Meri's Memories

Meri Dan-Gur's son Eran was killed on March 1, 2008 in a confrontation with terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Meri wrote a deeply moving poem that she read in his memory at OneFamily's 2012 Yom Hazikaron ceremony (view a video excerpt here):

Eran, my dear son:
To be a mother
Is to dream about you, my son, even before you were born
To feel you grow inside me in my body and in my soul
To sense the umbilical cord connecting us
To give birth to you and to gain pleasure from the birth pain
To feel happiness that makes the heart jump
To be joyful.

To be a mother
Is to guide you with a glance, with concern, with support and with endless love
To know that the tears that flowed from your eyes on your first day of kindergarten would be replaced by a huge smile when we met at the gate
To see you grow every day, turning from a child to a youth, to a man.
To feel your mood in your voice, and to feel the touch of your skin with my fingertips.

To be a mother
Is to be excited every time it’s your birthday, to celebrate, to be happy, to sing together with you, “so may we merit next year” without thinking that it could be different.
To accompany you on your enlistment day with a sense of pride and appreciation
To wait for the door to open when you come on leave, to jump up and to hug, hug, hug
To feel the room fill with your light and to know – my child has come home safely.

To be a mother
Is to be connected to you, my son, with ties of love, concern, giving, and happiness,
To know that any problems that comes up on the way will find its solution
To be a support for you today, tomorrow, and every day of my life
To live with you in the present and to dream about the future.

To be a mother is to establish a family, to realize a dream, to know completeness, to touch happiness.

To be a bereaved mother
Is to feel in one moment the shattering of the dream, the body that convulses, the heart that is torn,
To feel the uterus bleeding and the umbilical cord torn with a cruelty that cuts off your existence – our existence.
To feel pain whose power I never knew.

To be a bereaved mother
Is to feel how in one moment the happiness of life turns into sadness, pain, grief
To see the rainbow in the clouds in shades of gray and black
To feel longing that has no remedy, longing that gets more powerful over time
Longing for who you were, for who you could have been, longing for the family that we were, longing for a dream.

To be a bereaved mother
Is to live in the past, to live in memory, not to forget any detail
To remember the look, the small, the body movements, the glance in the eyes,
To feel from the depths of memory the amazing hug, to hear the voice,
and to be afraid – yes, to be afraid
That the brain will betray me, and that perhaps some detail will be forgotten.

To be a bereaved mother
Is to get up every morning without a song in my heart,
To look at the door and to know that it will open
But that you won’t be there
To celebrate your birthday without you
To lay flowers on your grave instead of candies on your bed
To mark another year without you, and not to be there at your wedding
Not to see you in love, happy, sad, coping, winning
Not to see you… Not to feel you… Not to feed you…
So much not…

To be a bereaved mother
Is to walk a tightrope that separates life with you from life without you
Between the physical existence that I have that you don’t,
To choose life and to find out that that is the hard way,
To understand that the terrible pain can be diluted by love and by giving,
The love fills my heart and caresses my wounds, and the giving gives meaning to my life.

To be with my children, Nadav and Guy, may they live long lives,
Is to expand my heart, to find the light in the eyes of my living children,
To nourish my soul with their voices, their rolling laughter, their existence, their being
To participate with all my heart in their happy moments, and to share their pain,
To know that the happiness and the pain live in them together,
To be a support in their lives, to help them bear their pain.

We love the knocks on the door. They bring us friends, beloved, and close people. I was only afraid of one knock on the door my entire life – that cursed known that turned our lives upside down, whose echo is embedded in our hearts like a sharp knife and stopped it from moving at that moment.

On Shabbat, March 1, 2008, at 1:00 pm, they knocked on our door.

It has been more than four years that almost every thought starts with “no”. He won’t come, we won’t speak, we won’t laugh, this guy with is ironic glance and his crazy sense of humor will no longer be. There will be no young man with the understanding that is far deeper than his years. There will be no warm smile or hearty appetite. That rare combination of stubbornness and delicateness will no longer exist. His frank intelligence and the wisdom of his heart will no longer be. And we will no longer watch Spongebob together and won’t feel your strong hug, and we won’t see you walking and talking with Nadav and Guy with enthusiastic hand movements, and we won’t see you embracing Liron, the love of your heart.

We are in mourning and in pain in this world. And we wonder how to be expansive in happiness when that cursed Adar begins in which you gave your life, while I am certain that only in Heaven the angels came out in happiness to meet my Eran who went up in a storm.

Shabbat day, the first of march, the day on which my eyes grew dark and my light was extinguished. They told me that you would not come back to us and that He Who dwells on high had taken you to Him, that you had completed your task in this world, and that you belong to the world to come. I sacrificed you – a complete lamb, a complete offering on the altar of the sanctification of G-d and love of the country.

For years I have been trying to understand that foolish saying about how time does its thing. Does it mean that I am supposed to miss you less? To hurt less? To suffer less? Does it mean that people around you think it hurts any less? Or is it simply that it’s less nice to show the world how it hurts more with every day that passes?

The shock is behind us. The anger is behind us. The blaming is behind us. We are left with just the emptiness and the pain of isn’t. With a wound in our heart that doesn’t stop bleeding. With an inability to fill in what is missing. We are also left with all that you left of yourself in us.

You made me a mother. You taught me what unconditional love, love without limits, is. Even now, in coping with your death, I find myself learning with your help. I am learning about myself, about my own limitations, about my abilities. I am learning to rely on your brothers Nadav and Guy, who give me strength and satisfaction, and on good friends who are always there for me.

I am learning to stand strong, to concentrate on what we have. I am learning not to be alarmed even when the pain tears my heart. I am learning to always put new meaning into my life.

I am a different person,
Because my longing for you accompanies me in everything that I do.

I am a different person,
Because your death is part of my life.

I am a different person,
Because my life has taken on a different meaning.

I am a different person,
Because I value the simple things, the small celebrations, the short moments of satisfaction, more.

I am a different person,
Because the quiet is very easy for me, without words.

I am a different person,
Because for me, “living” is first and foremost “not dying”.

I am a different person,
Because your life is intertwined as a thin thread in all of my actions today.

I am a different person,
Because it is good when I am alone, because being alone is always being with you.

I am a different person,
Because I am a different mother, a mother who continues to love her children with all her heart despite the pain that will always accompany all of us together.

I am a different person,
Because nothing is the same after you lose a son, my Eran.