The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

I was clearing out my Google Photos the other day. Two years of pictures, all jumbled together the way life actually is: screenshots of shoes I wanted to buy, recipes I never made, my kids being kids, a vacation that feels like it happened to different people. Makeup tutorials. Restaurant meals.

And then, between all of it, the war.

Not just a few pictures. Hundreds. Soldiers. Death notices. The black-and-white squares we have all learned to recognize on sight, the ones that stop your thumb mid-scroll. A face. A name. An age that is sometimes younger than your own child.

And then another one.

And then another.

Two years of this. Two years of life and death stacked on top of each other in the same camera roll, the same way they have been stacked on top of each other in our actual lives. Birthday parties and shiva calls. School plays and emergency alerts. Shabbat tables and funerals.

I kept scrolling and I kept thinking: We are not who we used to be.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that announces itself. It crept up on us quietly, the way exhaustion does. We still go to work. We still make dinner. We still laugh, sometimes loudly, because if you live here, you know that laughing is not the opposite of grief; it is just what you do with it. But something has shifted underneath all of that. Something that I am not sure we will ever fully get back.

We have learned to hold death lightly. That is the only way to say it. Not because we care less, God forbid, but because we have had no choice. You cannot stop every time. You cannot fully feel every name on every notice, or you will not be able to function. And functioning is what is required of us. So, we have all developed a kind of practiced, necessary numbness that looks from the outside like resilience and feels from the inside like something else entirely.

Our children know things they should not know. They know the sound of an alert before we say a word. They know what it means when Ima goes quiet looking at her phone. They know the difference between a soldier who came home and a soldier who did not. My children know these things. Your children know these things. And we cannot unknow them for them.

There is a generation of Israeli kids growing up with Oct. 7 as their formative memory. The thing that happened before they understood what war was, before they had the language for it, before they could be protected from it. They will carry that. Long after this is over, in ways we cannot predict, they will carry that.

And the mothers. I think about the mothers most. I think about them because I am one, because I have a son in uniform, because every time my phone rings at an unusual hour there is a half-second that I will not describe because you already know it if you live here. That half-second has become part of my body. It is in all of us now.

We are more tender with each other than we used to be, and also more frayed. We cry faster. We hug longer. We say I love you at the end of phone calls we would not have thought twice about before. We also argue more, we are more brittle, we have less patience for things that do not matter, and sometimes, on the hard days, less patience for things that do.

This is what two years looks like in a camera roll. This is what it looks like inside a person.

I do not write this to despair. I do not think we are broken. I think we are something more complicated than broken, something that does not have a clean word in English, though Hebrew gets closer.

We are a people who have been through the fire and are still standing in it, still living in it, still somehow making school lunches and filing expense reports and planning for a future we are not entirely sure what it will look like.

But I think we owe it to ourselves to say out loud: We are not who we used to be. Oct. 7 changed us. The months after changed us. The names on those death notices changed us. The soldiers in those photos, the ones who came home and the ones who did not, they changed us.

And when this is finally over, we will have to figure out together who we have become.

Gila Isaacson is the proud Israeli mother of five sons who’ve grown from energetic boys into remarkable young men, including a warrior in the IDF who makes her heart swell with pride. When she’s not following her sons’ latest adventures or worrying like any good mama bear, she’s pursuing her passion for journalism at Jfeed, where she continues to tell the stories that matter.