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All the sounds that sprung open in the morning, and hustled, and lived, and were used all day long, are now being put sweetly back to bed. This is what I miss most when the music changes and nothing is the same.
I know my red hair is considered ugly, but I don’t care because I have a part of my father that I get to wear on my head every day. Some people may think it is something to be embarrassed of, but to me it is a crown.
I have always thought my red hair was beautiful, even if no one else did. I love the way it looks like a strawberry from the garden and its flecks of shiny gold that sparkle in the sunlight. More than anything else, I love my hair because it is the hair of my father and even though he is not alive anymore, it shows me that he once was here, and that he left me his special hair color to remember him by. I get to wear a part of him on my head every day
“You never, ever really know who the real person is. People are good at pretending. They are sweet and nice and then when they don’t need you anymore, who knows what they can do. You never actually know a person all the way. People know how to dress their souls up, put some makeup on. They can act polite when everyone is looking but you can never be sure.”
“The whole purpose of this world really is for the next world, you know. This world is the corridor, before the palace. We are supposed to prepare ourselves in the corridor, so we can enjoy the palace. It is what our sages taught us. The next world is for eternity; this world is so fleeting.”
“You can go to heaven from here if you want,” I say, “but I am going home from here.”
‘Let the dead bury the dead but while I’m alive I must live and be happy.’”
‘We can know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.’
Slowly, life goes on, and one night I open my bedroom window and the frogs and the birds are singing their beautiful songs, and the stream is dancing along to them. I realize that even though I am still sad I am also happy again. I can almost hear Zaidy singing along with the frogs. I think of all the people that are not here anymore; my father, my brother, my Zaidy—and I wonder why I am the one to be found right here, listening to the world sing its sweet song. Even though I have no answers—and sometimes the sadness in my heart feels like it will pull me down and bury me—I still feel a
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“All destruction comes from thinking about others as different than you. To be cruel to someone, you cannot think of them as yourself. So, we make them a stranger in our eyes. As if we don’t all have the same blood in our veins, as if we don’t breathe the same air. No one can be cruel unless they really view someone as different but that rips the world apart. We cannot be different. We are all part of the same God. We are never alone.”
The entire world as we know it will fracture at its seams and explode into smithereens, causing destruction to everyone and everything in its wake. All because we haven’t yet learned to view each other as ourselves . . . that we are the furthest thing from strangers . . . that we are all part of one whole. But some people will want to remain separate, and by pulling us apart, they will unravel the very essence of what keeps the world whole, until it has no choice but to explode. Like a cancer, splitting the body’s own cells until every organ breaks down and the body, by doing to its own, dies.
“Think of it as the greatest gift of all. You don’t wait to see what kind of life you lived or what kind of person you became, you choose for yourself no matter what you are going through. You don’t wait for life to happen to you, you happen to life. With every move you make you can choose to make it what you want, what you believe in, even if it is the harder choice.”
I hear the faint sound of birds singing outside, I hear the slight ripple of a stream lapping over colorful rocks, I hear frogs croaking in unison. I am home. I am alive. And slowly, so slowly, I feel my heart open to let the music enter, and I take my new husband’s hand, and we dance.
If you are reading this now, you are alive, and for you, too, the world was created for you alone. All the beauty of the world was created just for you, and for each one of us.
We cannot always prevent the bad, but we also cannot let it overshadow the good.
Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up.
My grandmother wants you to know what she went through so you can change the way our future looks. She wants you to know you can never let this happen again. She wants you to know that it doesn’t matter what race you are, or the color of your skin, or what religion you practice; we are all one. She wants you to treat others with respect and she wants you to stand up for those who are being treated unjustly, no matter who they are. She wants you to remember, so you can stand up for peace.
