As I made my way up the walk to my sister-in-law’s house in the southern Israeli moshav of Talme Yosef, I didn’t know what to expect. How can a family face horrific tragedy and still manage to wake up in the morning, drink their coffee, send the children to school and move forward? What will I be able to say? How will I be able to help?
Two weeks earlier, at about 1 a.m. on Wednesday Feb. 26, my brother-in-law, Moshe Kimche, ended his life. He took his gun, went to the garden, kneeled against a tree and shot himself in the head. One clean shot in the middle of a rainstorm solved one problem but created countless more.
In the heavy days since Kim (as we called him) left us, I’ve tried to understand why he did what he did, to somehow make his act jibe with the picture of the strong, cultured man of the earth imprinted on my memory.
Kim’s dream, from his childhood in the Tel Aviv suburb of Givatayim, was to work the earth. He succeeded; he became a respected flower grower, the man that neighbors and farmers came to for advice.
His family spent two years in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, teaching agriculture to local farmers. He was commanding and professional, meticulous and creative.
Flowers and debt
And now, at age 48, in the face of critical economic pressures, he sat waiting for his dream to crumble. His debt, like that of so many around him, was deep, and it tortured him.
A combination of factors had already caused 500 of 1,800 Israeli flower growers to close their businesses last year. The exchange rate between the shekel and European currencies is low, and thus unfavorable for Israeli exporters.
In January 2002, the Ministry of the Interior stopped the arrival of incoming Thai workers, the main laborers in this industry. Kim and his wife, D’ganit, brought in local laborers, but they quickly quit. The couple tried to work the hothouses themselves, desperately picking the flowers they had so carefully grown, but to no avail: Four hands cannot do the work usually done by many.
The growers’ hardship was intensified by the low price of flowers in the European market, where 89 percent of all Israeli flowers are sold. African growers, many of whom have been trained by Israelis, and European companies operating in Africa are driving prices down.
Each day, D’ganit said, Kim would read the faxes that arrived. The price for flowers was low, and remained that way each day. If only it had risen a bit, she said, they might not have faced such desperation. Each day his heart broke a little more completely.
D’ganit said that Kim feared that checks would start bouncing and banks and lenders would pounce on the family “like on a zebra in the Serengeti.” He feared that his friends, who had signed as guarantors on his loans (a common practice in Israel), would bear great financial loss when he defaulted on them.
He imagined lendors taking the family computer, television, car. How, could he get to the job he would have to get without a car? How could he pay the few Thai workers he had managed to re-hire? How could he not?
If Kim had been a different man, less tortured by imperfection, perhaps he’d still be here, walking through his hothouses, examining his flowers, receiving faxes and living with debt like most of his neighbors.
Though the trouble was only financial, Kim knew he lived in a vicious system in which a person can be cut down by his debt, penniless and permanently working to raise the minus to zero.
In a country where it seems everyone is working on climbing out of debt and in a profession in which the question is not if you owe but how much you owe, Kim didn’t fit the mold. As one friend eulogized, “He didn’t bend; he broke.”
Options seemed grim, in spite of D’ganit’s persistent optimism. The couple had discussed bankruptcy and began to inquire about agricultural jobs elsewhere. They would rent out their land and try to scrape by with the knowledge that their debt would be lifelong, an anchor around their necks.
Though family had offered money, Kim couldn’t bear the thought of draining his parents’ retirement savings.
And so he spent sleepless nights, his thoughts churning, looking for a solution. If he had not been so morally upright, the debt might not have robbed him of his rest. And if he had slept, perhaps he would have found some measure of peace to guide him through the crisis.
Rather, days before he quieted his internal storm, he complained to D’ganit that his head was “exploding” and he couldn’t stand it. Though nobody thought that his figurative speech forebode the ugly reality in store, the couple had sought help. They visited their doctor and made an appointment with a mental health professional for what was to be Kim’s last day alive. For personal reasons, the professional canceled the appointment.
On his last night, Kim took a sleeping pill he received from his doctor. Apparently, the medication left him hyper, a side effect not impossible, the doctor later admitted.
If only…
The day before I arrived, D’ganit appeared on national television on a talk show that focused on suicide. Though the show had been planned well in advance of Kim’s death, producers held it until after the shiva so that D’ganit could participate.
“I’m not here to place blame,” she said. “But if only the government helped farmers in Israel, with minimum prices, for example” so farmers wouldn’t have the bear the risk alone.
If only, she said, there was an agency devoted to helping farmers in economic straits, a center to help them arrange their finances and face debt, give legal, financial or psychological advice, or direct them to the appropriate professional.
I know it’s too late for “if only”: Kim is gone. But his death is larger than himself now. Just one month before, another flower grower committed suicide. His and Kim’s deaths have sparked discussion about a new crisis in Israel.
“It’s a phenomenon,” said Haim Hadad, secretary of the Flower Grower’s organization. On the other hand, “it was predictable,” he said, as reported in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv.
The road ahead
Almost two weeks after Kim’s death, one week after shiva ended, I lugged my suitcase on the stone path to a house of mourning, a heavy weight in my heart.
But then my three beautiful nieces rushed out of the house to greet me with smiles and hugs. They took my bags and brought me into the house. I was met by a glowing yahrzeit candle, a light that would succeed in reminding me why I was here, reminding me of loss.
This story was supposed to be about the mess Kim left behind, but I’m drawn to Kim, and to the waste and tragedy of his death. As I moved through the house, I felt his fingerprint everywhere.
I felt his spirit in the garden, in the way that he and D’ganit planted to rotate flowers and fruits. First the red flowering tree, then the yellow and finally the purple blossoms. Now the citrus, next the loquat and, later in the season, guava, mango and countless other fruits.
A true renaissance man, Kim spoke beautiful English and had bookshelves crammed with volumes in both Hebrew and English. He loved music, especially Blues. And he was always able to see past nonsense to the heart of an issue.
And if for a moment I thought I could forget him, if I was able to surrender to the feeling that he’ll walk in the door at any moment, the faces of his fatherless children, my nieces, brought him immediately back.
While I was there, Sapir, 8 1/2, told her mother that when she has a son, she wants to name him Moshe. And the twins, Or and Stav, 14, wouldn’t talk about him. Surely the road ahead is full of confusion and anger and a great, deep sadness.
I found my widowed sister-in-law braving the high tide of paperwork and the drowning sea of grief with grace and bravery (see related sidebar). Aware of her responsibility to be the backbone of her family, she glowed with compassion for her tortured husband, not giving in to the anger that seems so obvious to many of us.
She knows her path to wholeness is long. She knows she’s at the beginning. She knows that when we raise wine glasses, we still say “L’chaim” because that is, after all, the point: waking up in the morning, getting dressed, making lunch for your children and sending them to school, taking a deep breath and braving the day.
For me, I hope God truly protects widows and orphans, as the saying goes. May Moshe Kimche’s memory be for a blessing, and may he find peace.
Loading ...