Last Seen – the unbearable vigil of waiting

There is a particular kind of fear that has no name.

It is not the fear of a nightmare, because you are wide awake. It is not the fear of bad news, because the news has not come yet. It is the fear that lives in the space between one WhatsApp message and the next. Between the last seen timestamp and the moment the screen lights up again.

My son is in Lebanon. And the FPV drones are starting to reach him.

I know this because it is my job to know. I am a news reporter. I spend my days, six days a week, monitoring security incidents, tracking developments, processing information that most parents are mercifully spared. I know what FPV drones do. I know what “a soldier was seriously wounded” means, in the clinical language of IDF announcements. I know how to read between the words.

This is not a gift. This is its own kind of wound.

There is a protocol I have developed, the way soldiers develop protocols, the way you find a system when chaos is the only alternative.

I check his last seen. Not every hour. More than every hour. I have learned the rhythm of it, when he tends to be on his phone, when he goes dark for stretches of time that mean he is in the field, when the silence is operational and when it is just sleep. I have become a scholar of his digital silences.

Once, in a moment of desperation that I am not ashamed of but will not pretend was my finest hour, I checked his commander’s last seen on WhatsApp.

His commander’s.

Because if the commander was online, perhaps the situation was calm. Perhaps they were all okay. Perhaps I could exhale for a few more minutes.

This is what we come to, we mothers of soldiers. We become intelligence analysts of the most desperate kind, piecing together a picture of safety from fragments that were never meant to tell us anything at all.

When the message came about his friend, I did not ask for details.

Someone from his unit. A drone attack. One soldier killed. His friend, badly wounded. Life-changing, they said. I have been sitting with those words ever since. Life-changing. I do not know exactly what that means and I have not asked, because some information, once received, cannot be set down again. It takes up permanent residence inside you.

My son knew this boy. Served beside him. Ate beside him. Was in that landscape with him, the same terrain where FPV drones now move through the air looking for exactly the kind of young man my son is.

There are no good words for this.

I know because I have looked for them, the way I look for everything, thoroughly, professionally, desperately. They do not exist.

I check the Hezbollah Telegram channels when I hear there has been a “security incident.” I am aware this is not rational behaviour. I am aware that nothing I read there will help me, that the information is filtered through the lens of people who wish my son harm, that it is at best propaganda and at worst a kind of self-torture I am inflicting on myself in the guise of staying informed.

I do it anyway. Because the not knowing feels worse.

It never is worse. But fear is not a reasonable emotion and it does not respond to reasonable arguments.

To my son, I say: I love you. We miss you. Be safe. Be careful.

And sometimes, when I cannot help myself, I type: are you ok?

And when even that feels like too much to ask of him, when I know he is carrying enough without also having to carry my fear, I send him instead a verse from Psalms. The one I have been saying over and over to myself in the small hours of the night, the one that has become a kind of heartbeat:

כִּי מַלְאָכָיו יְצַוֶּה לָּךְ לִשְׁמָרְךָ בְּכָל דְּרָכֶיךָ

For He will command His angels on your behalf, to guard you in all your ways.

I send it because it is the truest thing I know to say. I send it because it is a prayer disguised as a sentence. I send it because I need him to know that something watches over him in the places I cannot reach, in the moments I cannot see, in the split seconds that will never appear in any WhatsApp timestamp.

To my husband, I say nothing.

Because there is nothing good to say, and he knows everything I would say anyway. He is more frightened than I am, though he wears it differently. We sit together in it, this shared vigil, and sometimes the most honest thing two people can do is simply not speak.

To my friends, I say: please daven.

That is all. Please daven. They understand.

To myself, in the quietest moments, I say: God has a plan.

I say it the way you hold onto a rope in the dark, not because you can see where it leads, but because letting go is not an option.

Please, I add, let that plan include protecting my son.

I do not know if I am praying or bargaining. I suspect the difference matters less than the rabbis might suggest. I think God knows the difference between the theology of a calm morning and the theology of a mother who checked a military commander’s WhatsApp last seen at 2am because there was no other way through the night.