(Making Me Understand is an occasional blog feature where I analyze, in brief or at length, what a particular work of art or an artist means to me right now.)

I have been feeling less and less allegiance to this blog, because it has a major flaw: it’s about cancer. And so little of my life is actually about cancer anymore. I guess I should just lean harder into the name of this blog, I’ll Live. Living is what I’ve been doing all this time, after all, though some days it’s harder to really sense that. I don’t have that particular zest for life that someone who is closer to mortal danger has. That seven year plan I crowed about? It is about to end, less than a month to go. I think I abandoned doing anything with it somewhere around year four. I’m going to call it a rousing success, because to do otherwise is antithetical to the plan as I originally conceived of it. I have nearly made it to age 52, and I am apparently still learning not to berate myself for things that don’t work out.

(By the way, I had my scans. They were fine. They are always fine.)

It has been a month and change since our world was turned upside down early in the morning on the very last holiday of the Jewish holiday cycle which starts with Rosh Hashanah and ends with music and dancing and rejoicing as we come to the end of the Torah reading cycle and begin it again. On that joyful holiday this year, Hamas brutally attacked my people, murdering and raping and torturing and beheading them. 240 people were taken as hostages to Gaza, and most remain there, except for the ones who have since been found murdered and a very lucky handful who were rescued or returned. Babies, elderly people, every age in between. I don’t sleep very well at night from worrying about them. They watch over me while I am working.

And then we learned what happens when our people suffer one of the most horrific large-scale attacks since the Shoah. It turns out that much of the world has maybe 3.5 days worth of empathy to give before it starts to forget what happened, before it preemptively starts forecasting the certain war crimes that the Jewish nation will visit on its neighbors, before vocabulary words are bandied about severed from their actual meanings, and before the accepted narrative of the events suddenly is as twisted and tortured and beheaded as the victims of Hamas were. I have lived my entire life watching this cycle play out in the media. I have not gotten used to it, and I have not stopped hoping this might be the time things play out differently.

Social media has been mostly a curse this month. I have shed “friends” right and left who disappointed and depressed me with their absolute certainty in victim blaming, with their acrobatic attempts to seem like they are caring people calling for a ceasefire but not for hostages to be returned, to seem like they are not garden variety antisemites. I work on a college campus, and every day has brought new, shameful ways that undergraduates test out new identities by parroting hate speech and even projecting it onto the walls of a library. Luckily I work in a professional school, where hateful rhetoric has not been openly shared. I have suspicions about some of my students, but I keep them to myself. I have started wearing a Magen David every day, however, because I need them to know where I stand. (I don’t necessarily present as Jewish.) Young J’s college application season has also been tinged by the war, as we examine events on various campuses and try to figure out where he would feel safe. He had been considering a gap year program in Israel before starting college. That is no longer on the table.

In the arts world, which I am tangentially connected to, writers and artists I formerly respected are signatories to hateful open letters. Poets who were formerly friendly have become strident and unyielding, unwilling to accept that their words might permanently damage relationships established over decades. I have tried to do what little I can to support Jewish writers who suddenly find themselves adrift or canceled in their writing communities. I hate that this has happened to them, just as much as I regret that they never saw it coming. (I began to see glimmers of it just after 9/11.)

My friends in Israel who felt fully committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict were shaken to the core by October 7, one of them telling me that she literally couldn’t believe what she was hearing on the radio that morning. She was so sure it could never happen.

Speaking of the radio, for the first week or more after the attack, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to music. Music is a constant in my life, so I knew there was something wrong. A friend suggested listening to Israel’s army radio station, Galgalatz. This is a music station, and following October 7, it became a sort of memorial in radio, as listeners sent in their tributes to murdered family members and friends. The tributes were excruciating to listen to, but I couldn’t stop, because you never knew just what song you might hear. There was electronic music played in memory of young people killed at the music festival. There were classic Israeli songs. And then you’d hear Led Zeppelin or Guns n’ Roses or Metallica. A full spectrum of music, free-form memorial radio. I won’t soon forget it. Of course, the broadcast is periodically interrupted by rocket alerts, where towns and neighborhoods are announced, meaning people need to run for cover. It happens all day, every day. And then there are constant PSAs with instructions for what to do when there’s a rocket alert and you’re driving.

Gradually, as weeks went by, I started to feel more ready to listen to other music. Some of it was imposed on us: Young J is drumming for his school’s production of Mamma Mia! so we had to go check it out. I will admit not feeling thrilled beforehand about attending the performance. I like to think of myself as a discerning music listener, and ABBA is not a band in any sort of rotation in my life.

The show won us over, of course. The storyline was vapid, but the singers had so much talent and heart, and the band was superb (Young J works hard at the kit). Quite unexpectedly, I found myself in the grip of one song in particular, “SOS.”

No one is more surprised than I am that I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song for a week now. My music streaming app keeps strongly suggesting I listen to The Carpenters play “Please Mr. Postman” afterwards, but I keep insisting on this one track. I’m not ready to move on.

I just found this music video of it, which is hilariously amateur compared to what we’re used to seeing now. The women in the band aren’t perfect: one has a sneer she can’t quite conceal, one has a snaggle tooth. The lyrics are vapid beyond belief.

But their voices call out to me from the dead center of the 1970s. I was three years old when this song was released, and I’m quite sure I never heard it at home, because my parents played no pop music at all. I have come to realize that in the past month, I may have heard the song played on Galgalatz. In fact I’m sure of it.

ABBA never intended this to be a song for wartime. There’s something very International sounding about it, bringing to mind the Eurovision contest, which it turns out ABBA entered and won in 1974. Eurovision is also a contest that Israel, despite worldwide hatred, has managed to win four times. So listening to this track also transports me back in time to a world where Israel was not reviled the way it is in so many quarters today (vociferously and egregiously).

I’ve heard the song enough times to love it and mock it simultaneously. The rhymes are certainly facile. But the synthesizer and the harmonies operate on a level I am unable to explain. It makes me want to do karaoke, but not in a festive way. It makes me sing in the shower again, something I had stopped doing ages ago. When I’m walking into the building where I work, I need to remove my headphones and check myself before belting it out in the hallway.

Because it is a song about a broken heart, and my heart is definitely broken. It is a song crying out for help, and I need help. I am trying to understand how to go on. At work, some colleagues kindly ask whether I’d like to talk about it. I decline, because I’m not ready to break down on a regular basis at the office. It’s already hard enough to wade through the sadness to get my work done. I do, however, a few times a day, put my headphones back on and listen to this song. And I think of the hostages, freezing and starved and terrified in tunnels for over a month, and I think of ABBA, and my brain tries to put together some sort of complex extraction plan via pop music. Then the song ends and I realize that isn’t going to work. And I play it again.