3 ideas
Ora treats the official death notification as the act that makes a loss real, so she makes herself impossible to find. The mechanism is magical thinking turned into action: if the message cannot be delivered, the event cannot be completed. The book presents this as both irrational and a real grip on the one thing she still controls, the moment of knowing.
Ora recounts Ofer's life in exhaustive, ordinary detail: his infancy, fears, habits and quarrels. Each concrete detail becomes a thread holding him in existence while she cannot protect him physically. Telling the story to Avram, who chose never to know his son, also passes the child to a reluctant father, so that the life is witnessed by more than one person if it ends.
In a society at constant war, parents take part in delivering their children to danger. Ora herself drives Ofer to his assembly point in a hired car, with an Arab-Israeli driver at the wheel. Seen this way, private family life is not a refuge from the military system but one of its supply lines. Ordinary acts of care, like packing, driving and saying goodbye, become acts of complicity the parent cannot refuse.