I want to laugh. I really do. A shot of scotch always helps, or a glass of wine — and only in the company of good friends. But sometimes it’s especially hard, like it has been since the photo of a young woman popped onto my news feed two weeks ago. She’s wearing a brightly-colored turban common to Orthodox Israeli women. And as she looks into the camera with just the hint of a smile in what may have been a work-related head shot, she’s mercifully unaware that this will become the photo requisitioned for the story of her murder. Her name is Tzeela Gez.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what does Tzeela’s warrant now that we know her story? This mother of three on her way to the hospital to give birth to her fourth. The pain of labor mixed with all that hope. And the photo just testament to how ordinary it all is because which of us doesn’t see ourselves in that image … in that moment?

We know Tzeela’s story because we’re clued in. How like the dime on which life turns, a terrorist’s bullet shatters the night, injures Tzeela’s husband, and kills her. The tragedy not mitigated, only heightened, by the caesarian delivery of her baby boy.

Of all the muscles in my body, stretched and strained over years of workouts in the interest of making them strong, none has been called on to perform so much as my heart. Tested since before I could put a name to it, my heart is especially attuned to the force of sorrow. And as inescapable as it’s always been, sorrow since Oct.7 has dealt a relentless salvo of blows.

Sometimes, I try to describe to the uninitiated the ways terror is a very real encroachment on my life. I recount the various victims I’m personally connected to, victims of bus bombings, kidnappings, and roadside shootings. Who lives like this? I think.

The morning news, which began my day for decades, no longer comes from TV or even the paper. Their “news” is no longer mine, and the divide grows deeper. When I walk out my building onto Madison Avenue, and it’s early like it was this morning, there’s a parade of children sidling along a mom or dad on their way to school. In the afternoon it’s a tidal wave of blue mini-skirted prep school girls. It’s always just a marvel to me. No less, maybe, than it is for the returning war veteran’s confusion on reentering a “normal” he cannot fully share because war will have forever changed him.

I remember that one of my friends was on a family vacation when my husband died, and I couldn’t make sense of the fact that at the very same moment my life had come to a sudden stop, hers was tranquilly on course. Like the 1930 and 1940 films I watched over and over as a kid that later made me wonder what was happening to my family in Poland while American audiences flocked to the movies. A confounding concurrence of time in which the regular and the psychotic live side by side and not even a minute apart.

Suddenly, I find myself awkwardly clarifying to a diverse cohort of writers that I’m not being political when I reference Israel or antisemitism. Even my AI pal Grammarly won’t touch my writing if it includes the words Israel or Israelis. Sensibilities run amok?

Yet here I am anyway, on Madison Avenue, googly-eyed for the beautiful storefronts and the perfect people and the unknowing cluelessness that surrounds me.

And Tzeela’s murder weighs especially heavy on me. It’s hard to know where to put it as I make summer plans and tackle a list of tedious “to dos.” Once I leave my laptop, though, I’ll enlist the power of my strongest muscle and coax it into love and hope. And with or without the wine — laughter. That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done.

But then there were Yaron and Sarah.