May you love something too heavy to carry,
and may you lose it for half of your life.
When you have it back again,
may you play it alone in the dark, singing:
“One day this all will be gone. Today it is not gone.”
Knocking on a Door
The addition of Sebastian to our family seemed to pull the various parts of us into balance. Frédéric and I had always spoken English together, but Joseph decided that he would speak French with Sebastian, and so our house settled into four languages: English and French among our family, Hebrew on the western side of the house, and Arabic on the eastern. I had once read that a child who grows up with several languages often begins to speak later than he might otherwise, struggling to understand how a glass on a table can be a glass, and a kass, and a verre. But, in time, he learns that it can be all of those things, and also that it is none of them, but something deeper.
I listened. And as Sebastian repeated words over and over again, l’eau, soleil, viene. I would repeat them in my heart, and then out loud. Umm Hossam had promised that my children would teach me everything. Well, now they were teaching me to speak French.
• • •
At night, I would watch Frédéric carry them to bed, one in each arm, in the home of love and language they built between them. I listened to him sing them to sleep in a language not yet my own.
Some details come into focus only over time in a marriage—and even as they do, they reveal all the more the limits of what we understand, like a vase emerging from the earth, inscribed in a language we cannot read. We know more for having found it. And yet.
As our boys grew up, I knew my husband more and less than anyone in the world. I could read his silences. I would awaken in the night to his slightest movements. He had held my hands as each child emerged into the world, and he still waited for me every morning with a glass of tea.
And yet. Love is to hold each other in that strangeness, and I loved him more than any other stranger in the world—enough to know that his heart still contained a vacancy in the shape of a monastery. I never forgot what he told Paolo, before he left: “Now I have to choose between love and love.” He chose us. He loved us absolutely. But he never stopped loving all that he left behind. It took years to understand that the two were not in contradiction, as I learned with Sebastian and Joseph—that love does not diminish with the new but only expands to make room for it all.
Still, it was hard to accept that loving us had exiled him from part of himself. Once, a Turkish acquaintance told me that her father had met Frédéric and me together in Jerusalem, and then returned home to Istanbul to tell her, “My only hope is that you one day find a husband who loves you so much.” This is true.
And yet, once, I also read a description by the poet Naomi Shihab Nye of her father, in exile from his homeland in Palestine, looking out of place at a lunch counter in Kansas, and I recognized my husband in the description of him. He was home to us, but he was never completely at home with us.
I would have done anything to make it better. I just did not know how.
“Don’t worry,” he promised me. “Nothing is ever lost. It is only transformed.”
• • •
Frédéric had still kept one ritual from his monastic life: every year he went on a retreat. That winter, Frédéric packed his bag for Bethlehem. He would meet every day with Father Peter, the beloved priest who had come to us on the night of Joseph’s birth and who was trained in giving the Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit retreats designed to help individuals make choices about their lives.
I remained in Jerusalem with our two boys. Frédéric read and prayed alone on the edge of the desert in Bethlehem, not far from the hospital where we had paced back and forth at night, waiting for our first child to be born. And during those days, the old emptiness came up, the sense that even with so much given, something more was waiting for him.
Father Peter asked, “Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?”
“You know I can’t,” Frédéric answered. “I’m married.”
“I know,” Peter replied. “But that is just the question that keeps coming to my mind.”
Frédéric returned to his room to rest. But Father Peter’s words would not leave him.
• • •
In fact the answer “I can’t” was not as obvious as Frédéric had made it out to be. Though Father Peter was a Roman Catholic priest, Frédéric, the boys, and I had always attended the Syrian Catholic Church in Jerusalem, where our sons had been baptized. This was because when Frédéric had wandered into a monastery in Syria ten years before, it had been into the mystery of a Syrian Catholic monastery, an Eastern rite church that was part of the Catholic Church, but that maintained some of the rites and rules of the Orthodox Church. One of those was allowing married men to become priests.
He now considered the possibility that Father Peter might not have suggested the impossible after all; perhaps he could be ordained a Syrian Catholic priest.
Two weeks after his retreat in Bethlehem, Frédéric went to confession in Jerusalem with Father Etienne, another Roman Catholic priest. In the midst of their conversation, Father Etienne turned to him and asked, “Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?”
“You know I can’t,” Frédéric answered again. “I’m married.”
“Still,” Father Etienne insisted, “I just felt that I needed to ask.”
Frédéric walked home, placed a pot of tea on the stove, and sat me down at the table. He took my hand.
“I have no idea what this means,” he told me. “I feel like I am being asked to do the impossible, to knock on a door that has no answer. I know that. But now I have no choice but to start knocking.”
• • •
Two weeks later, Frédéric walked down the street to visit the Syrian Catholic bishop. He described his retreat and recalled the decision he had made, all of those years before in a desert monastery, to give his life to God. He confessed the fact that being married and having children had only deepened that desire, with the knowledge that love is not limited, but is exponential.
Finally, he asked if it might be possible for him to seek ordination as a married priest in the Syrian Catholic Church.
He knew that it would not be easy, or even straightforward. He would need to obtain an official change of rite from Roman Catholic to Syrian Catholic. Though he was already conversant in Arabic, he would need to learn to speak it so fluently that he could hear confessions and visit the sick. He would also need to learn Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, and to complete four years of study in theology and philosophy, as well as engage in pastoral work. But the greatest challenge would be that of the imagination: if he set out to become a married Syrian Catholic priest, he would be entering what, for us, would be uncharted territory. Neither of us had ever been close to a married Catholic priest.
Frédéric later told me that the bishop looked at him without the faintest expression of surprise, as though he had been expecting this conversation for a very long time.
If someone had told me that life is unexpected, I would not have guessed that I might one day be married to a priest. But I had married a man who spoke to birds, who saw angels appear on trains, and I knew better than to think that life with him would be straightforward. He believed in the physics of grace—that the smallest amount of hope, balanced against impossible odds, was enough to conquer them. And if they were not conquered, even then, the process of moving forward was never in vain. I was reminded of the iconic words of Sister Maria from The Sound of Music: “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.”
Frédéric entered the seminary a few weeks later.
The Love Stairs
A year passed without war, and calm settled over the city. Security guards disappeared from the entrances to cafés. Customers forgot their fear of shattering glass and sat next to the windows. Arabic and Hebrew could be heard on Jaffa Road, as enemies
brushed up against each other. The light rail, a tram which had been in construction for years, finally reached completion, and with it the impossible happened—that scar of no-man’s-land in the heart of Musrara, between our house and the western part of the city, finally fell into movement, with Arabs and Jews climbing aboard the same compartments and riding side by side to their respective neighborhoods, the dinging of the bell audible from the rooms of our house.
And our life, in all of its complexity, began to form its own logic. Every morning we woke up, and I dressed the boys, and we dressed ourselves, and prepared our four separate bags. Frédéric headed off to the Catholic seminary in West Jerusalem, where he was studying for the priesthood, a lone married seminarian in a class of young Roman Catholics. Joseph was dropped off at the French lycée downtown, where he started kindergarten in French. I walked Sebastian to Joseph’s old day care in the Old City, where he was learning his first words in Arabic. Then I boarded the bus and traveled to the other side of the separation wall, where I taught Palestinian students Kafka and Faulkner and Shakespeare. None of it made sense, but it made sense to us. And at the end of the day, we gathered our bags from our respective worlds, and came home.
Sometimes, on my day off, I would accompany Joseph to school, walking him across no-man’s-land, past the tram station, and to a small set of metal stairs hastily built on the edge of a parking lot in the western half of our neighborhood of Musrara. These stairs were known as Chiara’s Staircase, but locals called them the Love Stairs. A Jewish artist in West Jerusalem named Matan Israeli, who once had a girlfriend in the Old City in East Jerusalem, had grown tired of her having to circle all the way around the wounded neighborhood to meet him, because a wall still ran along the seam, separating the neighborhood in two. So he had built her a pair of wooden stairs over the wall, like a narrow Band-Aid right through the heart of the wound, where our neighborhood had been torn in half more than half a century before. She used this small flight of stairs to meet him. Soon Arabs and Jews, as they slowly became aware that they could venture into each other’s neighborhoods without getting beaten up, began to use the stairs too. The wooden stairs were later dismantled, and metal stairs replaced them.
It was on the Love Stairs that I would lift Joseph when I traveled from our house on Nablus Road to his school in West Jerusalem, a fifteen-minute walk that took us across borders, wounds, and languages. Any outside visitor, had they seen us, would only have recognized a mother leading her child up a small flight of stairs, toward a parking lot strewn with trash. Yet so much depended upon those stairs: they anchored two worlds together in balance. I held Joseph’s hand as we approached them.
“Do you know what these are called?” I asked him once.
“The wonderful stairs!” he exclaimed.
And I held him. I stood on the stairs and I held him. I had hoped for some grander meaning in life, but this was it, and in some ways it was grander than anything I could have imagined. All we can do is try to focus on the good and add to it. He was four years old, and on those stairs, we and the city and the entire world were made whole again, if only for a moment, if only in his arms.
The Invisible Man
The phone rang early one evening in June. Frédéric was away on a quick trip to France. The boys were asleep in their bedrooms.
My older sister Lisa tried to make herself understood through her crying. I should catch the next flight home to Texas, she said, because our father was dying. He might not survive the night.
I hastily decided to leave my two boys with a family friend, since children were not allowed in the intensive care ward of the hospital. By the afternoon, I was waiting in line at the airport. Horror piled upon horror: my husband in France, my children with neighbors, my father dying in a hospital a continent away.
When my plane landed in Texas the following morning, my brother and sister were waiting for me. My father was still alive.
We drove directly to the hospital, where I crossed the threshold into his hospital room. At the entrance, dispensers of antiseptic were available for visitors to wash their hands. He had little immune system left, and our germs could kill him.
Then I saw him: weak and wrecked and so thin I barely recognized him. Half of his weight had disappeared since the last time I’d seen him, a few months before. He looked up at me from the top of his sheets.
“You’re here,” he whispered.
“I’m here.”
“Well, that was pretty scary for a moment.” He tried to laugh, but coughed instead. Every word demanded the effort of what remained of his body.
I clasped his hand.
“Maybe it’s because you came that I’m still alive,” he whispered. “Maybe God knew.”
This was exactly the kind of thing my father would say.
“You rest now, Daddy. You rest.”
And he closed his eyes, as if the world were already too much for him.
There can be the urge, in the telling, to make sense of what is awful, but I will try my best not to do that here. There is nothing romantic about watching a parent die. Six years before, he had kissed me in my wedding dress. Now the room reeked of bleach and sickness. My father called out, and a nurse ran to grab a plastic pan so that he could urinate in it, and he nearly cried, doing that in front of his youngest daughter, and we looked at each other in that particular hell that is a father’s body breaking down in front of his little girl, who he was meant to protect.
“I’m sure you wanted to see that,” he joked, his voice rasping. I tried to hold myself together.
“I’m married and have two little boys, Daddy. I see it every day.”
A nurse entered the room, took his vital signs, then left again. The door closed behind her. My father motioned for me to lean close to him. “In a second, she’ll come back,” he whispered, “and then she’ll fill me full of poison.”
I looked in his eyes, and he was afraid. My father was never afraid.
So began the magical hours, the hours I spent with my father in eternity.
• • •
We live with the illusion that there will always be enough time, and in the end, there are only fragments, moments. I had postponed so much, and now it would be too late. I was meant to be the family storyteller, the collector of histories. I was meant to learn how our family had sailed on ships fourteen generations before from the Canary Islands to found a city in Texas. I was meant to memorize the details of how his father was wounded twice in the Second World War, the only member of his unit to survive a battle in Luxembourg.
I was meant to learn the stories and details of my own childhood, from the years I was too young to remember. I did not know anything. Now the past was not worth the effort it would take for my father to tell it to me.
He was sixty-two years old, and it was too soon.
The nurse slipped in the doorway and administered the poison. He slept. We closed the shades and the room dimmed. This was what it was to look at the one you love, in the form of a soul. My two brothers stood by, and my older sister, and my stepmother, and aunts and uncles and priests who filed in and out of the room like shadows.
The last times I had seen my father in the hospital had been when Joseph and Sebastian were born. Those I loved, emerging from eternity and going back to it, among monitors and crisp sheets and the rest of us in our slippered feet, trying not to interrupt as we tiptoed past.
It can feel like an impossible cruelty to consent to the one you love being poisoned, to know that this poison is the only thing that might save him, but that in all likelihood it would kill him. In those days, I experienced what it was to have our roles reversed: for me to watch my father, shaking and feverish and afraid, waking in the night, trying to navigate his way through a nightmare. For two weeks, every morning, my siblings and I sat with him in the hospital. Some nights I slept there.
On those nights in the hospital, I would think of Joseph and Sebastian and Frédéric on the other side of the world. I remembered N
ablus Road, the neighborhood boys fighting outside the windows, the soldiers setting up checkpoints, the tear gas rising to the cracks not sealed tightly enough in the windowpanes, the accumulation of exhaustion and violence on a single slender strip of land, and I thought that this was happening in my father’s body now. His was a body at war with itself. I was hoping that beauty would be stronger than death. That was all. I remembered sunbirds and nightingales, pigeons in flight, circling over the fighting and the dead in Jerusalem, and I was thankful for Nablus Road and all that it had taught me. It was a school for a war that I had not anticipated—it had forced me to live and love within the face of death. I was grateful to Abu Hossam and Omar, and to Hossam and Saleh, with their backs full of scars, selling winter hats. They had taught me strength I did not previously have, to stare at the world as it is and to not turn away. I would depend on it now.
Before, I had only thought that every moment in my life had been a rehearsal, in some way, for my children’s birth: that every country I had traveled, every language spoken, led me to them. And that was true. But now I knew that every moment had also been a rehearsal for my father’s death. I had lived in war. I had stayed awake all night taking care of my sick sons. I had studied, imperfectly, the art of standing in front of the terrible, and waiting, hoping, that, in time, the beautiful would appear.
Yes, my father, when he had held my hand and guided me through my nightmares when I was five years old, was preparing me already—to outlast him.
• • •
So much of parenthood is asking our children to continue a story that was gifted to us at birth, a chain that began long ago, with our own parents and their parents before them. It is a story composed not of language, but of the way an infant is held in the night, of lullabies sung to keep the danger at bay, of oatmeal for breakfast and kisses imprinted into foreheads, of love passed through eternity, gesture by gesture.
Perhaps the terror of parenthood is only compensated for with the comfort of knowing that we are no longer finite, but links in a story that began at the beginning of time, and that just as we carry the bodies and countries of those who came before us, we will be borne forward by those who come after us. My father had always been aware of that—that was why he needed to be in every hospital room when a child appeared. Those hospital rooms were ceremonies, transmissions.
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