I found that my grandma died as I was sitting in a room surrounded by Palestinians sharing their personal stories about losing their homes in 1948.

Nakba day is coming up, and at this important juncture in historical narratives, we gathered, 50 people, in a room to honor their stories. Each person who spoke began by situating themselves and their families by a chain of names. My father was….son of….daughter of….mother of…from the village of….They held onto these names as tightly as the heartbeats that continue to pump the blood through their veins.

My grandmother, Judy Bloom-Criden, daughter of Jacob Mirviss, was born in Connecticut, not in a village in the Galilee. And yet on Friday that is where she will be buried: in the Hula valley under the shadow of the Mt. Hermon with the only tiny sliver of snow to be found in this country. She was an English teacher, and taught almost everyone on the Kibbutz and their kids how to swim. She played the flute. She made a killer chocolate cake from some crazy combination of vinegar and cocoa. She moved here in the 1970s, following the death of her husband. Her sister had already lived in the Negev for almost twenty years; her parents had also recently made the permanent pilgrimage to the desert. I asked her once, under the gaze of a painting of klezmer musicians, why she came to Israel. “It’s the home of the Jewish people,” she said. Full stop.