by Robert M. Katzman © December 17, 2021
Seems recent and long ago
Near and far
The dimensions are hazy
I missed her so
When she was
All together
Instead of fragile ashes
In Israel
Now she’s in the sand
No, she IS the sand
In the Dead Sea
Cold, wet, sun glinting
Part of it
***
by Robert M. Katzman © Sunday, December 22, 2019
Written in response to Peggy’s letter of pain on Facebook: No, Peggy, I don’t know you, but I felt compelled to respond. Perhaps it will give you some possible way to cope and find peace.
I have not lost a child, but seem blessed or cursed with massive empathy, with absorbing others’ pain so intensely, it is like having a massive unpredictable Empath Serpent coiled within me, sometimes rearing up and piercing my heart with its fangs. I have no shield to stop me from caring.
I am Jewish, not into ritual, but deeply spiritual, and now old enough to have experienced the loss of so many people that I have forgotten some of their names.
A village of dead friends and relatives scattered across many towns, this country and other countries. I see their faces, can hear their voices in my mind, some of them locked in an endless loop of a certain holiday scene where I was less, to them, then whatever I might ever aspire to be. Yes, I can hear their voices. No volume control to the–endlessly anticipated–onslaught of the daggers they pierced me with when I wasn’t allowed to respond:
(Read on …)
“A Promise is a Promise”.
A Short Story About Keeping My Word to a Dead Man
by Robert M. Katzman © December 8, 2021
About thirty years ago I was running a business no one’s child would ever go into, in Morton Grove, Illinois, which is NW of Chicago and next to Skokie, Illinois, about 16 miles from Chicago. One of very few left in the United States at that time, perhaps twenty such stores, I called it Magazine Memories.
It was a back-issue store which people frequented to get a magazine from the week or month a person was born, married, joined the army or graduated from a school. We also carried rare and collectible items, with the inventory going back to 1576, a British newspaper.