Even if I’m Not // Devorie Kreiman shares an excerpt from her upcoming book about loss, grief and faith

My first words as a mother were, “Don’t drop him.” It was as if I knew, even before I held my first child, that I wouldn’t be able to hold onto my children.
We are the family who lost half our children; over a ten-year period, four of our eight children died as infants from a rare mitochondrial disorder. After the babies died, I was sure that nothing that terrible could happen again.
Not to us.
Then, Yossi, our oldest child and only son, drowned six weeks before his wedding day.
As a child, Yossi loved playing with words. Once, when he was getting ready for school, I said to him, “There are bagels on the counter if you’re hungry.”
He said, “Even if I’m not.”
“What?”
“The bagels are on the counter even if I’m not hungry.”
After Yossi died, I grappled with long-held beliefs: Hashem is close, everything that happens has a purpose, and our neshamos continue to exist after we leave this world. The comfort of these truths was there for me, if I was ready to accept it, but also—as I learned—“even if I’m not.”
The following is an excerpt from Even If I’m Not, a memoir by Devorie Kreiman

Chapter One
November 5, 2010

The house wakes today like any other day. Our big-boned Mediterranean two is nearly 100 years old, with single-pane windows that invite the chill and rain inside.
Nachman’s alarm goes off at 4:45 a.m. He gets dressed without turning on the light, soft-foots down the stairs and out the door into the Los Angeles fog for Shacharis. He’s back at 6:45 a.m.
Last night, we went through the to-dos for Yossi’s wedding and agreed that this morning we would call the jeweler, a friend of a friend in Montreal, to order the diamond ring for his kallah, Shaina.
Nachman and I hunch over the speakerphone. “Shaina prefers a setting without prongs around the diamond.”
The jeweler says, “A tension setting. Very artsy. The diamond seems to float.”
“Oh no,” Nachman says. “It would cause a lot of tension if the diamond floats away.”
The jeweler laughs. “You may want to go with a sturdier setting.”

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