It's the dishwasher making that awful sound. The whirl and the guttural bellow shaking the counter with it's perverse gyration. It's just the dishwasher, a middle class to some, upper class to most, appliance that cleans and disinfects my pots and pans and glassware so I needn't spend an hour of back breaking labor hunched over the sink; letting the clean water run down the drain where no one will get to drink it. It's the dishwasher that leaks and overflows onto my laminated kitchen flooring which I often stand and stare at wistfully wishing it to magically turn into hardwood.
I am complaining about my dishwasher- the thing I have to make my life more convenient-while people are dying.
People are always dying. Not to be morbid, just actual. People are dying every day, every hour, every minute another goes. It's the biggest part of life and it's the hardest to explain. I looked at my little blonde headed daughter this evening and wondered when it was time to tell her that everyone's life as they know it ends. When do you tell children such things? Before they see it for themselves? A bug. A pet. A flower. A leaf. Death feeds life.
I am thinking of all those things as I am listening to my dishwasher's death rattle and wondering what sounds Israeli mothers are listening to tonight. How they might be wondering how to tell their child about the death of a loved one. How they might be mourning the death of their own loved one. Their own baby. I am listening to my dishwasher in frustration and in shame because I was angry at being inconvenienced by a first world appliance that spews fresh water while Mothers hold their breaths waiting to see if the pain of loss will subside long enough to live another minute. That they are afraid to close their eyes and lose the image of their child, their home as they knew it to be only a few days ago.
And I have no rationale left. No linear thought. So I sit, hating the dishwasher while mothers cry in the dark. And I rise to turn the stupid thing off. And I fall on my knees. And pray for a peace that passes all understanding, even when I don't believe.