Sitting on a Three-Legged Chair

“You sit too much,” the massage therapist said.

She had found a knot beneath my shoulder blade the size of a walnut. She said it with the certainty of someone who had just discovered the cause of all my problems. She didn’t know that sitting was my job.

A week later, my body was still making her argument for her.

It’s 6 a.m. and my neck is already pinching me, my shoulder already aching. I really need a new chair. So I can finally get rid of this peeling faux-leather mess, old but comfortable, shedding all over the place.

I’ve been researching chairs for months. Three got my attention.

First: the authentic Eames Executive Chair. Plush cushion, tilt, swivel, height adjustment. $4,676.

Second: the Ferrari Cockpit Chair. Ferrari actually has to deem you worthy before you can buy one. Sixteen-to-twenty-week lead time. Worthiness I can handle. The wait I cannot. $500,000.

And then the Herman Miller, science-backed, ergonomics-tested, designed to support the natural curves of the human body. $2,050. After the first two, it feels like pennies.

I can’t believe I’m doing this again. Morning hours are sacred. I just write and read. No news. No noise.

Every morning I convince myself that if I could just find the right system, the right schedule, everything would finally balance. The kind of balance where I don’t wake up already behind. Where I can finish one thought before another barges in.

I have no idea how I ended up here.

I opened the laptop to write. There was an unfinished email still open. I was waiting to hear back from my sisters before I sent it. It was too late to text them last night and too early now. I grabbed a paper to add it to my to-do list and noticed the Friday menu scribbled on the back of a DWP bill. I should start preparing early. First I need to catch my niece, three time zones away, before the window closes. But my house is still sleeping, and I don’t want to wake them. So I go down to the garage to call her. The treadmill sticks out its tongue; I’ve broken my promise to it every day this week. I go upstairs for water and my sneakers. I sit back down on my peeling chair.

And somehow, still researching chairs.

A few days later, I found myself at a wobbling table in a coffee shop. Researching chairs designed to support the human body.

My niece called. She was on her way to volunteer at a hospital. She had wanted to volunteer with babies for years.

While we were talking, another call came through.

My other sister.

Her son was sick. Could I watch him for a few hours?

Of course.

I clicked back to my niece, packed up my laptop, waved to a stranger looking for an empty chair, and headed home.

My niece had been telling me about this baby for a while. She never met her before, and there was not much she was allowed to know. Not about her family. Not about her diagnosis. That is part of the organization’s policy, for the privacy of the families. But to prepare herself she called to ask one thing: what does the baby like?

What can a seven-month-old like anyway? The baby just learned to sit. She cannot stand on her own. She only speaks baby talk.

Of all the things she could not know about this baby, she knew this: she liked to be held.

And then one day, bags on both shoulders, heading out for my long day, she FaceTimes me. Her voice is upbeat. “Guess who I’m with?”

And suddenly I am there.

Not my there.

Her there. In the hospital. Holding a seven-month-old baby.

“Look, she is ginger.”

I stopped walking. Dropped my bags. Sat down.

“This is Emma. Isn’t she so cute?”

The world went deaf.

Baby Emma looked like a baby bird who fell out of her nest and got caught mid-air. My niece is holding her as if they were connected by blood. Emma puts her head in the nook of her neck and holds her index finger with her tiny hand. Helpless, fragile, two patches on her cheeks. I think she scratches herself in her sleep.

And then her eyes.

Her eyes looking straight back at me.

Hypnotizing.

Brave.

Ancient.

A seven-month-old baby in a hospital room. The calmer she was, the more painful it was.

Rachamim Elohim. Rachamim.

Raw, like someone had peeled off my skin.

I hang up. She texts me: can she have some music from my playlist? The nurses told her she likes soft music. I scroll frantically for the right song. I don’t stop until I find it. I send her ten, just in case. Then I send the one I used to play for her when she was a newborn. I don’t know if it was to calm her or myself. Angel Wings. No lyrics. Just a heartbeat, the sound of a baby safe inside a womb, and a harp melody.

She texts me her full name. With her mother’s name. “Please pray.”

I call her back. “Of course I will… She reminds me of a painting.”

“Me too,” she said.

I look it up. Screenshot the painting and text it to her. Girl with a Pearl Earring. Johannes Vermeer. 1665.

“Yes!” she wrote. “That’s the one.”

The next week, my niece goes back.

She holds Emma the entire shift. Until she falls asleep on her.

The moment she puts her down, she cries.

Then a few days later she calls. I pick up. “I’m walking into Saba’s doctor’s office. I can’t talk…”

“She’s having an eight-hour surgery,” she interrupts. “Please pray.”

A seven-month-old baby having an eight-hour surgery.

“Let’s do a Tehillim (Psalm) reading for her. I’ll call my friends. How many chapters can you cover?”

“What time is the surgery?”

“In the morning.”

“Your morning or mine?”

“Mine,” she said.

The day of the surgery, I had a full day ahead of me. I had my to-do list. Autopilot. One thing at a time.

But I was frozen.

I don’t know what the surgery is for. I don’t know if it will fix something or just reveal it.

What difference does it make?

Eighty-eight days in a hospital, and now an eight-hour surgery. For a seven-month-old baby.

Any update?

Not yet.

Of course she would tell me. Not that they would tell her much. She is just a volunteer. No news is good news?

My nephew walks in with a school project. He’s crying. He hasn’t finished it.

He pulls it out.

He reads it to me out loud. Al shlosha devarim ha’olam omed, on three things the world stands. Torah. Prayer. Acts of kindness.

“Let’s finish it right now.”

I set up the paints and brushes on the kitchen floor. He opens the lid of the red paint. It splashes on his face and the tiles.

“I would also add chocolate chip ice cream. Strawberry. And… blowing bubbles at the beach.”

He is right. I would too.

A seven-month-old baby having an eight-hour surgery.

“But if I was the world, I would sit. Not stand.” He dips the brush again.

And we sat.

We sat on the cold tiles. My foot goes numb quickly. But today it was my whole body. The discomfort and the coldness of the tile didn’t bother me.

“Which color do you want first?” I tried to stay present. I painted with him.

A WhatsApp notification.

A baby died. They need a volunteer to bring food to the family.

My niece called. Her broken voice said it all.

She was terrified it was Baby Emma.

It wasn’t.

But a baby still died.

And then the world stopped.

Stood still.

I sank deeper.

Nothing seems to matter.

There is a custom, when the world becomes too heavy, to sit low.

Sorrow can’t get back support. Loss doesn’t have armrests.

I didn’t know I was doing that. I just couldn’t get up.

There are moments life takes away all the answers and leaves only the question: how do you keep standing when what hurts has shifted the ground beneath your feet?

Maybe that is why we sit low when we mourn. Not because we have given up standing. Because we are trying to find our way back to it.

In the calls that followed, it became routine to check on my niece and on Emma.

By then Emma was no longer just a seven-month-old baby in a hospital room. Even though we still didn’t know much about her, and couldn’t ask much, I felt I knew her.

My niece would call and tell me about her. How Emma greeted her with a smile when she entered the room; how she thought it was funny when the nurses shushed her during another round of checks and vitals; how impossibly patient she was; how her mother insisted on dressing her in Shabbat clothes, even there.

And how much she loved to be held.

“What music did she end up liking?”

“Yossi Banai,” she said.

“Good taste.”

The world started moving again.

Slowly.

And then all at once.

The emails were still waiting. The errands. The obligations. The endless open tabs, not just on my browser.

And I fell back into my chair.

Not this chair.

The other one.

The one I keep mistaking for solid ground.

The one that stands on the mirage of certainty, comfort, and productivity.

Three legs are enough. That’s the frustrating thing. Enough to stand. Enough to convince yourself you’re steady.

Until you shift your weight.

Then something else lifts off the ground.

I still haven’t bought the chair. I still sit at wobbling tables. I still have knots in my shoulders. At this point, something from Office Depot will do.

Because I can’t stop thinking about Baby Emma looking straight at me, holding me completely with her enduring, direct, unguarded look, telling me without words that she sees me as clearly as I see her.

Emma can’t express her pain. She can’t sit it out. She doesn’t even know how to stand yet.

She just asks to be held.

Al shlosha devarim ha’olam omed.

On three things the world stands. 

Hilla Gohary Kerendian is an Israeli-Iranian American essayist whose work explores Jewish identity, memory, and the human heart. She writes Change of Heart Stories on Substack.