“I started understanding death when I was little,” my mother said in the final year of her illness. “I have always lived in its shadow. I can hold it off enough to let me fight in the morning, but not to let me fall asleep at night.” Photograph Courtesy Nir Baram

At night I used to pad up and down the dark hallways in our house and stop outside my parents’ bedroom. Bending over to squint through the keyhole, I could see my mother’s slight body huddled on the right side of the bed underneath heavy covers, her head disappearing among them. Ever since her body was consigned to the disease, my mother had been melancholy. She squabbled with fate, demanded an explanation (I’ve never harmed a soul, she insisted), and quoted the Psalm we always recited at the annual memorial service for her mother, my grandmother Sarah: “Princes have persecuted me without a cause.”

On a hot July day in the final year of her illness, we wandered around the cemetery looking for my grandmother’s grave. Every year we had to search for it. “Plot C, Row 4,” my father, whose memory was his greatest pride, claimed. “No, it’s all the way up there, next to the black tombstone,” my uncle mumbled wearily as he dabbed the sweat from his face. At some point everyone turned to my older brother Ran, who was famous for his flawless memory that kept our family history safe. But Ran was tongue-tied this time, since in fact he was hopeless at directions, and was always getting lost when he drove around Jerusalem.

At last we found her grave. We stood in a group and conducted the memorial. No one said anything about it during the service, but we all clearly understood that the fates of mother and daughter were one and the same; that was the sum of it. My father stood next to my mother with his arm around her. No one else dared to look at her. Instead our eyes roamed in every direction: we examined the design of various graves, pondered gilded high heels, inspected stones we would leave behind. My mother was hunched, with a pale red scarf covering her gaunt head and her thin body confined in a heavy black dress. Toward the end of the ceremony she approached the grave and said, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be there soon.” Then she turned to us with a condescending smile, as though she were mocking our silence. Ran stared at her, and I wondered how he was able to remember everything: Was he busy recording each event while it unfolded? And how do you even remember a memory?

We all plodded off to the car, but my mother looked surprisingly cheerful. During the drive home I began to feel envious of Ran. For the first time, I understood that he was the only one of us who preserved the hours and the days, whose memory could keep things in chronological order, and that he would remember her better than any of us would. Mom was sitting in the front seat. “I started understanding death when I was little,” she said. “I have always lived in its shadow. I can hold it off enough to let me fight in the morning, but not to let me fall asleep at night.”

That night, I sat down to write something I called “A Brief History of Death.” Ran’s capacity to remember everything threatened me. Each time I looked at him I imagined an endless abundance of memories organized like books on a shelf. I felt he was robbing us of the days we had all shared, that at the end of every event he grabbed it and fled. I came to admire the smooth and comprehensive way he answered questions about the past, aware of all the fine details of color and sound that brought things back to life. I believed that Ran knew the secret that could dull the reality of loss. “A Brief History of Death” was supposed to be my written response to Ran’s memory.

My mother never went to university. Her family was poor, and from the age of twelve she had to manage the household, after her father walked out and her mother plunged into depression. She was, to the end of her days, pained by this missed opportunity, though she seldom mentioned it, insinuating that she had given up an education for her children’s sake. She learned about literature, history, and philosophy from her educated friends, particularly Hannah Sternberg, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy. When Dr. Sternberg visited, she and my mother would sit in her bedroom reading books, and after she left my mother would blissfully float around the house with a secretive glow on her face. She’d sit in the living room until late at night, surrounded by books, sometimes with a glass of red wine and a cigarette, and those were her sweetest hours. But within a few days the details would blur in her memory and she would become embittered again, humiliated by her status as a student of Dr. Sternberg’s when the two of them had been high-school classmates and had dreamed of discussing philosophy and literature together as equals. When I once snapped at her, “Why don’t you go back to school now? There is a university in Jerusalem, as I recall,” she wondered, with genuine surprise, how I could fail to see that it was too late.

Shortly after my thirteenth birthday, my mother announced somewhat mysteriously that it was time for me “to get to know the books.” I was the star player in the local soccer team, and my other interests included fighting and reading adventure stories, and now she expected me to sit in her room reading her beloved Russian classics: Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. She would lie in bed reading aloud as I stood near the door, or sprawled on the floor, or sulked on a stool. I didn’t really have to sit through it; I could have refused. But for reasons I was unable to fathom at the time, I clung to a conviction that I must do as she told me. After a few months, I began to listen: we read Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and I liked it from the first page. At some point, though, I became aware of the narrator’s ignorance, and this notion of a storyteller stumbling blindly in the fog, without truly knowing anything, fired my imagination.

After a while we stopped reading together. There was a distance between us. I was not the boy she had dreamed of; perhaps I had been cast as the “bad boy” for so long that I’d fallen in love with this mask. But sometimes, without telling anyone, I still read “our books,” or ones that could have been ours, like Balzac’s “A Harlot High and Low.” At dinner we occasionally recommended books to each other and murmured something about how, one day soon, we would read together again.

As soon as I began writing “A Brief History of Death,” I discovered that I could not stop lying. Our cemetery visit occurred on a stormy night; Ran had a machine inside his body that stole all our dreams; the main character was an amalgamation of my mother and my grandmother. As I wrote, I wanted to erect a wall between the two women and remain faithful to my mother, but my grandmother’s character kept invading the story. Perhaps this was because, ever since I was a child, my mother had spoken of my grandmother as a woman whose arteries had been injected with poison by life itself—a victim of the malice and treachery of other people. Just like my mother was.