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The night before, I dream that I don’t get to the hospital in time. I’m disgusted with myself.
The scenes replay until I get the point: my husband is having urgent cardiac surgery today and I have
to be there. I frantically pull off my sleep shirt and pack some things.
I realize I’ve never been so aware of the space around my husband as I sit amongst families--both
Arabs and Jews--who bring baskets, bottles, thermoses, filling the ward with heavy smells. They make
the place feel restless, bring in wind and rain. Their concern shuffles mine.
Two explosions in Um el Fachem the day the ambulance takes us from Afula, three hours to Jerusalem,
then a day later another bombing on King George Street in the city center. It’s between seasons now,
could have been the start of spring, but the fighting has blocked that sense of release spring usually
brings. I can’t imagine coming out of this; the war and the hospital have become the same zone. I am
in a struggle I can’t unravel.
I have come with a beginner’s mind, not wanting to let go of what I don’t know, of what I’ve
never known before. I don’t want to see my husband carried into the center of the ambulance, and wish
we could turn it all back-- not let the stretcher get pulled into the hospital where strangers block
elevators and empty beds wheel past.
There’s no answer as to how this began. I have to learn new terms; I’ve lost something, I know,
as I place a shaky hand on my husband's leg. Floor 5: a Monet, familiar wild poppies like those feathering
the slopes of the Gilboa Mountains behind my house, hang to the left of the elevators.
During the operation, I find a bench in a garden and try to disregard anything but the hills
of Jerusalem. They ask nothing of me, just wait as I do. I try to get to lofty thoughts, but mostly
mumble bits of prayer. My voice is small. I'm scared, but strangely patient. I walk up and down the
same path.
When the surgeon tells me that the operation has succeeded, I look for a wall and press myself
into it. I listen to him but only hear that it is over, everything is fine. Now, recovery is crawling
into new life, leaving behind the old, a self-digesting birth, to the pace of explosions from Jenin,
twelve kilometers down the road. Two army bases with tanks and a helicopter pad occupy our village while
the space around my husband fills with compassion. He’s a bypass veteran now.
In a month, people promise me, I won’t be able to gather these details, place them into a plot,
but I’m sure I’ll never forget that, for a moment, we stood at the edge of the grave, and knew how bare
that ground was.
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