Another anniversary

There’s an anniversary coming up. Unfortunately, the one you are probably thinking of — around a month from now — will most likely be marked by recrimination, cheating, lying, the breaking of crockery and custody fights. But I’d like to take a second in this blog to write about a different, more traditional kind of anniversary.

In a couple of days, my husband and I will be celebrating a wedding anniversary. It’s a pretty hefty, half-decadal one. That is, in “normal” times we might be planning a big night out or even a party. We might be buying one another nice gifts. But celebrating can seem like a too big a burden these days, when just getting out of bed can be trial. We hope to manage breakfast.

Not a big deal: 11 months into this war, a large majority of the married people in the county have marked the passing of another anniversary. For some, that anniversary has come and gone with a mother and children waiting for the father of the family to be released from captivity. For others, an anniversary is now a painful reminder of a husband or wife killed – on Oct. 7, afterwards in a tunnel in Gaza or in battle. Yet others did not get to celebrate even one anniversary before their fiancés, boyfriends or girlfriend were murdered or killed. They had moved in together, started making plans before the brutal tidal wave of Oct. 7 hit.

So yes, I’m one of the very lucky ones (for lots of reasons, not just giving ourselves a prize for holding on this long).

Still, when I look at my husband these days, he tends to look a bit shell-shocked. And I wonder if I look the same to him.

This feeling of bewilderment and helpless rage is not exactly new to us. I think back to Rabin’s assassination. But this situation has gone on for so long; it feels, this time, as though things are likely to get so much worse before they get better. It feels, for once, like I can’t state with certainty that it will all be okay in the end, that we will outlast the evil events now taking place.

When I look at my husband these days, he tends to look a bit shell-shocked. I wonder if I look the same to him

In the past, we coped together. We examined our options, but we always ended up putting our faith in ourselves and in the community we had become a part of – vatikim, or senior members – here in Israel. We coped with reserve duty and wars, with the weekend work rosters and weeding cotton after a full day’s work, and later with the metamorphosis of our socialist community into a vaguely community-based exurb. We coped with the crises of parenthood, of health scares, of shared and personal struggles. When COVID hit, we were lucky to have one another to talk to every day, to sit with at dinner time and even to watch TV with, in the evenings.

Now it seems as though our coping mechanisms have basically come down to banging our heads against the wall. And although head-banging has become a national pastime for so many of us, I do appreciate having this particular someone by my side, even to share in the frustration.

I don’t think I imagined that by the time we got this far (if we got this far) we would be sitting on a beach somewhere sipping mai tais. We might have taken up couples’ watercolor painting or jewelry-making classes, started a greenhouse, or joined trips for seniors to the Far East.

Instead, our date night is the weekly Saturday-night protest. We continue to work, in part, because work has become a respite from the endless news cycle. We yell, fruitlessly, every day because we are so very attached to this tiny square kilometer, even as our government has disengaged from us, disowned us and discouraged us to no end.

I’m not complaining. We are some of the lucky ones. We have enough trust in one another to believe that if (should I say when?) our leaky ship sinks, we’ll either go down together or save one another. If we don’t quite feel like a big celebration this year, I am human enough to have faith that there will probably be another opportunity next year – at the very least, the year after. Still, if I’m sitting across from my husband sipping an espresso that day and taking an extremely long trip down memory lane, I will spare some thoughts and prayers for those who have marked anniversaries, birthdays and family holidays in captivity, whose lives together have been cut short by war.

Is it too much to hope that we’ll all be able to celebrate next year?