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Rochelle Mass
Non-Fiction
At the Edge  

       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. 




Writer Bio

Rochelle Mass is the author of two collections of poetry, (Ride the Wind Press) and Where’s My Home? (Premier Poet’s Series). Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, including London Magazine, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Jerusalem Review, The Tel Aviv Review, Taproot Literary Review, PoetryMagazine.com, The Adirandak Review, and Drunken Boat. In 2002, she was nominated by The Paumanok Review for the Pushcart Prize in fiction. She lives and works in Israel.

massr@israsrv.net.il
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