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I left Oma and Opa with relief and dread and headed for the slate, spare ice of Vermont in January. My first time in the snow and it was record cold, where you could feel your body make preparations to shut down if you stood too long in one place. I was not the only one fighting to keep myself alive.
My grandparents spent 45 years in New York. After that despair-filled visit, I saw them again in California, no longer on the verge of death, but abutting a new verge, one in which all that came before them - the Orthodox Jewish parents, the children's homes in Germany, the kibbutz in Palestine, surviving the war that birthed the state of Israel, the immigration to New York - was scattered in chipped mosaic about them like the tchotchkes left in boxes too long.
In a period of a few months she had stopped eating or sleeping much back home. A stroke? Loneliness? She began to fall out of bed at night. She needed, suddenly, a cane to walk with. She wanted to throw herself into traffic. She forgot where she was. Who she was. She asked, "What do I have to live for?" It was move or die, though she fought us every step of the way. My father, who had left them more than 30 years before (fled them really, as if they were a war) now closed the 3,000-mile gap to move them next door to him at my urging.
Somewhere between getting on and off the plane, my Oma forgot that my father was her son.
He has since become "a nice man." "The manager" of their house. He shares a name with her own lost son, Ilan - changed to the spelling "Elon" for American eyes and tongues - but he is not that golden-haired child she used to tell me about, the one with the beautiful curls that were cut off by a babysitter when he smeared them in rationed jelly. She lamented those curls to me throughout languid, hot summers I spent with her and Opa in their muggy New York home.
This "Elon," my father, is not the swift smart kid who learned English so well and fast when they came to the states in 1956. She remembers only her eldest, my uncle Joe (Joaf), who has trekked the states himself, now in Florida, moved perhaps by some reawakened immigrant spirit, trying to find a place of peace and home.
"You don't forget who you have borne!" she cries when we try to explain the family matrix. "How can you forget such a thing?"
"It was just a bundle, barely a person, perhaps you have just forgotten," my Opa counters, always pained, always in disbelief that a brain can betray such an intrinsic reality. "A baby is not a bundle!" she cries. "Only a woman can know this."
It does seem impossible, even at 88 years old, that you can forget your son. But clearly, sometimes you do. Not only sons are forgotten, and not only by mothers. What about when you are a father, with a daughter? You did not carry the child in your tissue or feed her with your blood. She grows up to be 20, then 30, and you let her drift away and out of your life, trust her to continue to bear her burdens silently. You don't feel the need to reconcile the past, your own '60s-inspired wanderings and damage inflicted by neglect. You have a second family, and then, watching your mother forget you, do not realize that your daughter has begun to wonder (this grown woman who doesn't need you anymore), "How long before you forget me, too?"
- Jordan Rosenfeld lives in Petaluma, Calif. She is the host and co-producer of "Word by Word," an interview-style literary radio show on NPR-affiliate KRCB.