Last night I woke up around 3 a.m. thinking about my children. Not my children as they are today, but my children as they once were.
I could see all three of them vividly: Adin at eight, Asher at six, and Dafna at two.
We were living in Israel then. It was 1978. I was 33 years old and Arianne was almost 30. Israel was a different country in those days. We were struggling to make a life there and, a year later, we would leave for the United States. Looking back, those were not easy years. Yet they were wonderful years.
They were wonderful because our children were young, and we were young parents. The days often felt long, but the years passed with astonishing speed.
Now that I am in my eighties, I find the past visiting me more often. Sometimes it arrives unexpectedly and with remarkable clarity. I don’t just remember those days, I almost relive them. For a few moments, late at night, I am back there again. But then I remember that there is no way back.
Today my sons are in their mid-fifties. They are parents themselves, raising children who are now young adults and, in one case, still a teenager. My beautiful daughter, Dafna, left us in 2019. She never had the chance to experience the joy of becoming a mother herself. I miss her every day.
I wish there were a way to return to those earlier years, even if only for a moment. Thankfully, I have photographs that help keep those memories alive. Today’s parents have even more. They have thousands of photos, videos with sound, and countless digital traces of family life. Soon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, artificial intelligence will be able to create convincing digital twins of the people we love.
I wonder what it will feel like to sit across from a digital version of my eight-year-old son, or my six-year-old son, or my two-year-old daughter. Would it bring comfort? Joy? Sadness? Some combination of all three? I can barely think about that possibility without my thoughts turning to Dafna.
Then my mind drifts even further back. I think about my own childhood and about my parents when they were scarcely older than children themselves. My mother was just eighteen when I was born. My father was twenty-one. My grandmother was thirty-eight. Her mother, my great-grandmother was sixty-six when I took my first breath. She was 92 when Adin took his first. Five generations were alive at the same moment. While there is a good chance that I can become a great grandfather, I think being a great great grandfather is out of the question.
I wonder why these memories are so vivid now. Perhaps as we age, the distance between the past and the present somehow shrinks. Perhaps our memories become stronger but most likely because our sense of the present becomes weaker and the future? Let’s not speak so much about that.
I am also grateful that the wonderful mother of my children, Arianne and I share the memories of our young children with me. Her memory is much more vivid about that time then mine.
Thankfully, the people we loved, the places we lived, and the children we raised never really leave us with the exception of those that suffer from memory loss. I mourn their loss.
I love my children. But sometimes, especially at three o’clock in the morning, I miss my kids.
Two Thirds Done 
Avram – with Fathers Day scheduled this weekend in Canada, this post hits hard.
My 2 daughters are just heading out into the world tackling their 1st jobs with wide-eyed enthusiasm…and a quiet disbelief (“Dad can you believe 10 people sat in a room for 2 hours talking complete nonsense and we achieved nothing?” “Yes my darling I have experienced that once or twice.”)
In my study I have two photos – in each one of my daughters is on my shoulders making the kind of crazy face that only young kids make. Joyful, un-embarrassed, gleeful. I still see that joy in their eyes but, sadly, now on fewer and fewer occasions.
Thank you again.
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Avram, thank you for this most beautiful piece. It resonates deeply with me, and I am sure quite broadly with parents of grown children. The early days of parenthood were challenging, but also filled with joy and wonder as our kids grew and developed on a daily basis. And it all goes by so quickly. I am also terribly saddened to learn of the passing of your dear daughter Dafna at such a young age. Tragic, and painful in ways I can at best only imagine. Please share more about her in future posts if you feel comfortable doing so, so that we too can keep her memory alive.
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beautiful piece, Avram. I don’t have children and my early family life is not one I like to bring to the present. Reading this made me so happy for some reason as I could really feel the love you have for your family and the experience of bringing it present in the collapse of time you write about late at night. I am not sure this is an age related thing. I think the distraction of the routine of life we operate in forces our experience of “time” as a linear path and when we can truly slow down to be very present we can get glimpses of a different relationship with reality in the present moment that is past, present and future all at once. I can get there with meditation at times. And especially on vacation retreats.
The picture of Dafna at age two really captures her vibrant beautiful spirit. I understand missing someone every day and know how the depth of that sadness never lessens with the distance of time.
FWIW, I have experimented with creating AI personas that replicate lost loved ones. It is an interesting experiment. I had very mixed feelings of the interactions. Some healing and some very weird. Although, this was with some of the older models and I am sure today I could create better personas/agents. I just haven’t felt motivated to do so for some reason based on my first experiences. There is some research happening around this for grief recovery now and many ethical concerns percolating around the subject. Of course, China is already commercializing versions of “carrying your lost loved ones” with you in your pocket. We live in interesting times.
thank you for sharing this very moving post.
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Avram Very poyent and menschlich, I often rethink past times….so vivid…I feel that place and time is still there…it seems possible some how we should be able to slip back for a moment…we can visit in our mind where the whole scene still exist…maybe we will have the holodeck sometime soon…I feel alas we can only visit and cannot live in the past.
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I have had difficulties living in the present. For most of my life, the future dominated my thoughts. I preferred dreams over memories. The present was about how to move to the future. Now that is starting to reverse. While I think about the future, it is often one in which I am no longer present even though I might still have some impact on it.
Thankful, I have my piano. Playing piano is like a massage for my brain. But then often in the dark of the night, the past returns. Fortunately,
it is mostly the beautiful moments. I have learned to let the painful ones pass.
Then there are often the special moments I share with Deborah just walking through the small tourist free streets of the historical center of Lecce.
Our Palazzo renovation is where the past meets the future in the present. Designing a home that was initial built in 1731, to be our home in the future. It will be a place where tech meets limestone but also where there is a room dedicate to music to be played in the moment.
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Love you.
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