"Time Heals Everything But..."

Kids say the darndest things. Or do they? Do we approach our children with humor, or are they actually just mirrors? How much that we try to shield them from do they really understand?

D and I have been doing vision boarding in preparation for our upcoming move. Crafty, as I like to be, I cut out a whole bunch of words from magazines, and got a set of vision boarding, quotes and cards that we could choose from so I didn’t feel like I needed to invite the wheel.

Looking through the cards, D suddenly popped up, shrugged, eyes, wide open, and said, “Ima, I found the perfect card for you.”

Curious, I looked up. Here is the card she showed me:

“Sadness flies away on the wings of time.” (Jean de La Fontaine)

This kid never ceases to amaze me.

Stilling myself, brows furrowed and intentionally keeping my cheekbones high, I took a deep diaphragmatic breath (yes, the irony is clear to me) I asked her gently, “Why do you think that quote is perfect for me?”

“I know that sometimes you’re sad,” she says, “and this reminds you that it will always get better.”

She has sifted through a deck of more than 100 quotes before this one spoke to her. I’m left wondering, does my child see my defining attribute as … sadness?

We have been through a lot together, our little family. Aside from Ronen’s life and the death and grief that followed, we have endured times of stress and struggle — three out of four kids hospitalized at some point, one for serial asthma attacks, one for seizures, stitches all of them (one a dog bite, one a head laceration from falling in school). Mental health and spectrum diagnosis. Job transitions for Bob, an upcoming job transition for me and the uncertainty therein for all of us. And COVID —- quarantines within our home and Zoom kindergarten, six months without childcare and two four-year-olds to entertain and educate while still working, nearly three years of distancing even after vaccines.

This looks like my first iPod, in case you've never seen one. Ha.

Long ago in what feels like another lifetime, “Time Heals Everything” sung by a young Bernadette Peters from Jerry Herman’s musical Mack and Mabel original cast album featured regularly on my favorite playlist (on my OG first early 2000's iPod!). I have a clear mental image of this song playing in my teenage ears while I ascend the stone stairs and reach for the gold door handle in the wooden front door of our house.

Young, naive sap I was.

In the most acute stages of my grief journey, this song no longer resonated. I deleted it from my playlists.

“Time heals everything

Tuesday, Thursday

Time heals everything

April, August

If I'm patient the break will mend

And one fine morning the hurt will end…”

I remember this song popping up on shuffle shortly after Ronen died. I raged. I shut it off just after the first verse. Turns out, what I sensed then still remains true six years later. Time really does not heal everything.

But lately I’ve been back to this song. If I had only remembered the punchline…

“Though it's hell that I'm going through

Some Tuesday, Thursday, April, August

Autumn, winter, next year, some year

Time heals everything,

Time heals everything ... but loving you.”

Jerry Herman reminds us later in the song, perhaps too subtly, that not all sadness evaporates because you wait long enough. But with some years of hindsight, maybe that's why he insists that we wait less-than-patiently through platitudes until we hear the real truth: Time really doesn't heal everything, and people who say that it does have never really been there. Point proven, I guess.

There's sadness... grief and mourning... and clinical depression. I have dealt with all three. I continue, daily, to manage all of them. (I work closely with professionals to do so, please don't worry.) I thought I was obscuring it better at home. A good reminder that no one is really masking to their own children.

Very soon after Ronen died I said to Bob, "I pray that we are the last ones this happens to... but when it happens again, we will be there for the next family." I have been blessed to be supporting others on the journey of bereaved parenting. People often ask me, "Don't you find it triggering?" Well, yes, I do.... is what I don't tell them. Instead I say, "It's my honor to be able to use my lived experience to support others going through a journey that no one else really understands unless they've been there."

... Really, it's both. Am I triggered (or, if we prefer, "activated")? Absolutely. But And, when it happened to us, I found the greatest comfort with those who sat next to me and said , "We've been there, too," with no further comment. None was needed. Now it's my turn and it continues to be. Each time I support a grieving mother, I pray: May this be the last one. And when it happens, I will be here.

Ronen,

Your 6th yahrzeit approaches on erev Rosh Ha-Shanah, and the season when I feel you here closest to my heart ends on September 29th, in just 10 days. As with every year, I grapple with the challenges of High Holy Day liturgy and theology. More on that, maybe, in the next few days.

Does time heal everything? Most certainly not.

Has it gotten easier over six years? Yes.

Will I always miss you? Absolutely.

I still think of you every day. It is my honor to carry you will me in the world. Perhaps e.e. cummings wrote it best:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

And now, I carry you in another song:

Time heals everything,

Time heals everything ... but loving you.