Chaye Sara: How many lives

וַיִּהְיוּ֙ חַיֵּ֣י שָׂרָ֔ה  The life(span) of Sarah 

As a non-native Hebrew speaker, I am  impressed by the plural construction,  The word  חַיֵּ֣י chaye is a plural. Ibn Ezra deals with this. 

חיי. לשון רבים ולא יתפרדו.

THE LIFE OF. The word life (chayyim) is always encountered in the plural. We never find it in the singular. 

Is the Ibn Ezra writing this anomaly off as a linguistic quirk? Or is it an insight into the nature of life.  We all live many lives, go through various phases. The meaning of my life changes in the course of a day.  Of course, life should  be a plural. 

We are told that Sarah had at least 3 lives.  She had a life in Ur, prior to the migration to Canaan.  She had the life in Canaan prior to her name change, and she had the life of the mother and defender of Isaac. Other divisions are equally plausible. These do not correspond to the stated intervals: one hundred, two decades  and seven years. Although the dates do not match, the idea of separate phases of her life is conveyed by the repetition of the partitioning word  שָׁנָ֛ה  shanah, year; a word that also means change. 

The reading of Chaye Sarah, the obituary of our founding mother, marks the week of my own mother's passing. My mother also had ( at least) three lives. She was a girl and young woman in Poland.  She was born in an authentic shtetl: outhouse, no running water, kapotes, no cars.   Circumstances forced her move to the city.  (I suspect she would have left the shtetl even if she were not forced by the war.) She endured the challenge of severe persecution.  Her survival is true to the  meaning of the word. She lived, vive, over and above ( sur) the circumstances that killed 90% of her cohort, as the sole member of her clan. These were her first decades

She was a mother; at first on the run from Poland to the American sector of vanquished Germany;  on to DP camp and finally the USA. She and my father lived by their wits, in a twilight zone of poverty, ambition and modicums of success.  A new generation arose; the children were protected. They developed a sense of themselves - enough to respect their past and make the necessary compromises. My mother survived these hundreds of crises. 

Her last years in Florida began with some joy. She saw nine of her ten grandchildren born, and the tenth, Esther, carries her name. 

A person has many lives. Every moment and action has multiple dimensions and ramifications. Breaking a biography  into sections has a post-hoc artificiality. It was nor like that when it happened. 

The parsha also attests to the distinction between the events and the story. The parsha relates the story of Abraham's messenger identifying and retrieving the (only) acceptable wife for Isaaac, Rivka. The previous parsha identified Rivka as someone that Abraham had heard about. Abraham's servant, charged with finding an appropriate mate primarily on the basis of geneology,  devices a test of kindness ( or perhaps enterprise) to identify a person with the qualities he, the servant, think important. When he asks for a drink of water from the well, she will go above and beyond  and offer to water the camels. Immediately, a woman who passes the test arrives.  Without checking her genealogy, he gifts her the prenuptial jewelry. It turns out, she is Rivka (lucky!).  When he retells the story, he checks the genealogy before  adorning her.  The story is somewhere between what happened and what the teller wanted to happen. That space allows for any chronicle to be questioned.   

Every life is a diamond in the rough. When we tell the story, cut the diamond, the facets emerge. There are too many angles to imagine. It can only be described through simplification.