything badly and bitterly and blurred.  Everything is dark and dead and filled with the Rachel-echoes in half of my vision and the other half cries out at the unfairness of the burden.

Time treads on, whether I want it to or not.  The rest of this book focuses on another year, nine years later. 
Nine-and-a-half years later, Joel was twenty one and then twenty two – my Mother’s measure of time. I can control the words on this page, but I cannot control time.  So I will complete the metaphors I have used and say these things. 
The wound from that torn silken strand that led to the living Rachel has healed, but it is not pink or new pretty skin, not easily molded, nor soft to the touch.  It is tough: an ugly scar.  But I think the strand is still there, now reaches, still touches her in some way, I know not how – another dimension? 
The large carp that I was has grown lungs.  The round, gaping mouthed, struggling fish has even grown legs, arms and hands all added to or replaced the lovely fins.  I adapted.  In many ways I am wiser, stronger because I intimately understand loss.  For the most part, I am able to function. 
But if I could move in that fourth dimension, I would throw myself in that cool green water and hold our Rachel again.  I would tell her how deeply I love her and how endlessly I have missed her.  I would ask her to forgive me, as I have asked of the empty air so very many times.
And maybe if I swim deeply enough in that water, my mother and father would fold me in their arms one more time and I would be comforted.

To understand any character in this book, you have to know about Rachel.  Think of it this way: all that we know and experience is an ocean: huge, daunting and at the same time exciting, full of life and death.  We bob in it, pushed this way and that.  Rachel’s existence dances, a wave in that ocean, her existence touches and moves each person who knew her.  She affects, in different ways for each, what he or she is and what he or she chooses to do.
Healing does not happen in a week or a month or even a year.  I write about the healing of myself and my blended family, but in order to do that, I have to jump nine years in time and we will wade through the muck of the third worst year of my life.
What follows is the story of one year in the life of a family, not a calendar year, but from June of 2007 through early June of 2008.  As families we ramble like a herd of hamsters; we meander simultaneously in divergent and similar directions toward our goals. I write of this year, but it includes the shared tribulations and joys of those I hold most dear.
Rachel is not alive in 2007 and 2008.  The rest of this story has the shadow of Rachel through the rest of us, but not Rachel herself.  Make no mistake -- she was there and she is here today, with us, always.
I write of a year in which we struggled, suffered, grew, changed, and were blessed, each in abundance.  Some years just have more drama than others.

So the change doesn’t jar you too much, I will tell you now the next chapter starts with a wedding; the chapter that follows is far removed in time, tone and topic from this chapter.

Rachel dressed up for Spring

Rachel (second from the left) dressed up for Halloween with close friends

Rachel strikes a pose