This Week's Thought - The Day of Forgetting

This Week's Thought - The Day of Forgetting

 This Week's Thought From The Koby Mandell Foundation  

- Sherri Mandell  

The Day of Forgetting

For most everybody in Israel, last Monday was the day of remembering, Memorial Day, for Israel's soldiers and terror victims. For me, Monday was a day of forgetting (the title of a beautiful poem by Orna Kenig). 

This year, the eve of Yom ha Zicharon coincided with the English date of Koby's murder. 10 years of remembering.

The day before, I went to the cemetery in Gush Etzion. Preparations for the next days' ceremony were underway: the gardener was trimming the bushes. There was a bottle of glass cleaner on the path leading to my son's grave. The metal banisters for the descent into the graveyard had been cleaned. Israeli flags were strewn above. 

But on Memorial Day, I let everyone else remember Koby—his jokes, his smile, his Yankees cap. I went hiking with my husband and son, and we swam in the Dead Sea. We let others touch the sense of what it is to keep a memory in your chest pocket. It's always there vibrating like a cell phone, even when nobody is calling.

It was everybody else remembering that gave us the permission to forget.

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