 |
 |
 |
|
A searing portrait of a mother's grief and strength in the wake of unthinkable tragedy.
Once
upon a time, I was meandering down the road of life with my husband,
Jon. It was a regular and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm
beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Normal.
On the
morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin's beloved
twenty-three-year-old son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival
billed as a celebration of unity and love-and, in that moment, her life
was forever separated into The Before and The After. Over the next
eleven months, she and her husband, Jon, would work tirelessly-in public
and behind the scenes-to secure the hostages' release, to breathe some
humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless
emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent
pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And when Hersh and
five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence
and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost.
In When We See You Again, Rachel
pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper, giving voice to the
broken among us, and reminding us that even when the world feels choked
with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it? Her
own experience has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a universal
story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember
and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love.
"There
are days when I break completely," she writes. "I have cried for an
entire day straight. I didn't think it was physically possible, but the
weeping never let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hoping I
would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whisper
of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us."
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|