MEDVIEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?
MASHA: I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.
-The Seagull, Anton Checkhov
One of my teachers at The Hartt School told us that acting is the only art form that you can only get better at with age. With acting, your instrument is not reliant upon the dexterity of your hands, precision of your eye sight, quality of your vocal range. It is your lived experience that seasons the actor; allows them to marinate and bring forth all of the complex notes of emotions that only a life fully lived can. It took me 42 years, but I now understand Masha’s famous opening line.
I, too, am in mourning for my life. The life that I had before October 7th, 2023. Before the underbelly of humanity exposed itself through people I thought were my friends. Through strangers who called for my death. Through teachers who made my children unwelcome in their school.
This depth of understanding is something that a person cannot fake. Cannot channel. You’ve either lived it or you haven’t.
I have put one foot in front of the other for a full year now. And I have nothing to show for it besides a beating, if not battered, heart. Sure, I’m alive. But I live in mourning.
My children deserve better, G-d knows that. But something is better than nothing. So I pack the lunches, and read the books and feign delight in the run-on sentences they use to describe their latest discovery in Minecraft. And they do fill me with joy and with life and for moments I am in color again. But inevitably, it fades and I am Masha once again, always wearing black.
The hardest part is that I know that this shall not pass. The bell cannot be un-rung. The toothpaste will decidedly never go back in the tube. And while I know that the only way out is through, I cannot comprehend what is on the other side of this nightmare.
I will never be able to live in a world where October 7th did not happen. And when I realize that, the trees of the deep dark wood that I am so desperately trying to get through fall down all around me. And I am trapped in an actual living Hell. And not the one I was condemned to as a child by my classmate for being Jewish.
My father told me on more than one occasion, typically in response to one antisemitic experience or another, that the world will never be short of people who want us dead. I thought it was hyperbole. What a life I lived to believe that it was. How blissfully unaware I was.
In Judaism we have many rituals and customs surrounding mourning the death of a parent, child, spouse. The intensity with which our customs call us to mourn allows us to immerse ourselves in grief. And in doing so, we can then get up and start to live again. But what is the ritual for mourning one’s own life? How do I get up and step foot into the reality that I was alive when they came to slaughter us? That my children were walking the earth when my friends were walking by beheaded neighbors, and huddling with 10 other kibbutznikim in a bomb shelter, taking turns pissing on towels in the corner, and driving through the desert, rockets falling, shielding their children’s eyes from the carnage along the roads, and and and…
So, while my dream was once to play Nina, it looks all roads lead to Masha. And I will forever be in mourning for my life.
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