Death Is But a Dream by Christopher Kerr & Carine Mardorossian

Author:Christopher Kerr & Carine Mardorossian [Kerr, Christopher & Mardorossian, Carine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

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“My memory starts and ends with him.” These words were spoken by the wife of a hospice patient, whom I met about fifteen years ago. Alizah was seventy-four years old and tending to her dying husband, her partner of fifty-four years. I had seen the many faces of grief in hospice, but her appearance of consuming pain and shock stopped me in my tracks. “I have not known of a life without him,” she whispered. I still remember where she was standing when she uttered those words. I remember her meek demeanor and beseeching eyes, her look of utter despair.

I listened speechless when Alizah told me about meeting Nathan, a love story that belonged as much in history books as in a personal narrative.

Their story began on October 21, 1942, in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, on the fateful day during World War II when the occupying Germans rounded up the Jews in the village. Alizah was thirteen years old. Along with neighbors and other townsfolk, her family had been driven from their home and ordered to assemble in the marketplace. There were hundreds of men, women, and children, stunned and fear-stricken, all lined up in rows. In the midst of the shouting and frequent gunfire, Alizah could hardly register the surreal events that were unraveling before her eyes. Her childhood friend Nathan, a fifteen-year-old neighborhood boy, stood in an alleyway, watching in horror as those he loved were being taken.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alizah saw Nathan run toward her. He grabbed her hand and pulled her from the lineup. She instinctively knew that he was dragging her to safety, and miraculously, they escaped notice in the chaos of the day. It was, she described, as if the two of them were moving in a parallel universe where time had stopped.

Alizah would never see her relatives again, and it would be some time before she learned of their gruesome end at the Belzec death camp, a fate from which Nathan had saved her.

The two teens survived the war in hiding and went on to be adopted by American families, reuniting years later. They would eventually get married and live full lives. Together, these remaining fragments of two decimated families reconstituted the sense of wholeness that had been shattered by the genocidal war.

Now, as Alizah sat by Nathan’s bedside, holding his hand, she could not fathom facing the world without him. To her, he was everybody and everything all rolled in one, the tie that bound her to a past that nobody but he could possibly understand. He was her life.

All I could offer them was my presence and a desire to bear witness, while knowing full well that even offering empathy would feel shallow. Nathan’s inner life contained depths of tragedy and strength that were beyond my comprehension and reach, a harsh reminder that some wounds, particularly old ones, can never be healed or soothed. Alizah was the embodiment of their shared history and inseparability, and Nathan’s dying experience was lived outwardly through her.

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