September 2

We are here to help each other survive

Nancy Topf Gibson, 1942-1998 (shown here in 1983)

Twenty-six years ago tonight, a flight carrying 229 people crashed into the ocean near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. The phone – a landline, of course – woke me at dawn the next morning. My mother told me her sister, my aunt Nancy, had been on the plane. There were no survivors, she said. (I don't know how she made those calls.) My legs gave out.

I had taken a leave from my MFA program in Boston to live in Tucson for a year. My fiancé and I had moved into our apartment on South Fourth Street just a week before and I'd started my waitressing job at a restaurant whose name, Ovens, still startles me. I drove to work to tell my new boss that I would be flying to New York and thus missing an unforeseeable number of shifts. I'll never forget her kindness, or how news of the crash was blaring on the TV in the entryway to the restaurant when she reached to hug me and told me that her parents had both died in a boat crash while on vacation in Hawaii years before. Her name was Candace.

I never intentionally remember this anniversary. But every year, it happens. "It's September 2," I think to myself. Nancy's yahrzeit. I think of my cousin, her only son, who was just 21 at the time (I was all of 24), and my uncle, who died in 2020. I think of my mom, and my grandmother, the shock and grief of a sister, a mother.

And today, I think of Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who will bury her only son. Her 23-year-old son who was alive until a few days ago. Who survived nearly a year being held captive in a tunnel with part of an arm missing. Whose kind eyes and loving spirit emanated from posters everywhere in Israel, whose face was so familiar he could have been family. He was family.

The plane crash was a tragedy caused by faulty wiring of the plane's in-flight entertainment system.

The murders of these six hostages were calculated, the most unimaginable, soulless move in a psychopathic game between so-called leaders who don't value life.

I weep with their families. I rage with their families. I stand with their families, always.

I will always remember how one of my first thoughts on the morning of 9/11, three years after Nancy's death, was an awareness that she wasn't there to experience the shock and grief of that day. (She lived just a mile from the World Trade Center, a walk she did almost daily and I had done with her when I lived in the city.)

Maybe this is something that happens when someone you love dies. Maybe it's even more acute if that person dies tragically. With each occasion, each milestone, each world event, each subsequent tragedy, each celebration, you think, they are not here for this. Sometimes it's an unbearable ache, and sometimes it's a weird relief, not that they're gone, but that they don't have to endure the heartache.

We are here to be here. We are here to hold each other up when our knees buckle and our legs will not let us stand. When our hearts are so splintered and shattered we gasp for breath. We are here to be here. To witness each other's incredulous despair, despair so consuming it seems impossible to still be in a body at all. We are here to be pierced by the keening of mothers whose only sons have been murdered in cold blood, and the cries of sons whose only mothers have been plunged into the depths of the ocean, never to be whole again. We are here to grieve and to mourn and to ask why, why, why.

We are here to somehow, against all odds, help each other survive.

To speak of hope today seems like an insult to those who are burying their beloveds. And so I won't. Instead, I will only say, you are not alone. You are my family. I will never abandon you.

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Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
Eden Yerushalmi, 24
Carmel Gat, 40
Almog Sarusi, 26
Alex Lubanov, 32
Ori Danino, 25

זיכרונם לברכה

Zikhronam livrakha – may their memories be a blessing. Amen.

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