My Teddy bear

 
 
 
 

This is "Dubi", my Teddy bear. He’s approximately 34 years old. I got him when I was a baby. I know his name is not original ("Dubi" means “Teddy bear” in Hebrew), but it’s better than “Dubi Ein Shem” ("No Name Teddy bear" in Hebrew), the previous name I gave him.

Eight years ago Dubi had a clothes dryer accident. His left side got stuck between the dryer door and its drum. Because he was stuck against the hot drum during all the drying process he was burned. While his right side stayed soft (for a 26 year old Teddy bear at that time) and in his pinkish orange color, his left side was shrunken, dark and crunchy. His left eye was worn out and milky due to the friction with the hot drum.

When I saw how he looked after he got out of the dryer I started crying. He is my favorite doll. He comforted me during hard nights at school. He came with me to the USA when I taught photography in summer camp. He kept me going through my BA degree. And now he is burnt and suffering.

 
 

After I calmed down I started Dubi’s Recovery process.

First thing I did was brushing his burnt fur with a brush and fabric softener. I worked slowly and carefully, trying to break the lumps of scorched fur while also not tearing all his fur completely. It took about an hour, and at the end Dubi was left with his left side still darker than his right side, and with a lot less fur, but he was no longer crunchy.

 

The next thing I did was buying him a new eye. I ordered a set of two sets of Teddy bear eyes from EBay. Because I had to wait a few weeks for the eyes to arrive, and because I didn’t want Dubi to have his milky and damaged eye in the open, I made him an eye patch. He wore it until I replaced his eye with a good one.

Another damage Dubi had was that the heat malted his sponge stuffing. His left arm and leg were completely empty. Fortunately, I worked then on my final art project for my degree, and I worked with sponges, so I had what I needed to stuff him. I used scissors to shred the sponge into tiny pieces. I unpicked a small section from his left arm and leg paws seams, re-stuffed them, and re-sewn them.

After the whole treatment I felt Dubi was himself again. He had scars, surely, but it didn’t bother us - him and me.

A year after the clothes dryer accident I adopted Misha, my beloved cat who died a year ago. One of Misha’s favorite hobbies was chewing fabrics. One day, when I was at work, she found Dubi on the bed between the blankets, and started munching his paws. When I came back home all his four paws were eaten and had stuffing coming out of them.

All I could think was: Wasn’t it enough he had a severe accident and got burned; he had to get eaten by a cat???

When he was new, his paws were white with pinkish orange dots, like the color of his fur. Through the years they wore down and faded, and became only white. Now, that I had to sew new paws for him, I wanted to restore them to their original color. Unfortunately I didn’t find a fabric with the right color at any of the fabric stores, so I compromised on a white fabric with red dots. He no longer had a solid color anyway after half of him darkened last year. That way he’ll still have no solid color, but with dots. I bought more fabric than I needed, because it was pretty and I wanted to have more of it at home.

A day after I had sewn his new paws Misha ate them again.

I sewn them again, but this time I didn’t put him back on my bed, but in the closet, where Misha couldn’t reach.

I was sad not to sleep with him at night, but I didn’t want to risk him. Besides, Misha started cuddling with me when I went to sleep, so I didn’t sleep alone.

After Misha died, I got Dubi out of the closet and put him back on the bed. I still like falling asleep hugging him. I don’t care that he is no longer soft and pleasant to the touch like before. When I’m not sleeping he stays on the bed. Petra, our current cat, doesn’t bother him and not even paying any attention to him.

Dubi likes to get tangled in the blankets and move with them. When I’m asleep I eventually stop hugging him and change positions, and he starts to roam. Usually he wanders to my partner's’ side of the bed and cling to him. The problem with that is that my partner has sensitive skin, and Dubi’s coarse and unpleasant feel wakes him up.

Because my partner knows how much it’s important to me that Dubi will be on the bed, he wanted us to think of a way to make Dubi more pleasant, so when he touches him every once in a while it will not bother him. The first thought that came to mind, and was disqualified before it was even said, was to sew him new fur. Will he still be Dubi if almost nothing of his original materials is left? It’s a very charged and interesting question from the conservation world, connected to the ethics of object integrity vs. the nature and essence of it. After a second thought came the idea to sew soft clothes that will cover his coarse fur, but not replace it.

 
 
 
 

This is how I ended up sewing a soft and fluffy shirt, pants and beanie from a torn old sweater.

 
 

The Golden Gate

I remember the first time I was awed by something that was related to death instead of fearing it. It was in the year 2000. All of us students of our school’s 10th grade went on an “Atonement field trip” in Jerusalem. It was a night field trip. It was the last time this trip was held in Jerusalem, because the 2nd Intifada started later that year, and walking in the old city at night became dangerous. From this year on they took the 10th graders to Tel-Aviv Yafo for that field trip.

I wasn’t feeling well the night of the trip. I got the cold. My head ached, my nose was stuffy, and I’m pretty sure I had a slight fever. I really wanted to go to this trip, so I took some painkillers and some cold medicines to feel better. It made me feel a little ‘high’.

We started the field trip at the Jaffa Gate. We walked through the narrow streets of the Jewish Quarter. We got to the Western Wall. From there we went to the Western Wall tunnel. Then we went up to the roofs of the old city walked around there. At one point we were brought to the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery so we could view the eastern wall of Jerusalem and the Golden Gate, and then we descended by foot through the cemetery to the point where the bus waited for us to take us home.

Cold night. The cemetery was barely lit in an orange glow. In front of me the Temple Mount and the golden Gate were lit in yellow light. I walked between the rectangle graves that looked alike in the dark, and felt I was in a different world. I understood why people wanted to be buried facing Jerusalem. I wanted to be buried there. It was quiet and beautiful like no other place I’ve ever been before. The thought that I was walking between dead people, between corpses and skeletons that are buried under the ground, didn’t frighten of stressed me. There was something right about being dead there. Something almost sacred. I felt like the dead were really resting in peace there.

Wisdom tooth

I broke a piece of one of my wisdom teeth. Not something painful, it just scratches my cheek by its sharp edge. Seemingly something fairly simple. Irritating, but simple. Nothing that money and a dentist can’t fix in a short time. But it shook and depressed me to the core.

One of its reasons is the initial distrust I have in dentists, and the fact that I can no longer not go to one after that. Another reason is my fear of unknown authority figures, and because I don’t have a dentist in Haifa yet, I have to meet a new authority figure. All that can explain the fact that I cried after the tooth broke, but not the depression that came the next day and stayed for a whole day after.

I thought about it and found the reason for that depression - an unplanned and unmediated encounter with me own mortality. The tooth, in my mind, represents me. It suddenly, and with no rational reason disintegrated a little. I didn’t eat anything hard or got hit. It didn’t ache or caused any trouble. All I did was eating a soft cracker with cheese when I felt a hard and crumbling chunk in my mouth. I can’t glue this chunk back, it won’t mend like a broken bone.

The same way the falling of primary teeth represents the beginning of the transition from childhood to adolescence, for me the falling of the permanent teeth represents the beginning of the transition between adulthood and old age. I know I’m not old, I’m only 34 years old. I also know that there are plenty of people who don’t have healthy teeth at a much early age. It doesn’t matter. It’s a personal symbolism that has no connection to facts of logic. From the perspective of my subconscious I died a little.

I always have, and probably continue to have, nightmares about loose and falling teeth. Nightmares where I’m suddenly left with only a few teeth in my mouth. Nightmares where I try to put the teeth back in my gums, but they become huge and I can’t get then into my mouth. Dreams I always interpreted as the manifestation of my fear of losing control, which by itself is a manifestation of my fear of death.

All of a sudden this disintegration process began. One of the few processes of me physically getting older that didn’t start, until now. I’m familiar with body and emotional fatigue from an early age. I already have small wrinkles here and there. I have a few white hairs since I was a teenager, and my memory is all over the place with my fibromyalgia and ADD. I managed to keep my teeth whole and healthy, until now. I have a reason unrelated to the progression of time for all of that. Except for the disintegration of my tooth. I don’t have cavities or gingivitis, I didn’t get hit or bit on something hard. It is clearly physical deterioration related to the progression of time, and this is terrifying.

It is terrifying, but when I look at myself from the outside it is also fascinating. I have some kind of a weird relationship with death. I read a lot about it, and think about it a lot, and I try to put my fear of it in frames I can hold and handle. But despite all the work I’m doing, and will keep on doing, something so small and insignificant to a lot of people got me to my knees. It is more than fear. It is my body beginning to understand it will end someday, and neither it nor I have any control over this. No matter how much I’ll prepare myself and practice “looking death in the eyes”, as a human, I don’t want to die. As a living organism, the proof of its deterioration and demise is a bad thing, a depressing thing, something that even without consciousness disrupts the normal functioning of the mind.

I wonder if there is a way to accustom the body and the subconscious to accept this process as something that is not positive, but also not paralyzing. Like the way I try to accustom my logic that the fact that I know I would die should not paralyze me, but give me meaning. It’s a question I’ll try to answer over the time, mainly because I don’t think I have a choice in that matter.

A beginning of something special

Two years ago I came across a YouTube video of a Canadian psychologist and a psychology professor, who spoke against a law they wanted to pass in his country. The video went viral because its subject was controversial. I listened to the psychologist and liked his way of thinking. As a result, I went into his YouTube channel and saw that for years he had uploaded all of his lectures and courses, so that anyone who wishes could listen to them. And so, I started listening. He had a course on personality theories and a course called "Maps of Meaning". Each lecture was two and a half hours long, at least 13 lectures per course. I was fascinated. He spoke of taking responsibility, of improving the present and future self, of finding meaning.

Meaning has always been difficult for me. Ever since I understood death and the fact that I would eventually die, all I hoped was that I would not have been born. I was 9 years old. This thought brought with it resentments toward the world, about my parents, about myself. This thought is what led to the beginning of my depression at the age of 10. Over the years, anger, cynicism, despair, and a lot of confusion were added to my resentments. There were nights I did not sleep, afraid of the day to come. There were also good days when I did not think about the future, only about the present and my friends. And there were days when I wanted to die.

Things got worse after I got fibromyalgia at the age of 19. Suddenly everything hurt, I did not have the energy to get out of bed. These were things that did not happen to me during the most difficult days before I got sick. If beforehand I felt lost, after I got fibromyalgia, I felt completely hopeless. Since it took me 5 years to get a diagnosis, I was told many times that everyone is tired and everybody hurts. How can I survive if I do not have the energy to move? How do people live without wanting to die with all this pain and exhaustion? There was a time when I did not know what to do when I opened my eyes in the morning, if I did not write a to-do list the night before, which included:

Get out of bed

Go to the bathroom to pee

Brush teeth

Change clothes

Eat breakfast

Everything I did was engulfed in a cloud of fatigue and pain, but most of all, in a cloud of cynicism and despair. I was a summer camp counselor and traveled the United States to run away. I did a bachelor's degree in art and education in a city far away from my parents to run away. I did a master's degree in conservation of material cultural heritage to run away. I said things like: "There really is no meaning to anything, so at least I will do an useless degree in interesting things”, "I've already done one useless degree, and so why not do a useless master's degree as well”?

During those years I started psychotherapy, in which I learned to separate myself from the environment and to understand what I did not like or did not want. I received diagnoses of fibromyalgia and depression and began taking medication, which reduced the level of pain and exhaustion to a tolerable level, and gave me the opportunity to feel things other than despair. I still continue taking medication and they are my life-line.

About four years ago someone recommended me a YouTube channel of an American mortician and a funeral home director, who talks about death and her work with it. Suddenly I realized I was not the only one obsessed with death, frightened but also fascinated by it. There is her, who was interested in death from an early age, so she did a bachelor's degree in medieval culture and then studied to become a licensed mortician, while working in the crematorium of a funeral home. She talks to other professionals in the death industry - hospices nurses, death Doulas, artists whose main preoccupation is death, forensic investigators, body farm owners, death photographers, death history researchers and many more. I found a kind of framework where I could talk about my death curiosity without people raising an eyebrow, or telling me that the issue is too heavy and depressing.

So how does this relate to the psychologist I mentioned at the beginning of my post, or to my new website? In the two years I have been listening to the psychologist, reading his articles and his two books, combined with bibliotherapy I began around the same time, my approach to life has changed. I feel less cynical and angry. I'm still feel hopeless every now and then, and still scared and anxious, but I accept it and try to manage these feelings, instead of the other way around. After many years of doing things to run away, I decided to take responsibility for finding my meaning, because I decided there had to be a meaning, and that I wanted to find it.

I'm looking, checking and investigating all the time. I create and read, and want to share it with the world. I have a feeling that my meaning is related to the combination of creating, writing, researching, learning and teaching, and death. When I think of this combination as my way of life, as a meaning, I have a number of possibilities for moving forward. One is academic research - a PhD, which somehow combines all of the above. I am at the beginning of the process of searching for a supervisor and focusing my research topic. I'm not rushing this process, hoping that I will achieve the optimal accuracy of a subject and a supervisor. Another possibility is sharing my world with the world. Sharing the pieces I keep creating, sharing my thoughts and plans, updating on their development, writing articles or reviews on topics I read about, regardless of doctoral studies (I did do a master's degree research, so I have some tools for critical thinking). Unlike my process with academic research, here I feel like I do not have to wait for accuracy and focus. I decided to act here and now. To try and experiment with all of this, to play and taste, and with you, my audience, to focus and hopefully find meaning.

After all, what is life if not a series of trials and errors on the way to improving the future, while trying to find meaning.