Aging & Wisdom Quote by Aharon Appelfeld

Grief, Appelfeld suggests, doesn’t merely scar; it rewires attachment into something closer to romance: a permanent, idealized devotion that can’t be corrected by time or new evidence. “Permanently” is doing the heavy lifting here. It refuses the comforting arc of healing and replaces it with a lifelong orientation. The parents aren’t simply missed; they become a fixed point around which the survivor’s inner life keeps turning.

The provocation is in the phrase “in love.” Love implies choice, reciprocity, even pleasure. Appelfeld borrows that language to describe a bond made by catastrophe, not courtship. The subtext is that early bereavement arrests the relationship at its most potent moment: before conflict, before disenchantment, before adulthood can see parents as flawed, ordinary people. The dead don’t get the chance to disappoint you. Memory becomes a sanctuary and a trap, because it preserves the parent at peak intensity while denying the child the normal work of separation.

As a Holocaust-survivor novelist, Appelfeld is also writing from a century where loss was industrial, abrupt, and often ungrievable in any conventional sense. For many displaced children, parents existed afterward as fragments: a face, a smell, a gesture, a last scene. “In love” captures how those fragments are cherished, replayed, guarded from intrusion. It hints at why survivors can feel disloyal when they thrive, or why intimacy later in life may be haunted by an unreachable standard. The line lands because it names something socially awkward: the way mourning can become a private religion, with the lost parent as its enduring deity.