The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

I always used to think she was heartless, even though I admit now that I’d looked forward to those brief periods of time between boyfriends, when I’d have my mom to myself for a few weeks. Now I wish I’d understood sooner, in time to discuss it with her. I finally get it, Mom. If you don’t let them in, if you don’t really love them in the first place, they can’t hurt you when they leave. But like so many other things in my life, it’s too late for that.

Rose felt a lump in her throat. So then, the burden had been passed to Hope too. She knew that now. Her own closed heart had repercussions that she had never imagined. She was responsible for all of it. But how could she tell Hope that love did exist, that it had the power to change everything? She couldn’t. So instead, she cleared her throat and tried to focus on the present. “There is nothing wrong with you, dear,” she told her granddaughter. Hope glanced at her grandmother and looked away. “But what if there is?” she asked softly. “You must not blame yourself,” Rose said. “Some things are simply not meant to be.”

“You are not your mother, my dear,” Rose said gently. Her heart ached, for this—all of this—was her own fault. Who could have known that her decisions would reverberate for generations?

“Maybe if you’d been, like, capable of feeling anything when you were married to Dad, you wouldn’t be divorced right now,” she says finally, over the whir of the mixer. My breath catches in my throat and I stare at her. “What are you talking about? I showed emotion.” She turns the mixer off. “Whatever,” she mutters. “Only to, like, send me to my room. When did you ever act like you were happy to be with Dad?”

“Yeah, well, I’m thirty-six going on seventy-five; I’m divorced; I’m sinking financially; I’ve got a kid who hates me.” I pause and look down. “You’ve got better things to do than worry about me. Shouldn’t you be out doing something… I don’t know, something young, single people do?”

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I came home to help her, the same cycle took over; I expected that she’d see how much I loved her as she lay dying, but instead, she continued to keep me at a distance. When she told me, on her deathbed, that she loved me, the words didn’t feel real; I want to believe that she felt that way, but I knew it was more likely that she was hazy and delusional in her final moments and thought she was talking to one of her countless boyfriends. “I was always a lot closer to my grandmother than to my mom,” I tell Gavin.

What I want to say is that the reason we’re divorced is he got bored. He got insecure. He got emotionally needy. He got flirted with by a stupid twenty-two-year-old with legs up to her neck. But I know there’s a grain of truth to what he’s saying. The more I felt him slipping away, the more I retreated into myself instead of hanging on. I swallow back the guilt.

“I need you to go to Paris,” Rose said calmly. Hope’s eyes widened. “Paris?” “Paris,” Rose repeated firmly. Before Hope could ask any questions, she went on. “I must know what happened to my family.” Rose reached into her pocket and withdrew the list, the one that felt like it was on fire, along with a check she’d carefully made out for a thousand dollars. Enough for a plane ticket to France. Her palm burned as Hope took them from her. “I must know,” Rose repeated softly. The waves crashed against the dam of her memories, and she braced herself for the flood. “Your… family?” Hope asked tentatively. Rose nodded, and Hope unfolded the slip of paper and read what was written there. Seven names, Rose thought. She looked upward, to where the stars of the Big Dipper were beginning to appear. Seven stars in the sky. “I must know what happened,” she told her granddaughter. “And so, now, must you.”

“All these people?” Annie asked, breaking the silence, bringing Rose back to the moment. “They all died? What happened?” Rose paused. “The world fell down,” she said finally. It was all she could explain, and it was the truth. The world had collapsed upon itself, writhing and folding into something she didn’t recognize anymore. “I don’t understand,” Annie murmured. She looked scared. Rose took a deep breath. “Some secrets cannot be spoken without undoing a lifetime,” she said. “But I know that when my memory dies, so too will the loved ones I have kept close to my heart all these years.”

“Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year,” Gavin explains. “It’s customary for us to go to a flowing body of water—like the ocean—for a ceremony called a tashlich.” “You’re Jewish?” I ask. He smiles. “On my mom’s side,” he says. “I was kind of raised half Jewish, half Catholic.” “Oh.” I just look at him. “I didn’t know that.” He shrugs. “Anyhow, the word tashlich basically means ‘casting out.’ ”

He nods. “The ceremony involves throwing crumbs into the water to symbolize the casting out of our sins. Usually bread crumbs, but I guess pie crumbs would work too.” He pauses and adds, “Do you think that might have been what your grandmother was doing?”

I’m not accustomed to people caring, people helping me. It makes me uneasy, and I’m not sure how to reply. “Thanks,” I finally say. “But I could never ask you to do that.”

“Nearly eleven thousand children from France died in the Shoah,” Carole said, reading my expression. “This hall always reminds me of all that could have been and never was.”

“Judaism is not simply something one practices, but a state of the heart and of the soul, an identity that runs in one’s blood. I suspect perhaps all religions are this way, for those who truly believe in them.”

More than seventy-six thousand Jews were taken from France, most never to return.”

“Most of the young ones never returned. They were taken to the gas chamber immediately because the Germans considered them useless.”

I can’t fully wrap my mind around the idea that my grandmother and the apparent love of her life have been living in the same country for sixty years and never knew the other had survived. But if Jacob had found her during the war, my mother might never have been born, and of course I wouldn’t have been either. So had things worked out the way they were supposed to? Or is my very existence a slap in the face of true love?

It is mankind that creates the differences, she’d told me last week. That does not mean it is not all the same God. Henri

shrouded in secrecy. The Koran teaches us to give to those in need and to do it quietly, for God will know your deeds.

“Some kinds of love are more powerful than others,” Alain finally replies. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t all real. Some loves are the kind we try to make fit but are never quite right.” He glances at me, and I look away.

I’m left standing there, feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge. When had I stopped believing that things could work out? I hadn’t been trying to rain on Annie’s parade; I simply want to help her manage her expectations. Expecting good things leads to getting hurt, I’ve found.

I’d realized in my early twenties that having a baby with a selfish man meant that my child would always have to deal with that selfishness too. I’d been too naive to realize then that you can’t change a man. And my daughter is paying for that mistake.

“This isn’t the life I thought I’d have,” I say. Gavin shakes his head. “Hope, it never is. You know that, right? Life doesn’t ever turn out the way we plan.” I sigh. I don’t expect him to understand.

“I did not teach her properly how to love,” Rose said softly. “It is my fault.” That was why Josephine pushed the men who loved her away, because Rose had kept her at arm’s length. Because Rose had been terrified of relying on the one person she loved the most. Because Rose knew that the people you loved could be taken away one day with no warning. Those were not the lessons she had meant to impart to Josephine. But she had.