or bitter. I took Marianne with me every aernoon to visit her, every
afternoon of her year of mourning.
She seems to read my mind. “You know,” she says, “nothing in my
life was harder than losing my baby aer the war. at grief was so
terrible.” She pauses. We sit together in silence, in our shared and
separate pain. “I don’t think I ever thanked you,” she ĕnally says.
“When we buried my child, you told me two things that I’ve never
forgotten. You said, ‘Life will be good again.’ And you said, ‘If you can
survive this, you can survive anything.’ I’ve said those phrases to
myself over and over.” She reaches into her purse for photographs of
her children, two daughters born in Israel in the early 1950s. “I was
too afraid to try again right away. But life has a way of working out, I
guess. I grieved and grieved. And then I took all the love I had for my
baby, and I decided I wasn’t going to plant that love in my loss. I was
going to plant it in my marriage, and then in the children who lived.”
I hold her ĕngers in my hand. I hold the beautiful image of the
seed. e seed of my life and love has been forced into difficult soil,
but it has taken root and grown. I look at Béla across the table, I think
of our children, of the news Marianne has recently told me, that she
and her husband, Rob, are going to try to start a family. e next
generation. This is where my love for my parents will live.
“Next year in El Paso,” we promise as we part.
* * *At home, I wrote my dissertation and completed my ĕnal clinical
internship at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort
Bliss, Texas. I had been fortunate to secure both master’s- and
doctoral-level internships at William Beaumont. It was a competitive
and desirable placement, a prestigious post, where the best of the best
speakers and teachers cycled through. I didn’t realize that the true
beneĕt of the position would be that it would require me to look more