Let’s Try Not to Get Separated Again by Liz Rose Shulman

I would like to believe that when the heavy elevator doors slammed shut, separating me from my 81-year old parents at The Louvre, that it wasn’t a big deal. Except that it was. It was a really big deal, though I’m embarrassed to admit it. On some strange level, it felt like they’d entered a teleportation device where they’d be converted from organic matter into pixelated energy, never to return. We were on vacation in Paris visiting one of the best museums in the world. I’d like to believe I was old enough to not get upset when the doors closed and they disappeared. I was fifty-two years old at the time, after all. I want to think I could handle a slight change in plan, but I was wrong. 

It turned out, during the few minutes we were separated from each other, that I felt much younger than fifty-two. I’m pretty sure I felt five or six, or maybe even three or four. I don’t like that I felt so young and that I experienced myself as so small. I also felt abandoned, not in the “attachment theory” way that experts talk about nowadays, when a child’s sense of security is compromised if its needs aren’t met as a baby. I’m not interested in the theory as a theory, but I would like to understand the emotional bonds that do or do not occur between people, and why we choose to remember certain connections. 

We had landed in Paris two days earlier. A few months before that, my parents asked my husband, Tony, and me to help them get to Paris from Chicago for their 59th wedding anniversary. Given various health issues and their age, they knew they couldn’t make the trip on their own. My mother also has a foot drop—the result of a decades-old back surgery accident—which can make walking difficult, and is one of the reasons, in addition to them being old, that we took the elevator that day we visited The Louvre. We were trying to get to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which, apparently, is what many of the other 30,000 visitors who meander through the more than 650,000 square feet of museum each day were also trying to do. Located in room 703 on Level One at the top of the Daru staircase in the Denon wing, it seemed easy enough.

What happened with the elevator wasn’t even all that interesting. We tried to take it together. It was too crowded. I told my parents to go ahead. Tony and I would meet them upstairs. It’s a mundane anecdote at best. But what I keep returning to in my mind as I try to understand the story myself—a simple story of taking my parents to Paris because they are old—is how I regressed when the doors closed, how scared I got, and how I went from feeling fifty-two to five or six, or maybe even three or four, in less time than it took for the elevator doors to close. I wish I hadn’t felt that way, but it’s the truth.

 It all started because the four of us had gotten on the elevator on Level Zero, and thought we were going up to Level One. But for some reason we went down to Level Minus-One. We didn’t know this until we exited the elevator and began walking around. Somewhere in between Saint Mary Magdalene in room 169 and the Cycladic Idols in room 170, my father realized we were on the wrong floor. We waited for the elevator again, but when the doors opened, it was packed with visitors. Like I’ve said, this shouldn’t have been a big deal. The elevator was too crowded when the doors opened, and I was worried about them walking too much. So I told them to smush their way in. We’d run up the stairs and meet them, I said. Wait for us when you get out of the elevator, I said. Like children listening to adult instructions, they did as they were told. They squeezed themselves in. Before the doors closed, I saw my father’s face inches from an older man who looked like he was in his nineties, bald with large liver spots on his pink head and tired, weary eyes. My mother wedged in between two middle-age women, a little boy with yellow shoes, and a 20-something in a black miniskirt and Doc Martens, with red lipstick, thick brown hair with three or four barrettes messily, but strategically, placed behind her ears. My father lifted his eyebrows at me and shrugged his shoulders and my mother clutched her cane as she shifted her weight to maintain her balance. It wasn’t a big deal. The doors simply closed. Tony and I would just walk up the two levels and meet them at the elevator door. 

It wasn’t my first trip with my parents to Europe, but the last time we’d gone together was in the 1990s. We’d never traveled internationally as a family because my parents couldn’t afford it. My father could, however, at times, buy an extra plane ticket when he had a work conference to attend. With his ticket paid for, he took turns bringing us kids, or my mother, one at a time. When we were teenagers, he took my brother to Ireland, me to England and Holland. He took my mother to New Zealand, Italy, Japan, and France. Their favorite place to visit became Paris, and when they could afford to travel for pleasure and not only for work, they went to Paris whenever they could. Then, in 1994, when I was twenty-five and my father was fifty-two—the age I was when I lost them at The Louvre—he brought me to Paris. This was the last international trip we took together. The company that paid for it this time covered two business-class seats. It was the first time either of us had flown anything more than coach, and we both marveled at the foot rest that allowed our legs to fully straighten out and the warmed mixed nuts we were given with a hot towel and a glass of sparkling cold water as soon as we sat down. My father, always scoffing at the wealthy, asked the flight-attendant if he could exchange the mixed nuts for plain peanuts, as though eating the cashews and walnuts somehow would make him complicit with the upper class. “What?” he said to me when I gave him a funny look—the flight attendant looked at him strangely, too—once he’d asked for the switch. “I just like peanuts more,” he quipped, and smiled at me to make sure I understood. (He actually did prefer peanuts to mixed nuts, he told me later, but I chose to remember what I perceived was his jab at the wealthy.) 

It was on that trip in 1994 that he developed what he called his “Fifteen-minute tour of The Louvre.” I was grateful for the haste. He’d dragged me around to other museums on other trips in the U.S—Chicago’s Art Institute, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Smithsonian in D.C. —when I was a sullen teenager, unappreciative of the time he took to show me art. When we were in Amsterdam another time, in my early twenties, we arrived at The Rijksmuseum just as it was closing. We stood at the gate, his hands grasping both rails as he begged the guard to let us in. “Just to see The Night Watch,” he said slowly as he pleaded, sounding like a loud American tourist who enunciates each syllable. Surprisingly, the guard let us in, and we stood silent for about five minutes at the famous Rembrandt. Speechless, we took in its size and detail, darkness and opal light, marveled at the subtle movement of the watchmen before we were told to leave.

A year later, in 1995, when I was living in Jerusalem as a graduate student, I had, unbeknownst to me, adopted some of the boldness my father exhibited that day we saw The Night Watch for a few moments in Amsterdam. A friend had come to visit Jerusalem for a day on his way to Egypt. One of the things he wanted to do with the few hours he had to tour the city was to see Oskar Schindler’s grave. The German factory-owner and Nazi Party member who saved 1098 Jews during World War II is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Mount Zion, Jerusalem’s highest point. We took the bus to the walled cemetery, but by the time we got there, it was closed for the day. There was no guard for me to beg like my father had done at The Rijksmuseum, but I insisted on walking the perimeter of the cemetery until we found a part of the wall that was low enough for us to climb. Putting our feet into crevices in the rock, we jumped over the limestone wall and found Schindler’s grave. We each placed a small stone on the gravestone out of respect, my friend did a slight salute, and we left feeling triumphant and rebellious as we climbed the wall once more to get out before anyone saw us.

At the fifteen-minute tour of The Louvre with my father in 1994, we sprinted past Venus de Milo (room 345), waved hello to the Mona Lisa (room 711), bolted by The Winged Victory of Samothrace (room 703). In one day, in addition to the fifteen-minute Louvre tour, he dragged me to Monet’s Waterlilies at Musée de l’Orangerie and to the Impressionists on the fifth floor of Musee D’Orsay. We took a break at Luxembourg Gardens, exhausted, sat down on a bench, and shared a cheese and tomato sandwich and a tarte citron. At the time, I was annoyed at the pace. I wanted to brood and smoke cigarettes in cafes by myself and pretend I was a woman alone on holiday—even though I hadn’t paid for my trip—as though sitting in the same places where famous writers also brooded and smoked like Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin would somehow make me a writer, too. I wanted to walk the streets without a map and pretend I knew where I was going, as if I lived there, as though I was living the life of a writer who lived there. Only later would I see my own fantasy as bravado, and would appreciate my father’s efforts to teach me about art (and how to use a map). Planning our trip to The Louvre as a fifty-two-year-old was just one way I could show him how much those trips meant to me when we were both younger. And besides, surely he enjoyed seeing the parts of himself he liked best emulated in his children.

As soon as the elevator doors closed, I knew it was a bad idea. I’d taken for granted that a staircase would be adjacent to the elevator. Tony and I began looking for a way to get upstairs, and that’s where I began to regress. The day had already felt rushed. I could only get us tickets for 3pm—the museum closes at 6pm—so before we even got there I was worried we wouldn’t have enough time. I’d forgotten about my father’s “Fifteen Minute Tour” and apparently, he had, too, he told me later. That morning, my parents had taken a taxi to the Petite Palait to see the Sarah Bernhardt exhibit, so by the time the four of us met at the Louvre, they were already tired. I also felt a self-imposed pressure to make sure everything went smoothly, but it was an artificial kind of stress people put on themselves when they are on vacation. You’re not working when you’re on vacation, you’re touring. None of this should have been a big deal.

It’s when Tony and I began searching for a staircase, that I began to panic. The crowds were thickening in that annoying way at museums where too many people are ambling in clusters as though they have no worry about time—they don’t, because they are, after all, on vacation—and no one is moving in the same direction. Some folks are using the museum map to guide them and don’t look up, others linger too long at certain pieces while listening to the audio that you can check out at the entrance when you first pay the museum fee, boring lectures on each piece of art, and you begin to think the noises they make, the “Oohs” and the “Ahhs” and the “Mmms Mmms” are just pretentious ways to show off to others they know something, anything about art. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to me yet that if my parents exited the elevator before we did, that they might just wait for us. They are reasonable adults. But because I had begun to worry I’d lose them, and because they are my parents, I thought maybe they’d actually come looking for me. In my mind, then, I needed to beat them to it, show them that I was the adult even though I was breaking down, sweating and panicking, and be there for them when the elevator doors opened. So Tony and I began dashing in between families with screaming kids in strollers, darting through a group with a man leading them holding up a green flag, hurrying as we looked for nearby staircases while my parents were transported vertically in a metal box as I increasingly felt rushed and panicked.

There was one moment before the elevator fiasco at The Louvre that day where I didn’t feel rushed. We were on our way to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, when we still thought we could get to it, when I was still hurrying everyone to keep going. We had to walk through Room 702, known also as one of The Louvre’s “Red Rooms,” where large works are on display. All of a sudden, Tony stopped walking and was standing in front of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. I was a few steps ahead of him and noticed he was behind me. My parents were behind him. I could see he was transfixed by the painting. Marat, the French Revolutionary leader who was stabbed to death in his bathtub in 1793 by the assassin, Charlotte Corday, has a slight smile. His long muscular arm is extended out of the bathtub. He’s still holding his feather pen that shows he was writing a letter in the tub. It’s been said Marat is smiling because the bathtub gave him relief from his debilitating skin condition, relief he was feeling when he was killed, as though the assassin froze him in time, in death, when he was feeling his best. I imagine the painting did for my husband what art is supposed to do for us—lift us out of ourselves and help us understand the world in new ways. I looked with Tony at the painting—at the angles of the high tub, the curve on Marat’s mouth, the detail of the writing on the letter, the delicacy of the feather. In that moment, time neither slowed down nor sped up; rather, it kind of disappeared, and we were in a neutral place where something in you opens up and your breathing gets a little deeper and you can breathe past your chest into your abdomen and you feel your nervous system slow down like you’re a car slowing down on a highway and you just notice you’re calmer and you finally feel something more than you normally feel most days. I was grateful for the pause. If it wasn’t for those few moments, I think I might have missed the whole point of going to an art museum.

My parents caught up to us, and we walked through the rest of the gallery. Soon, my parents’ fatigue was showing in their faces, in their shoulders and gait, and it was then we decided to take the elevator, and mistakenly went down instead of up. We got out and walked around and then they went in, and Tony and I looked for the closest staircase. We were near the Greek Antiquities when we saw some stairs that went halfway up to a deck that overlooked the perimeter of the floor we were on. It wouldn’t get us up the two levels we needed to go. Moving quickly, we looked for another set of stairs. Somewhere in between the Islamic Art and the Near Eastern and Egyptian Art on the other side of the floor we realized that we had no idea where we were. The Louvre has multiple elevators (it turns out there are 18). We also didn’t know which one my parents had taken (elevator L). Our cell phones didn’t work inside the museum. I started to sweat. How would I find them, and what would happen if I didn’t? We had no contingency plan, no “meet by the large pyramid outside at 6:00pm if we lose each other inside the museum” plan. 

Just before we got separated by the elevator doors, my father was winded and said he didn’t remember what was on his made-up fifteen-minute tour. I said it was no problem, that I’d make sure they saw the main pieces we’d seen decades before. But by the time we realized The Winged Victory of Samothrace required too many stairs, my parents were exhausted. My mother was worried about getting knocked over by the waves of people funneling through, and had begun doing strange things with her cane, like poking at a young couple both wearing white Converse high top sneakers walking arm in arm, as though she was a feral cat pawing at strangers when they got too close. My parents were thirsty. It was hot. I should have brought water. I should have gotten my mother a wheelchair when we first entered the museum. We didn’t think of it. I still didn’t get her one even when I did think of it. No, she said, several times when I asked her, she didn’t want to be a bother. We’re leaving soon, she said, even when we weren’t. 

When we finally realized there were multiple staircases and multiple elevators, I yelled at Tony that we’d never find them and had a temper tantrum, screaming they’d be gone forever. Like a kid, I threw my purse on the floor and Tony rolled his eyes. He told me to stay by one elevator as he searched for other staircases near the elevator we thought my parents had taken. I looked through the sea of people for old couples. There were so many! Old couples in their seventies, eighties, some in their nineties, holding hands and shuffling their feet. Some of them resembled each other, the way that couples start looking alike when they’ve been together for a long time, some with drooping faces and saggy, wrinkly necks and white, wide velcro gym shoes. For a moment, I thought I saw my parents. The man had a green baseball cap on and the woman had a cane and I got sad because I thought to myself, My parents look like them, and then I thought, What will it be like someday when my parents are gone and I see other old parents and I think they look like mine did. But then I realized that the old couple was my parents, and before I was relieved that I’d found them, I wondered when they began to look so old. Was it in the last year? Five years ago? Or was my own sense of time shifting as I, too, am getting older?

It turned out they did exactly what I’d told them to do. They got off the elevator at Level One and waited for us to get to them. Then my father’s face looked like a little boy in a large crowd, frozen and compliant, waiting for an adult to tell him what to do. My mother was holding his hand, her other hand gripping her cane for balance. They were only lost for a few minutes; technically, they weren’t even lost. I knew I’d been irrational, that they were never that far from us, that there are so many worse things than being on an elevator in a famous museum. We were, after all, on vacation. It shouldn’t have been a big thing. Yet time had disappeared in those few moments I thought I’d lost them, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how much time I actually spend trying to block out the thoughts I have of death and dying. 

As we walked towards the exit of the museum, my father took my hand. “A little advice for you,” he said. I leaned towards him, the father-daughter dynamic restored. When I was a kid, I wanted a rolodex of my father’s opinions on everything so that I’d have them forever. Surely, this, too, would be an entry in the rolodex I’d someday make. 

“Let’s try not to get separated again,” he said, squeezing my hand. 

I realized later, after he said that to me, why I regressed so much when the elevator doors shut. It wasn’t the obvious reason—that they felt lost to me in those moments because someday I will lose them. This was evident from the beginning of this whole thing. Looking back now, I’m still not sure if it was the fear of losing them that made me recall the memories, or if it was the memories themselves—an effort to make sense of a perceived emergency through the connections to other memories—that rattled me so much. I still don’t know. 

All I do know is that there was something about the way the doors closed, and the way their faces expressed confusion, and the panic I felt, and how I leaned towards my father when he gave me advice and said Let’s try not to get separated again that made me aware that I am on the second half of my life. That I need to develop my memories in a different way than I did when I was younger. It’s as though I’ve become a journalist of my own life, a ghost of myself following me around with a notebook and pencil, reporting and recording things that most people don’t care about with an incessant need not only to remember everything but also to create meaning out of it. To connect things that happen to other things that happen. Like pausing at a piece of art, watching a mother poking people with her cane, eating a tarte citron, begging a guard, climbing a wall, asking for peanuts, giving advice to a daughter, having a temper tantrum, seeing oneself in a sea of old couples, realizing, gratefully, one’s parents are there. On their own, each of these is just a scene. Together, they become a whole life.

Earlier, I said that when the elevator doors closed I was embarrassed because I felt five or six, or maybe even three or four. Yet the truth is that it’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel five or six again, or maybe even three or four again because I’d be at the beginning of my life, I’d be in the first half of my life, before most of your memories have happened. Or they’re happening and you don’t know it. They’re forming in your mind, creating deep grooves in your brain without you being aware, because you’re not yet scared you will forget. You’re not yet scared there will be no more of them. You’re just living and making memories but you think you’re just living. You’re so far away from even knowing that something like an elevator door closing shouldn’t be a big deal. It just closes, and then it opens, and you end up on another floor.  

Liz Rose Shulman is the author of Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad, published by Querencia Press. Her writing has also appeared in HuffPost, Slate, The Boston Globe, and Tablet Magazine, among others. She teaches at Evanston Township High School and Northwestern University. Visit her at lizroseshulman.com

24 April 2025