Perhaps “holocaust” isn’t the best word to use on Yom Kippur, and I do apologize, but nothing else fit as well.

I don’t go home – home being Montreal – if I can help it. Home to me is death. Home is heartbreak, broken relationships, old hurts and the deaths of my parents. I went back in 2007 for less than 24 hours, and it was enough. It was more death. But it was easier than the one I dealt with when I went back in 04.

Today I got a facebook message. Another one down. I called the family in question – the same family as the link above from 2007 – to pay my respects. Instead of the usual platitudinal to-and-fro, I instead received a litany of deaths and cancers for the past 12 months.

I’m stupefied. I can barely breathe. My “home” is more a place of death than ever. And just when I was about to slip in to take care of some overdue business, then slip out again, a grieving ninja.

I can’t go back. I just can’t.

There once were three little drunks/pigs. Those three little drunks worked together to build a house of gasoline, a house of stucco, and a gorgeous L.A. beach house of bleached pine.

The one who built the house of gasoline died in 1995 – his house burned to the ground in 2004 and took my soul with it.

The one who built the house of stucco died 2 weeks ago, and I just found out.

The one whose house was made of bleached pine and a dream – he lives today despite surviving lung cancer and his wife’s recent battle with breast cancer. You cannot blow down the beach house of pine.

I am barely breathing, trying to absorb all this death and disease. There is no amount of vodka, no amount of valium in this world, that will make it all ok. My childhood is not only gone – it has died.

Israel