Before She Died I Asked Her to Tell Me Her Story
Tags: Family, Love, Memories, Life, Beyourself

Before She Died I Asked Her to Tell Me Her Story anniewood Follow Aug 10 · 4 min read

Ask your parents everything while you can

Artwork by the author

My mom, my Ema, was hilarious.

She didn’t know she was hilarious but she was. Her unintentional humor was showstopping.

My husband enjoys many a great belly laugh over something I did, and I swear to you, as much as I’ve written comedy, performed comedy, and am a huge enjoyer of comedy, I often have no idea what the fuck he’s laughing about. I ask him. He tells me, between guffaws and catching his breath, “your face, it was… you were so…” then he goes back to the guffaws and breath catching. It would appear I’m as in the dark on this as my Ema was.

Sometimes it was just the simple fact that she was an Israeli immigrant and English wasn’t her first language.

I never had “rehearsal” it was “reversal.”

They weren’t “prescriptions” they were “subscriptions.”

It’s not a “sip” it’s a “zip.”

And mix-ups:

Tuesday is always Thursday and Thursday is always Tuesday.

And straight-up accidental comedy:

Her: Don’t answer the door! It could be a burglar!

Me: Why would a burglar knock?

Her: This is a good area. We have nice burglars.

Her at a restaurant: I don’t want to sit inside it has too much air conditioning and we can’t sit outside, it’s too hot and I don’t like this chair, do you have another and I don’t want this, can I have this instead on the side. And extra butter please and it’s very noisy out here, I want to go back inside.

Me: You are so difficult.

Her: What do you mean? I am delightful!

And so it goes.

But there was another side too. She’d often get a faraway look in her eyes and she’d take a drag of her cigarette. This was a look I’d come to know well. She’d time travel right in front of me, smoke billowing above her face, like a dream cloud that took her somewhere into her past. She spoke of her past with a combination of reverence, “My family loved each other very much” and heaviness, “My father used to chase us so he could beat us.” But she never seemed to buckle at the heaviness.

She would speak of both the good and the bad times with equal amounts of longing. She lost two sisters. Ruchama, was five years old. Panina was three. They both died from illnesses that undoubtedly could be handled now. Maybe even then, if you had money. I don’t know much about them except I remember my mom telling me about Panina’s blonde hair (the only blonde in a dark-haired middle eastern family) and how impossibly cute she was. She reminded everyone of Shirley Temple. When Panina was three years old she walked over to their mother and said, “I don’t feel good.” Then she just collapsed. That was that. That’s how Ema described it. This life that had barely begun was over without warning. Without even an accident. Just a simple, “I don’t feel good” and then… gone. And then, that same year, Ruchama died at the age of five. Ema never cried when she told these stories. She’d explain, “Many children died back then. It was a hard time.”

I only met my grandma, Bahora, one time. She came to America to meet me. I was one. She died later that year at the age of sixty. But if you look at the photos you’d think she was much older. By the time she was thirty she had eight children, her own mother died, and then she had to bury two children. Her husband (my grandfather) had a temper and they never had enough money. By the time she got to be sixty, she must have felt the weight of a thousand lifetimes. Ema spoke of her beloved mother often. She would often sigh remembering her, calling to her in the sigh, “Oh, Emalah.”

Six years after my own Ema’s death, I find myself doing the exact same thing. And so it goes. Oh, Emalah.

Hug ’em if you still got ‘em.

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