Love Can Break Open Your Heart
by Nina B. Mogilnik
I was so excited when my friend Brea agreed to join me at a lunch and learn class I’d been attending. It was only a four-week module, but each was a stand-alone session, so attending the last one with me would still be meaningful—I hoped.
I thought we could walk together a mile or so south and then go across town to the class by bus. Just our luck, a bus was pulling away as we approached the stop. “Up for walking the rest of the way?” I asked. “Sure,” came the reply.
I’m naturally a fast walker, but for Brea’s sake, I slow my pace. I’ve been doing that for a while now, to accommodate her physical limitations, and to be mindful of any other hiccups that might emerge on our outings. I worry about curbs, about obstacles created by the endless construction projects in the city. I worry about dog walkers not keeping their half dozen charges together as we pass. I worry about pushing Brea too hard, even at a slower pace. Honestly, I just worry.
We made it across town and were early to class, which was my hope, since the upstairs restaurant space gets full, and navigating from the lunch buffet to our seats can be tricky, with dropped bags and fallen jackets in the way. I found us two seats at the opposite end of the room from where Rabbi Tali would be, and Rebecca, whom I’d met and sat next to the week before, was kind enough to move over one seat, so Brea and I could have two seats forming a corner for ourselves.
We put our bags on our chairs and went to get food. Brea is so slight that I worry she’ll get nudged or shoved in any crowded space. I got food for myself, put it by my place at the table and went back to help her. I put some potatoes with aoli on her plate, and a piece of challah. She said “no” to the falafel. I insisted that she had to try the mashed potato-stuffed chicken schnitzel, a specialty of the house. I grabbed two sets of utensils and some napkins, and we took our seats.
I watched Brea trying to figure out how to eat the food on her plate. Her hands betray her often when we’re out, if a task involves cutting, or pouring, or lifting and putting back down. I try very hard to walk the excruciating line between assisting and infantilizing, and it is never easy, and always upsetting. But I saw how the schnitzel was a kind of rebuke on her plate, a temptation Brea could not access on her own.
“OK if I cut this for you?” I’m honestly not sure if Brea replied. I went about cutting the schnitzel into reasonably sized pieces, and tackled the potatoes in aoli too. I noticed that both my knife and hers wound up on Brea’s plate. I think she just lost track of whose was whose.
I was relieved to see that she ate. I had insisted—in what I joke with her is my friend-bullying way—that I would not eat alone, and would be insulted if she didn’t join me. But I also worry that she lives mostly via her nutritional infusions, and eats little outside of that.
After class, we walked all the way home, and stopped at our new favorite bakery/coffee shop. We each got a hot beverage and a raisin rugelach. Brea claimed to have loved the class, not focusing on the handout, but on what Rabbi Tali was saying. I saw that she couldn’t follow where we were in the handout but thankfully, reading it was not necessary.
At the bakery, I offered to pour Brea’s milk into her coffee. I’ve done that many times before. “Just say when,” I reminded her. We talked a bit more about the class, and about the few grocery items we needed to get on our respective way(s) home. We finished our post-lunch snacks and I let her pay. Class was on me, and I told her that we were now even.
Brea is two years younger than I am. We lived a block or so apart from one another in the suburbs, and met years ago commuting on the train. We hardly saw each other in those years, what with work, child-rearing, and more. But we now live blocks apart in NYC, and we see and speak with each other regularly.
I have visited her too many times in a nearby hospital, where I tried to make myself useful by ordering meals I was pretty sure she wouldn’t touch, making sure the nurse had the correct number for her husband, and assisting the nurse with some task when asked. I hate hospitals. Really, who doesn’t? Unless you’re visiting a healthy newborn baby and its mom, hospitals are awful. They reek of suffering and death. But not visiting Brea was not an option.
And then came the early onset diagnosis. It’s hard to describe how that feels as a friend, other than it’s yet another one of those things that makes me think: Hey God, what the actual f…k? Of all the people in this vast universe, you pick her?
But what’s done is done. People can’t be undiagnosed, and she can’t not be my friend. So I’ve become for her what I was for my father, when I helped him bathe and talked to him about his two identical houses, and what I am day in and day out for my autistic son, who regales me endlessly with the same words, phrases and questions. I’m the receptacle, the receiver, but also the returner. I had conversations with my father, Z”l, that made no sense, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to be in his world for as long as he was physically in mine. I talk with Noah about the same things over and over, and try to inject new things all the time to keep him tethered to our world, even while we sojourn through his. And I cut Brea’s food, play blocker on crowded sidewalks, and answer repeat questions because that’s where the evolution of our friendship has taken us.
It's easy to view life at times as a trial, as a test of emotional and physical endurance. And maybe that’s really what it is. Or maybe it’s the endless opportunity to make space in your heart for the things that wound you deeply, for the struggling and suffering of others because it’s only then that you discover who you are. Will you be the person who has nonsensical conversations, who cuts a grown woman’s food for her, who answers Sesame Street questions from a man-child you have loved since before he was born? You might never get the chance to know. Some days, I wish I never did. But then I think about all the love I’d miss out on giving. And especially about what I’d miss out on getting in return.
Nina Mogilnik worked for decades in non-profit, government and philanthropy settings, doing work she believed did some good and no harm. She moved with her family from the suburbs to NYC after her autistic son graduated from high school at age 21. She continued to do some work remotely, but then realized that her real job needed to be (re) constructing a life for her son in his new home and city. She continues to write--as a blogger for The Times of Israel, for Medium, and occasionally for other publications. This is how she records/accounts for/shouts about/expresses and otherwise communicates the challenges and joys of living a complicated, sometimes heartbreaking, but always true, life.