The Year Ends. The Scars Remain.
The middle of Dave's year was given over to his health and the end to a story with unexpected personal significance.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
I have this moment every day, often in the early morning when the dogs take us out for a walk.
The sun could be shining, or the sky could be clouded over. The air might feel warm with a light breeze or cold, damp, and blustery.
My inner monologue goes like this: Good morning, world. I’m still here.
It started the morning following my return home from the hospital in late April after suffering a heart attack.
The first day back I shuffled around the house and went back to bed. On the second day, I walked to the end of the driveway and back, with an escort — just in case.
With each successive day I walked farther, down the hill to the corner, then halfway around the block, and then a big achievement, all the way around the block. The latter included walking up an incline, which at first, I could not do without stopping. As the weeks went by, hills became easier and one block became two, and then three.
Eventually, I was allowed to walk without an escort.
The routine was pretty much the same with swimming. I began by walking in the pool. Then I mixed walking with swimming, building one length at a time, until I was able to measure my swimming by yardage.
After robotic bypass surgery in June, I had to start the process over again, walking to the end of the driveway, etc.
In early May I wrote a column titled “My Heart Attack Has a Nickname,” after which I didn’t write again for nearly two months, lacking the mental stamina (writing is work). I resumed the column at the end of June, with “As I Was Saying.”
The heart issues also forced me to hit pause on reviewing edits for a book I am self-publishing. That delay meant that I would not have a copy in my hands by the end of this year, as I had hoped. I am eager to achieve that milestone (after dragging the story along with me for 30 years) and move on to other projects.
The heart attack, surgery, and recovery dominated the middle five months of the year.
A few days after the heart attack, from my bed at Emory University Hospital, I wondered aloud whether I would be able travel to Maine and paddle a kayak on the lake by the family cabin in the woods — and if I couldn’t, what was the point?
An irritated young cardiologist bluntly rebuked me. That should not be your concern, he said in no uncertain terms. You are lucky to be alive.
His words stayed with me when we traveled to Maine in late August. That first kayak outing was a “shecheyanu moment,” as I wrote in this space afterward.
In late September, we finally took the trip to Barcelona that we were forced to cancel in March 2020 because of the COVID pandemic. My column for the AJT’s Oct. 15 edition was to have been about the medieval Jewish quarter in the Spanish city of Girona.
Then came Oct. 7 and the Hamas-led terror attacks in Southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
Needless to say, I pulled the Girona column, which would have been out of place.
Two days after the terror attacks, I learned that my extended family in Israel had suffered particularly hard. A dozen people on my family tree — people I did not know — were missing in the immediate aftermath.
They were descended from or related by marriage to descendants of my great-grandfather’s twin brother, who emigrated in 1882 from Romania and helped found what today is the Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov.
A mother and daughter kidnapped by Hamas were released relatively early in the hostage drama. The bodies of three elders, murdered on Oct. 7, were buried even as seven other family members were held hostage in Gaza. As I write this, a 38-year-old man remains a captive. His wife, two children, and mother-in-law were released on Nov. 26, along with his slain father-in-law’s sister and her daughter.
The only ray of sunshine in this darkness has been newfound contact with several cousins — highlighted by the extraordinary coincidence of meeting two who came to Atlanta as part of a delegation of hostage family representatives.
When this ordeal is over, if there is a family gathering in Israel — similar to one my wife and I attended many years ago — I hope to be there.
For now, the physical reminders of this year are visible when I take off my shirt and see in the mirror the still-healing scars on my chest from the robotic bypass.
As for the psychic scars, I never was one to have a regular gratitude practice — but now I have that daily moment.
Good morning world. I’m still here.
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