I loved my grandfather Semyon (Shimon) very much. He and my beloved grandmother Anna helped to
raise me and were a huge part of my daily life.
I was the eagerly awaited first born of their only child. After my father was born, they did not have
any more children and they treated me like their own child rather than a
grandchild. My parents worked a lot and
my grandparents were my primary caregivers from the time I was one.
My grandfather was born around the time of the Russian
Revolution in Belarus and he and his 6 brothers and sisters were all secular
Jews, having been robbed of the ability to study and practice their religion by
the Communists. He grew up during a time
when religious observance was an offence punishable by death and/or many years
of slave labor in a Siberian labor camp.
Regardless of these facts, my grandfather was responsible
for my introduction to Judaism. As a
child, I had been afraid of the dark and he was the only one in my family with
patience enough to sit next me at bedtime, hold my hand, and tell me bedtime
stories until I fell asleep. Luckily for
me, the stories he told me were ones that he remembered from his early
childhood and consisted of Torah stories about Adam and Eve, Moses, Joseph,
etc…
Approximately after we had been in living the US for 10
years, when I was 17, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors recommended radiation and told us
that he should have at least several more years left as the cancer was caught
pretty early and had a tendency to progress slowly at his age. My grandfather was in his late seventies at
this time, but healthy in all other ways.
Cognitively, he was doing very well, taking care of himself, and
remembered everything. He took the
cancer diagnosis better than I had expected and repeatedly assured me (rather
than the other way around) that he would be fine. He would say that people should worry less
about what doctors tell them as they tend to be pessimistic and present the
worst case scenarios. Still, he willingly went along with his doctors’
treatment plans and had to be admitted to Cabrini Medical Center in NYC for
several days every couple of weeks for treatment.
My parents and great-uncle (my grandfather’s younger brother)
had been spending a lot of time with my grandfather, taking him to various
doctors’ appointments and spending a lot of time with him to keep him from
being lonely (my grandmother had passed away less than a year ago). Therefore, when my grandfather was admitted
to the hospital for treatment and I assured them that I would visit him there,
they decided to go away for two days.
The morning after my parents and great-uncle left for
upstate NY, my grandfather called me from the hospital. He asked me to bring him several things that
he had forgotten to take with him to hospital.
That day, I had plans to go to Action Park (a water park in NJ) with my
boyfriend and friends. However, I could
not say no to my grandfather. I asked my
friends to drive me to the hospital so that I could quickly run up and give my
grandfather his things before we went to the water park. When I got to the hospital, my grandfather
looked distressed. I asked him if he was
feeling OK, and he said yes, but that he had been visited by a little girl who
told him that this was his last day and that he would not make it to tomorrow. I was stunned since this was totally unlike
my grandfather and he had never said such things before. Not even close! He was not dramatic or attention seeking by
nature. Still, I figured that he must be
stressed about his health and having bad dreams. I did my best to reassure my grandfather that
the little girl had not been real, that it was just a bad dream and that the
doctors believed that he had quite a bit of time left. He vehemently disagreed
with me and said that she had definitely been real, as he had seen her and
spoken to her. He was totally convinced that
it was his last day. My grandfather
asked me to stay with him, but I told him that I couldn’t because my boyfriend
and friends were all waiting for me downstairs (something I’ve regretted deeply
ever since). Instead, I did my best to
calm him down and promised to come back and visit him the next morning.
Unfortunately, very early the next morning I got a phone
call from the hospital and was told that my grandfather had indeed passed
away. I spent a long time grieving for
him and wishing that I could go back in time and stay with him when he had
asked me to. I also tried to figure out
how he knew that he was about to die when he was not in any acute medical
distress. I did not understand what the
significance of the “little girl” was.
No matter how I tried, I wasn’t able to rationalize it. Then, last year, a friend told me something
interesting that shed some light on this.
He’s a nurse who has worked with many hospice patients and watched them
die. He said that the overwhelming
majority of them saw and spoke to departed loved ones near the time of
death. In fact, he had often heard his
patients name names before they died. When
he mentioned these names to their children and grandchildren, it turned out
that these were the names of his patients’ deceased relatives. If fact, this man, who came from the secular
background of the Soviet Union, was so moved by what he saw over the years,
that he could no longer deny G-d’s existence and has become increasingly religiously
observant.
After the conversation with my friend, what my grandfather
told me on his last day of life finally made sense. As did the fact that a
little girl came to talk to him. After
all, my grandparents had had a daughter who died of dysentery during World War
II. My aunt was just over a year old
when she died and my grandparents had spent the rest of their lives missing
her. Who else but a beloved daughter,
would it have made sense for G-d to send to guide her father into the next
world? After all, if she hadn’t told my
grandfather exactly when he would die, how would he have been able to predict
it with such accuracy? No other explanation is plausible given the fact that
his state of health should have led him to believe that he had the potential to
live for a while yet.
As I child, I often felt terrible about the fact that my
grandparents had to live through the death of their daughter and experience
such unspeakable sorrow. I often
wondered why G-d even bothered to give them a child whose very brief life would
cause them so much pain. When I got
older, I had heard religious people talk about the fact that there is a purpose
to every single person’s life even if we don’t see it clearly at the time. I heard it said that according to Jewish
thought, even during a mundane task or seemingly meaningless life, we have the
potential to influence people and events in some unknown way.
Recently, I’ve come to the realization that a possible
“purpose” of my aunt’s very brief life might have been to reaffirm for me and
my family something that people are all consciously or subconsciously seeking –
a sign of the fact that something beyond this physical world does exist. To those that watched my aunt die and felt
the pain of her too short life, such future events could not have been foreseen. Nobody could have possibly known then, that
many years after her death, her niece would see her brief life and subsequent
appearance to her grandfather as a sign of G-d’s very existence. Thus, having lived for only one year, my aunt
has achieved what most Rabbis could not in several decades, bringing her niece
closer to G-d and answering her prayers for a “sign.” I hope that her Kiddush Hashem (suffering and
death due to being a Jew/sanctification of G-d’s name) will encourage my entire
family and our future generations to lead meaningful and spiritual Jewish lives.
