We Are All Survivors

I arrived at Doctor’s Hospital on east 88th street seventy-seven years ago yesterday. Some days later - maybe four or five since in those days giving birth was a leisurely affair, but in any case past the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima - my mother brought me home to 83rd street in swaddling blankets even though it was likely blisteringly hot in the city in August. My sister was already ten, but she and my mother, Henrietta, had an adversarial relationship from the get-go and I expect Henrietta was hoping it would be easier the second time around. I’m trying to picture her entering the lobby with me that first time, but I can’t decide if she’s pushing me in one of those show-off carriages with the sun shade and the whitewall tires or whether she’s carrying me in her arms. I can’t imagine her carrying me. I don’t remember being carried. It was a long way from the front door to the elevator and the floor was marble. Any misstep and my life would not have unfolded the way it did. Any stumble and I might not have survived.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

We are all survivors. We survived imperfect parenting and chicken pox. We survived tuna noodle casserole and pink cotton candy, Korea, the Jack, Bobby and Martin Luther King assassinations, Vietnam and 9/11. We survived McCarthy, Nixon, W, and Trump. And all the losses. Losses on top of losses. The loss of that mother sixty-one years after she brought me home, all of our parents and many siblings and other loved ones, beloved friends. I use this word survivor advisedly, knowing that the word in English is deeply associated with people who did not walk into the lobby, but out of the camps the year I was born. I’m also thinking of those who lived through AIDS and Putin’s recent atrocities in Bucha. Of those who crossed the Mediterranean from north Africa in inflatable boats and those who made it out of the Paradise fire and the flooded lower ninth ward. My survival seems inconsequential by comparison. Who cares, you know? And yet, it’s all I have. It’s all each of us has. Our life, our time here on both sides of the much vaunted millennium. Our testimony to the personal and social history we have lived through, sometimes triumphantly and sometimes under a dark cloud. And all the losses, always the losses.

Every life is a statement about survival, of living to see another morning cup of dark roast in spite of near misses on the highway, dark deserted streets, encounters with unsavory men who did not have my best interests at heart. I stand in amazement when I think about the risks I took voluntarily and the sheer random good fortune of not getting sucked out to sea in the undertow of the fierce and freezing Atlantic in Amagansett while the young lifeguard turned to look over his shoulder at a girl posing on the beach, one hip leaning in his direction. I am one of the lucky ones and I’m here to tell you about it. It helps, as the timeline of my life seems to be collapsing in on itself to read what Einstein, no dummy, had to say on the subject. “Time,” said Al, “does not exist - we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

In this hallucinogenic version of reality with no boundaries, no separation between periods of time or between you and me, I’m on my way to the elevator with my mother, but I’ve already fed the pigeons in the Piazza Navona and bathed in the perfect warm liquidy environment inside of her. I’ve already eaten crab and dumpling in Tobago and summoned all my energy to squeeze through the narrow canal of her and out into the world. I’ve already toppled off the seesaw and given birth to my own baby. When I entertain this understanding, the idea of survival doesn’t make much sense, doesn’t really hold up. I’m in motion like all the rest of us and the rocks on the graves in the Jewish cemetery will not hold me here. All I know is I’m here now, whatever here might be, whatever now might be, and the lilies behind the house are shooting fiery blooms, red and yellow and orange.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.