Heart-Earned Wisdom: Not bearing the details

I am at the sulfur baths at a hotel at the Dead Sea with my husband. We are trying to relax. It's been a very difficult couples of weeks.-- the terrorist attack at Mercaz ha Rav Yeshiva and a beautiful young child - Hilleli - in our community who is hovering between death and life from an accident at the nursery school where she was choked by a curtain.

We have one night to relax, unwind. I used to be very good at going on vacation. I could chill out in a minute. But now, ever since my son's murder by terrorists six years ago, I find it hard to unwind. Working helps me because I don't have space for my mind to wander. Empty time fills me with the chill stark terror of what we've lived through - losing our 13 year old son, Koby, an 8th grader when he went hiking instead of going to school. Instead terrorists beat him and his friend Yosef Ish Ran to death. 

But today I am in the hot murky water of the sulfur bath with its faint aroma of eggs and matches lit and blown out. I walk down the steps slowly. "It's slippery; watch out," says one of the 2 men in the pool. They are both dark with ample mid sections and hairy backs. I enter and immediately lie on my back in the hot water, floating, trying to let all of my tension go. I stand and one of the men begins to talk to me. He says, "It's nice to relax from all of the stress of work."

"What do you do?" I ask.

He says to me, "I'm a doctor at Abu Kabir."

I look at him in shock. Abu Kabir is the forensic institute located near Tel Aviv where they take dead people. I know they perform autopsies there. I don't know what else. But whatever they do, it is not a pleasant place. The boys from Mercaz ha Rav were taken there for identification.

Sometimes after a terror attack, there is no body to identify. Sometimes they have to identify people by their limbs or teeth.

I don't want to think about Abu Kabir. I lie down on the water and try to breathe, try to let the sulfur soak into my weary bones.

The man leaves to soak in  another pool and I ask his friend who remains: "Is he really a doctor?"

No, he says laughing.

I walk out and lay down on the chaise lounge. A half an hour later my husband walks in, and I join him back in the pool. I tell him what happened. And then almost as an afterthought I say: "Koby wasn't in Abu Kabir, was he?"

For some reason I thought he had died and been buried. I know there was a period between the time they found him and the time he was buried. But I thought he was nearby with the chevra kadisha, close to my home. I didn't let the words Abu Kabir enter my mind. It is the only forensic institute in Israel that performs autopsies.

I stop breathing. I have always felt a bit fortunate (funny word I know) that I didn't have to go looking for him in the hospital, the trauma of not finding him. "Was Koby in Abu Kabir?" I ask my husband, and he says he is not sure.

I don't want to know. After 7 years I still can't bear to hear all of the details.

I leave the water and lie down on my chaise lounge. The attendant covers me with a sheet, like a corpse. I pull the sheet over my head, and I cry