The other night I woke from a vivid dream about Keith Siegel.

Keith graduated two years ahead of me from Carolina Friends School, in Durham, NC–my sister’s class, 1977. Even at such a tiny school, we didn’t hang out. Except for the occasional fragment of nostalgia, I hadn’t heard his name since then.

Until he was taken hostage by Hamas.

I learned about Keith’s terrible status in April, when Hamas released a video of him. https://youtu.be/obQ7vpgWHiU?feature=shared

Shocked into action by this connection, I immediately wrote the White House and my Senators, begging them to keep the pressure on Israel to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza that would bring the hostages home AND stop the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian innocents.

Then I forgot about the hostages again, for long stretches. I certainly wasn’t dreaming about them.

Then, a few days ago, my sister (the one in Keith’s CFS class) sent me an article from The Atlantic. THAT’s what inspired the dream.

In “I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free,” Keith’s wife Aviva Siegel writes:

The last time I saw my husband, Keith, was on November 26. He was lying on a filthy mattress on the floor of a darkened room and could barely look at me. We had spent 51 days together as Hamas’s hostages after being violently abducted from our home on October 7. I had been told earlier that day that my name was on the list; I was to be released and sent back home to Israel. Keith was to be left behind.

Keith, Aviva reminds us, “is an American citizen…born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—also the hometown of James Taylor, his favorite singer.” (I remember him liking Jackson Browne too.) He’s a gentle man, she writes, someone who learned Arabic in order to communicate with Palestinians living across the nearby border. A vegetarian so committed he wouldn’t even eat a morsel of chicken in the little food provided by his captors. A peacemaker.

Yes, I thought. Sounds like a 1970s CFS grad, all right.

As I forced myself to read Aviva’s horrific descriptions of captivity–on a lovely, sunny day, heading to a farmstand to buy some flowers–I felt more and more surreal. “I think about Keith all the time,” Aviva writes,

…but I feel a particular pang whenever I drink water, when I take a shower, when I eat something delicious. As a hostage in Gaza, these are not things I could do. The most frustrating part is that I don’t know anything about Keith’s condition: Is he alone? (I’d love for someone to tell me that he’s not.) Is he sad, or crying? Is he in a tunnel with no oxygen? Is he sick or being tortured? Has he eaten any food at all today? Is he alive?

In my dream the other night, I think Keith was trying to answer his wife’s desperate questions. He was still captive, sad and weary, wearing a white T-shirt, but he was philosophical. Reassuring.

I woke up feeling I wasn’t doing enough. I read Aviva’s article again.

“Keeping the hostage issue at the top of people’s minds,” she writes, “is the only thing I can do.”

I’m asking the United States government not to give up on them. I’m asking Israel’s leaders to bring our hostages home. Don’t abandon them. Don’t let our loved ones be killed.

I wrote the White House again, and my two Senators. I don’t know what else to do, to stop this terrible war. Except not forget, not give up. Maybe we can all try not to give up on peace.

If I dream of Keith again, I want to be able to tell him we’re trying.