My sister and I aren’t twins, but my mother has always said we might as well have been. We’re just shy of two years apart, me the youngest. We are different in almost every way imaginable, but we were inseparable as kids. We grew up together in Jerusalem and Calgary, and not being a video-game or technology family, our games consisted almost entirely of make-believe scenarios, and our play-scape was expansive, diverse, and we were full of little eruptive squabbles and endless bouts of giggles.
I do have another sister whom I adore, six years older than me. She is an incredible big sister and we are very close, have way more in common and have a very beautiful bond – They are very different relationships though, as she was not an every-day play-mate and imagination-buddy in the same was as me and Galit. Me and Galit share our own world and even our own made-up language for things. We even have sister-telepathy. Astounding “coincidences” where we are thinking the exact same incredibly specific thing, miles apart, one will message the other, and the other will respond with “no way, you’re not going to believe this.” I woke up from a nap one day and thought “marble cake!” and then wondered why I was thinking about marble cake. Ten minutes later she sent me a photo of a marble cake she’d just baked. It’s always astounding but no longer surprising. She’s in many of the dreams I have at night. She’s just there, somehow beside me, not necessarily playing an active role in the plot of the dream. But she is present.
We have maintained a closeness over the years. Anyone who has gotten to know me intimately knows they hear about this sister all the time. I tell “when Galit and I were little stories” frequently.
She is present in my system in one way or another, in every waking moment of my life. I just kinda feel her.
We haven’t lived in the same country for over twenty years. Our relationship is mostly sharing funny memes, incredible videos that astound us, we bring up silly memories from our childhood, and more recently, we compare signs of aging.
We have codes. We have nicknames. We have variations on our nicknames you could write a PHD thesis in linguistics on.
In the last decade or two, our relationship has deepened into more philosophical topics. Whereas I am the obvious outspoken and public figure of the three of us, my sister has a quiet brilliance she doesn’t showcase. She immerses herself in depth in things she finds interesting, among them music. Sometimes she reaches out to ask me a question (like, can I explain why a key-change in a song makes it feel dramatic). Sometimes she asks me my ethical opinion on a particular conundrum.
I have always loved her stories from work. She worked as a translator and then pursued a life-long dream of working in television, behind the scenes. She excelled in it and received constant praise from her bosses and co-workers. She has an incredible work ethic and is liked by everyone who meets her.
She has always been far more sensible and pragmatic than me, that’s for sure. More organized. More clear about her goals. In an ice cream store of 81 flavours, she would still always choose vanilla. It would drive me crazy, but she was always quietly satisfied with her choice.
In the past few years, as the world has experienced apocalyptic levels of grimness, we have often caught ourselves mid-conversation about it, saying something like “I can’t believe this is a real conversation I am having with my sister. What world is this?” Far too many times now, we have stopped to say that.
Then came October 7th.
I was in a van with my band driving north from Los Angeles for a gig, happier than I’d been in ages, but finally asked my friend for his phone so I could check the news cause in the 20 minutes of Wi-Fi I’d had in the hotel that morning, there were a staggering number of messages in my inbox asking me if my family was ok. I didn’t even make it through the second paragraph. I saw the number of estimated dead, (which was about half of what the real count was), and I saw the word hostages, and my entire world collapsed and went black. I screamed and shook and asked if someone could hotspot me so I could call home. My parents were in Calgary. My dad answered, “hello?” and I just cried and cried, “Is Galit ok? Is Galit ok?”
She was, thankfully, physically safe for the time being. But nothing was ever going to be the same again in her world, and therefore not in mine either.
…
In the last few years, Galit has been working for an incredible organization called United Hatzalah. They are a first-responders network that specifically goes in to save lives when there’s been a terrorist attack. The team members are from widely diverse backgrounds and world-views, but it doesn’t matter. Saving lives matters. The volunteers risk their lives in order to save others. And the rest of the team in the office, and the donors, help make all of that possible.
On the day of the brutal attacks, many of the volunteers were killed. Some were kidnapped. Those who survived saved countless lives, including saving babies. Some stayed on the phone with whimpering children who were hiding in closets after seeing their parents butchered. None of them came back ok. My sister’s colleagues, my sister’s team members. Yes, she was physically safe for the time being, yes, I could breathe a sigh of relief for the most part, (though who was to say what more was to come) – but I knew she wasn’t ok. I certainly wasn’t, and I wasn’t even there.
Since then nothing has been the same. It’s gotten harder to check in, cause what the hell can I say. How are you? I know the answer is: “how can anyone be ok? Definitely not ok” – but of course, of course, I check in. I ask her, “what can be helpful right now? Do you want silly distractions or do you want to talk about it more?” She says, “send me whatever you like, I may not always be able to take it in.” Sometimes she sends me silly things too. “You have to continue to live.” Sometimes she sends me accounts of volunteers, heroic and gruesome and difficult. Sometimes she sends a cartoon depicting the insanity of trying to live and work and go grocery shopping in the midst of all this horror.
I send her cute videos of gorillas playing, or some funny meme, and we try to maintain some kind of “there is still SOME life outside of this situation.” - because we both think it is vital. I want her to do as well as possible in a horrible, terrifying situation. And she wants to know how I’m doing too.
There is guilt, I assure you, about me living far from the intensity of danger and carnage.
I asked her if I should come and help. She said I would be helpful there, but no.
This has been going on for months now,
I asked her if she wanted to come to Europe for a while, while I was there. She said she couldn’t really leave her colleagues behind to stay in that while she tries to enjoy herself. I am worried about her not getting to take a single breath’s break from it, but was also worried that her stepping out of the country would allow her tension enough of a break to see how bad it is, and that that might break her.
So we’ve continued our very long distance connection, and what used to feel like chatting from two different countries has turned into feeling like chatting from two different planets.
And now, these last few days, she is trying to go about her day and wait for Iranian missiles to fall. Nobody knows when they’ll land, or how many, or where exactly. But they have assured the world that they will fire.
It doesn’t matter to me one whit what anyone thinks about the situation, who is right, who is wrong.
This is my sister. The one I crawled around on the floor with laughing and tumbling. The one who pretended with me that we were riding horses while in the back seat of the car. The one who made up silly songs with me, and snuck treats out of the cupboard when my parents weren’t looking.
And I wanted you all to know about her. I wanted you to know that as I post my joyful posts about being back on the road, about being back on the train, as I insist on living my freedoms and privileges with every iota of appreciation and gratitude I can muster, that one of my limbs is under the metaphorical rubble of this situation, the situation where my sister lives and works and is part of saving lives.
I wanted you to know that she is one of the many good ones, in a horrible situation that is horrible through no personal fault of her own.
And that I’m scared I’ll never see her again.
Share this post