Everything We Cherish May Burn

 Everything we cherish may burn: love, cancer, and the Notre Dame

Almost four years ago, if you told me I would be watching the Notre Dame burn on live TV from a hospital room, I would have perhaps felt a shiver of trepidation, but laughed. Even 26 days ago, I’d shrug it off. The Notre Dame is unmovable, impermeable, the survivor of crusades, two world wars, and the sands of time. My life is busy, often stressful, but blessed beyond all belief. My husband is healthy, unbreakable, so full of life he overflows with contagious enthusiasm and touches everyone in his spheres.

 I’d pull up this picture; I’ve just turned forty, and Matt and I are on the trip of a lifetime, kicking it off in Paris. Getting up with the sunrise over the Sacre Coeur, and reveling in the sunset splashed on the fortress of the Notre Dame. Living a bliss suspended in time, the kind so rare and breathy and beautiful that you take the picture thinking, “this, this moment, this perfect, beautiful moment.” Our hearts so full and expansive we feel it echo through our cells for the lifetime to come. And we both laugh, because I feel French and beautiful and light and classic, and my husband, he of the holey Costco t-shirts and perpetually torn Carhartts, is wearing—what’s this?—a button down shirt under a v-neck sweater. We will walk to a cobblestone framed café and not care that we are eating crème brulee for dinner, and drink champagne, because we are alive and in love and basking in Paris. The last rays of the sun will dip behind the Notre Dame’s towers, and late that night, we will laugh at the beautiful and almost comic absurdity of that picture, and then stare in silent reverie, because that moment in time—it is ours. Forever.

It’s been less than four years. I finally click off the TV and the footage, over and over, of that iconic spire plummeting towards the flaming wreckage of a bastion of history. I sit here, thankful for the lit keyboard in the darkness, kept company by the rhythmic schew-schew-schew of my husband’s feeding tube, giving him an excruciatingly specialized cocktail of calories that will allow nutrition to flow through his veins without blowing his thoracic lymph duct wide open and creating an urgent rush to surgery. I listen to his breathing, sometimes ragged, sometimes with a gurgle, but constant, comforting in the jagged edges that seem almost defiant against the quiet whir of suction and the rhythmic prayer of the pump. More than anything, every time he chokes a little on the saliva that he can not yet swallow, I hold my breath and pray that the wave of nausea will not hit, that I will not be rushing to grab the emesis bag and get him upright enough for the heaving discharge of the calories he has fought so hard for, 250 CC’s at a time.

This is a dance we have been performing for days—too many days now, no matter how short the time—and I am ready to stop spinning. I am ready for the room to stop spinning for him, for the drugs to leave his body, the tube protruding from his nose to be removed, ready for the simple, small, and somehow most important sip he will ever take in his life, the first time he can swallow a cool sip of water. I am ready for a sleep that lasts more than 45 minutes, that’s not haunted by the worry of my husband choking on his own blood from a ruptured surgical site, or the sudden overhead light of this blood draw, or that vital sign check. And mostly, even though I know we’re just starting this journey with a giant surgical step, I’m ready to say goodbye forever to cancer.

This is the thing I cannot have. Like the spire that has crumbled in the abyss of the nave, we now carry this scar forever. We fight fearlessly knowing that the pinnacle of what was before is gone, and the damage at the site will remain. We fight for what still stands, and for what we will build in the future. This is not said in defeat, but rather in defiance. We two have stood in awe of the scar of the glacier that crumbled, revealing the perfection of the ice wall beneath. We have seen the landslide, after it rakes and scours the hillside, bloom with the impossible heaping troves of foxglove, fireweed, arnica and phlox, each tenuous new root claiming a spot in the cycle of rebirth.

The details have been said, and I am tired of reliving the impossible. A swollen gland on his neck in the space of 5 hours becomes Stage III throat cancer with metastasis to the lymph system. He goes back to finish his last shift for a while despite the diagnosis, and I carry this terrible secret through a night with the children. We do not tell them until we know more, until we have the plan and the roadmap that we feign comfort in, knowing we will redraw it at every turn.

Between the two of us, we have nearly 45 years in the fire service, and at night, I wrestle with this. I love my job, my service, and in hot angry tears, all of a sudden I hate it, because it threatens to take that which I love more than anything. I waited 35 years for you, and 9 is not enough. He pleads with me—don’t hate the job, because the job is what I am. I know this, because this is in my blood, too. But which fire was it that woke the angry cells in his body? Did he decon enough? What about the diesel fumes that bathe our gear, our skin? That picture of him on a conflagration, white teeth flashing brilliantly on the biggest of smiles, his face slightly sooty and sweaty from a job well done- could it be that one? Will the job he loves more than anyone I’ve ever met take him from me? Do I have those same cells threatening a deadly unfurling in my own body, waiting to smother from the inside? All these questions, they tear and cloy for the few short weeks leading to surgery.

Our insurance will tell us that they no longer cover this; it’s an on-the-job injury. We are told by a labor attorney that our worker’s comp likely will not cover this either, and we find out despite throat cancer being presumptive, only one—ONE—case has been covered without question. We will gasp and rage and wrack our every last nerve reading that so many of these cancers, supposedly presumptive, go uncovered.

 We will be floored when the surgeon gives a preliminary figure of $130,000 if all goes as planned. Our labor attorney tells us not to worry, it will be covered one way or another, but I still check the balance of the mortgage and the current valuation of our home. We are now in the hospital 2 more days than planned, and there’s no telling when we will go home. That figure has grown like the cancer cells that threatened to occlude my husband’s airway. We have wrapped our minds around surgery, radiation, possible chemo; no one could adequately warn us of the side effects of bureaucracy.

The day of the surgery will come, and I will unsuccessfully try to hide the tears threatening to spill as they wheel the love of my life away. In a moment of unwitting comedy, shortly after they push the first medication and wheel him down the hallway, he will see a flashing light above the door, exclaim, “firetruck!” and start making siren noises. This is the last thing I will see and hear of my beloved for 7 hours. A robot, a brilliant young surgeon, several surgical residents, and a team of literally a dozen or more people will take up the mantle of this fight for him.

The days that follow are a blur, leading to this moment by computer glare in the dark. There have been setbacks, and my heart cracks a little deeper seeing the perpetually joyous face of my warrior husband absorb the updates and realize that everything from here will be different. Not necessarily worse, but… different. There will be news of a surgical complication, a rare potential that he has unfortunately encountered. The morning his drain runs milky we will silently sit in fear, and I will lie about what I have read, about morbidity and immunosuppression. He will know I am lying, and squeeze my hand and smile, regardless. We’ve got this, he’ll say, before the pain becomes stifling.

Fevers will come and go, and I will learn how to override the nurse’s monitored regimen to check his temperature, just to reassure myself. When the wave of ever present nausea crests to the first terrifying vomiting, I will hold my breath the entire time, until I see it’s just formula, and no blood. A surgeon will tell us that the back of his airway looks “like someone took a blowtorch to it.” I will be haunted by the eschar I have witnessed on the bodies of the dead in fires, and yet, I will continually think of it, praying for it to hold with every retching. I will hold the nurses in near biblical esteem, for they hold the key to his comfort and the ear of the doctors. I will have to accept that I am utterly and completely not in control.

It’s late, the air is dry, and my eyes burn with the effort of trying to see in only the glow of the computer screen and the blinking lights of the monitors and pumps. I look down at my phone to check for messages from the kids, and see this “All is Not Lost: Firefighters Able to Save Notre Dame’s Main Bell Towers.” I dig in my phone for this photo, taken the prior to the sunset on that day nearly four years ago:

Here’s the thing. This fortress, this bastion of history, she is forever changed today. This is what remains, and it will be smoke-stained, smoldering, and scarred. For weeks firefighters will be monitoring her, watching for hot spots to smolder and flare, and for months, perhaps years, investigators, architects, and planners will pour over her every inch. Her spire has fallen, crashing into the abyss, and taking with it some sense of innocence. People around the world will mourn in pictures, songs, and prayers for what has been lost-- the same sense of  safety and surety before planes flew into towers, and the same perfection of moments you find yourself taking for granted before you hear the words, “I’m sorry, this is cancer.”

I look on my phone for news, willing the words I know are there: “President Macron: We Will Rebuild.” Of course. The bell towers hold strong, fierce in their defiance of destruction, and determined to ring into history. At least, this is the story we give them, because it is all our story.

My husband breathes rhythmically, the whirring of the pump a gentle reminder. Sustenance. Tenacity. Resolve. I take his hand in mine, even as he sleeps, and feel the gentle squeeze in return.

Where will you be?

To begin: You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going. In many ways, I have walked my life in a gauzy haze of undefined history, a scattered and broken family tree that blew away like tumbleweeds. It is only recently (after a stilted attempt years ago with my beloved Nana, her mind already starting to fold into the dementia that would be her death) that I have managed to make the connections and reach out to the few distant relatives that I have heard of to put the pieces together. My mom's side of the family is for another blog post, an exploration of outcasts on the Isle of Man, and horse thieves of unknown origin in the early settlements. Of my father's side, I knew just a few things: there weren't many of us left, and we were Jewish. Jewish wasn't so much an identity for me, as a reason for having dual holidays in December (my Jewish father married my Episcopalian mother), as well as something I occasionally got teased for growing up in a rural, white, Christian upstate New York community. My big Jewish nose. My frizzy Jewish hair. My ample Jewish backside. "Jewish" became something that I subtly learned to hide, and certainly not a cultural identity. 

Enter Friday night. I am in the D.C. area for two weeks on the FEMA campus, learning the balancing act of being an emergency manager, contemplating a career direction I never expected and yet find deeply satisfying. On Friday night, I had a chance to leave campus and meet up with my father's cousin, a man who had friended me on Facebook last year in an attempt to put his own pieces of the puzzle together.  Suffice it to say, that from the minute I sat down across from a man who channeled the image of my grandfather (who passed away when I was 14), I was handed the thread to start weaving the story together. Along with his wonderful partner Marcie, over sushi we pored through pictures of relatives, the women strong-boned and powerful and eyes deeply set, women who looked like me. Great aunts, great-great grandmothers, distant cousins, a small but distinct tribe. Words I had never heard like "Sephardic", "Shtetl"; place names like "Janow"... all pieces of a nebulous mystery I had yearned for years to begin understanding. Our visit was all too short, but I left with a new sense of belonging, and a mission to seek answers to a question at the Holocaust Museum the next day: Why are there only a small handful of descendants?

The next day, I met up with a few classmates from EMI, and we walked for hours around the national mall, taking in the monuments and memorials with reverence and awe. We chose as a group to visit the Holocaust Museum a few days before, made all the more interesting by our mixed political views. What follows is a visual tour, a personal discovery, and call to awareness. The "story" to each photo is below the photo. Please read the photos of captions from the museum.

This is the banner that was hanging above the entrance to the Holocaust Museum. "Some Were Neighbors". 

Several in line were sporting red "Make America Great Again" hats, and I even spotted a small pin of a confederate flag. We were all in line for the same experience. Something had brought each of us there, whether it be answers, validations, curiosity, or challenges. The words "collaboration and complicity" echoed in my head. At the same time we waited patiently in line, the current president was signing anti-immigration laws into measure and demoting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the Director of National Intelligence. He then appointed White House Chief Strategist  and admitted white nationalist Steve Bannon to the National Security Council.  Please read the next photo very carefully, especially the smaller print.

Let me repeat: the president placed Steve Bannon at the top of the National Security Council. I'll quote the Washing Post to give you a better idea of what the NSC does:

 "The idea of the National Security Council (NSC), established in 1947, is to ensure that the president has the best possible advice from his Cabinet, the military and the intelligence community before making consequential decisions, and to ensure that, once those decisions are made, a centralized mechanism exists to guarantee their effective implementation. The NSC is effectively the central nervous system of the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus." 

Make America Great Again. 

America First.

We will have so much winning, you will get bored with winning.

Believe me. 

National Day of Patriotic Devotion.

Needless to say, my hair did not fit into the acceptable hair color swatches. Those were actual swatches of hair that were used to determine whether a person was of a superior race. I had kept my hair tucked up under a hat, but I chose that moment to let it down. 

The day before, I had never heard of Janow and Janow Lubelski. Here, I see in writing on glass the towns that my ancestry were pushed in to, before they were subjected to "the final answer". This is a glass wall of place names, the length of a hallway. Villages, Shtetls, ghettos that were systematically exterminated while much of the world lay silent. These were the places of my people. The Grabers (the "y" was added in "Grayber" after coming stateside, to sound less Jewish) were primarily in Janow and the surrounding areas of Lublin Voidodship.

Until this point, I had mostly felt numb. Numb observation, and sense of heaviness. A weight I couldn't fathom, and a sense of aching aging. And then, I saw the words of David. David Graber, 19-years old, fighting to carry the message of the atrocity beyond what he knew would most certainly be the end of his life. I can't quite describe the moment of finding my family name emblazoned in a Holocaust memorial. 

I found a corner and leaned into it, and at last, felt the heat of tears. I tried to keep my face to the glass, and feel the grief of this moment privately. An elderly woman came up gently next to me, and placed her hand on my back. "Is this your first time here?" I didn't make eye contact with her, for fear of sobbing. I just nodded. "We are all family. Shalom." 

Shoes. These are not replicas, these are a small sampling of the millions of shoes that remained, long after the bodies had been gassed, or shot, charred, and dumped in mass graves. These are the shoes of the men, women, children, elderly who became the receiving end of rhetoric of fear, and the face of blame and evil. These are the shoes that they wore as they were herded like cattle into train cars, and the shoes that they wore into the undressing rooms, to feel the bare earth under their feet one last time. These are the shoes that covered the feet of my family. All these years later, and in a sterile museum, you can still smell the leather.

I was compelled to take this picture. Behind me is a collection-- a massive pile-- of hair. Hair that looked like mine, dark and wavy and unruly; hair that had been cut off the heads of the naked women and children just before they entered the gas chambers. Hair that was then bundled into 40 lb bales. Jewish hair was considered unfit for wigs, so it was used as fill for mattresses and blankets.

This woman came from the Lublin region. It was jarring to see her picture, and feel almost as if I was looking into a mirror. Her eyes. Her hair. Her cheekbones and lips. Was she a Graber? There was no identification; she was one of a large settlement that was shot to death in a mass grave. The rail cars were full, and there was rumor of rebellion. 

Who will you choose to be?

406. In the holocaust registry, that is the number of individuals who share my name who were murdered. Most of those 406 died in the lesser-know secretive extermination camp of Belzec, although it appears some were sent to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka. Between 450,000 and 500,000 Jews were slaughtered at Belzec. There are only 7 known survivors of that camp.

43. That is the number of Gra(y)bers who survived the Holocaust era in entirety.

You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going. 

It was less than a hundred years ago that over 6 million human beings were brutally rounded up, branded, tattooed, tortured, and murdered simply for being a race that evoked fear and suspicion in a small segment of a nationalistic population. A brashly spoken and rather disregarded non-politician who wasn't taken as a serious political force took power, manipulated and silenced the media, and created a cabal of loyal henchmen (known as "the Reichstag") who would take control and power of an entire nation within 6 months. The world would mostly remain silent until the horrors were delivered to them in the form of war threatening their own liberties. By the time the camps were liberated and the war ended, 2 out of every 3 European Jews had been murdered. By 1945, most of my ancestors abroad had been exterminated.

You have to know who you are, to understand where you are going. My path forward from here is as clear and distinct as the eternal flame that burns in genocide memorials across the planet. Where will you stand? Will you remain silent? Will you look the other way from the fear and anger and brewing hate, regardless of origin? Or will you take my hand and stand with me and say, "never again"?

Post-election thoughts

I haven't posted anything since the election, and I've had a few people ask me why, given my usual very vocal opinions. The truth is that I still don't have the right words, because honestly, people like me were part of the problem. Sure, I worked my butt off for my candidate, and I passionately told everyone and anyone who would listed why I supported her. But how many times did I passively turn the other way when someone said something hurtful, untrue, or just plain ignorant, and I "let it go" in the name of peace and friendship?

A very brief story: The day after the election, we ran into one of Zane's best friends and his mom at school conferences, both of whom I adore. Zane's BFF was withdrawn and sullen, totally unlike him. His mom, a very strong and proud woman, had tears brimming in her eyes, and her shoulders slumped. I asked what was wrong. They had simply gone shopping, like they do every week, at Fred Meyer, right here in SW Portland. They were immediately threatened and harassed, and fled for home, fearing their safety. IN PORTLAND. You see, they are a Muslim family, and she wears full hijab. The worst part-- when I conveyed my horror and intention to accompany them the next time they go, she said "we've gotten used to the stares and muttered obscenities, but...". STOP THERE. What? This beautiful family of proud American citizens has endured harassment and micro-aggressions this whole time? In liberal Portland? Where have I been?

The answer is, right here this whole time. Yes, I choose love, yes, I choose light-- but I have let people near and dear to me down, in the name of keeping the peace, and not wanting to be offensive. I also believe that the conversation is greater than the political polarization; this is more than Trump vs. Clinton, Liberal vs. Conservative. This. Is. Us.

So here's this cartoon. It's definitely not the same one that keeps popping up on many of my friends' feeds, the whole "all lives matter, can't we just get along"? (Literally, dozens of postings). This cartoonist put into words what I have been feeling for the past week. This doesn't mean that I can't have a conversation or be friends with someone who's views are different. To me, this means that it's time to take a deep, honest, and maybe painful look at how my life and actions have served others, and how I can do better. I am a very privileged white woman living on my little urban farm in Portland, with my white husband, our white kids, our chickens, cats, dog. That is not to say I haven't had hardships-- I have endured terrible things only the closest friends and family to me know-- but I always have this place of relative safety and privilege to return to. When I walk into Fred Meyer, no one is going to call me a terrorist, call my son a n*gger, or threaten me physical harm for the hat or scarf I may be wearing. I am willing to look in the mirror, take stock and appreciation for what I have, and then shatter the mirror to see beyond, because right now, it's about so much more. It's not a sweet little meme of a Trump and Clinton person holding hands, it's messy, sticky, and really, really scary, and every single one of us is accountable.

If you are ready to join me in the conversation, look deeper, work harder, and find the true humanity and love that connect all of us, you know where to find me.

Fire

Weight of an air pack, axe in my hand.
Just before I clip into air--
            the stench of fear-sweat, acrid, alarmed, excited.
Wood splinters as we crash through a door.
The engines whine and rev high behind us, water spraying, blinding, people shouting.
            Something in my back splinters, too.

Keep going, press on, the ghosts say.

The man, he is there, just out of reach. Just up those stairs. Just through that door?
There is too much fire. The furnace blast of flashover
pushes us back out the door.
I will find him later, still almost standing.
A toppled redwood in a blackened forest.

Skin melts at 500 degrees, stretched gaunt over tight bones.
There is a model airplane-- fire engine red-- on the other side of the door.
             Intact. Unscathed.

Fifteen bullet holes in the skinny buddha's body, his blood
drenched onto scorched California earth, nurturing nothing, nothing.
His hand, still clutching the leash of a whimpering soft-muzzled doberman.
Three drifters, they will say. Senseless.
           Thoughts and prayers, they will say.
A wake of grief rippling an entire coast, like a funeral pyre.

Did he notice in that frozen moment the flash from the gun, before
flesh ripped, before gasping dreams spilled forth, uncontained?

The blonde head of my son, hair thick and smelling of campfire.
If the shooter comes to the classroom, mom, you just
drop off the ledge and out the window.
You'll only break an ankle, maybe a leg, but probably not the whole thing.
Other wise, you have to charge him, throw a chair.
His large blue 12-year-old eyes contemplate the physics
of facing death.

A car backfires outside
I lurch my body over him.
            Geez, mom, it's just a car
            and anyway, I have homework to finish.

My anger and grief are steam rising off the back of a hard run horse
galloping, frantic and seeking familiar pasture.

Where is the safety, who will be the rescuer
in this hot, sticky, salty viscera?
Sirens light through the dark sky in the distance
Familiar, comforting, haunting.

These ghosts and I, sitting outside the fire, gazing in.
Our reflections dance, entwine, ensnarl
Eyes glittering, rapt in the distant shimmering heat.



©2016 Dacia Grayber