A year and eight months before the outbreak of the war, I became a bereaved mother. People who do not know and hear the status immediately ask: How old was the son? Where did you serve? How was he killed? In Israel, bereavement is national bereavement. If once it wasn't absolute, October 7 hit us like a tsunami and enveloped us all in national mourning and bereavement. An entire country became relatives and close friends of the murdered.
But my son, who died at the age of 22 and was not a soldier and did not die during his service, is no less a hero. For 22 years he dealt with complex special needs, was hospitalized many times, and a month after his 22nd birthday he was discharged and died.
Since he passed away, I have been debating whether I may say that I am a bereaved mother. Is my bereavement, a civil bereavement, which even the state does not see the need to support, legitimate? In the face of the Israeli experience that makes me and many other parents feel uncomfortable holding on to this name, there are other voices as well. Fewer voices, confirming the definition and feelings. By the time I began to feel comfortable with my new definition, the legitimacy I had given myself to say out loud, "I am a bereaved mother," was shattered.
October's experience of bereavement, which became a national experience, flooded me with private waves of bereavement. My own PTSD awakens and shakes, despite the fact that circumstances are as far east as west. Many mothers shared in front of me the piercing pain of loss and longing, and I understood them so much, and cried with them. Another mother, hugged by her husband and two children, said, "Now there are four of us," echoing the pain I carry over the reduction of my family unit (since then, my beloved mother also passed away six months ago, reducing the size even more).
The pumping around the stories of abducted children, and the stories of failures in the kibbutzim, caused many anxieties about the danger of harm to our children. And all this resonated and flooded me again with the anxieties weighing on the safety of my two remaining daughters, with an unbearable feeling that I would not stand it if, God forbid, something happened to one of them. Those who have been touched by bereavement another time forever have an existential fear that the new, fragile reality will be shattered again. And all we've been seeing and hearing for more than seven weeks is how the Angel of Death repeatedly knocked on the same door.
I still haven't found comfort. How will I come to comfort? Ever since everything we see and hear has been blowing heartbreaking farewells, my longing becomes my private stomach and leads me to say to the new bereaved families: I am with you. The civilian bereavement family also embraces you with understanding and identification. We will miss together
Many of my friends chose to attend funerals and visited seven of many families. Since my private bereavement, the cemetery and mourning homes have been a place where my grief is too mixed, too overwhelming. I still haven't found comfort. How will I come to comfort? Ever since everything we see and hear has been blowing heartbreaking farewells, my longing becomes my private stomach and leads me to say to the new bereaved families: I am with you. The civilian bereavement family also embraces you with understanding and identification. We will miss together.
I join the call of many that the sense of unity that has returned to the national pulse must be preserved. It is important that we continue to hug each other, regardless of the circumstances. Bereavement is bereavement, a bereaved mother is a bereaved mother. No one chooses to lose, and no one knows under what circumstances it might happen to them. The compassion that everyone feels for bereaved parents should continue even after the war, when the state and its citizens are tolerant of all bereaved parents, wherever they may be.
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