Chains

My mother passed away early monday morning. I was at her bedside with her amazing friend Phyllis Koch; we stayed there all night until the snow fell and the sun rose, and with the new day my mother left her pained body.
The medical staff thought she died peacefully and free of pain, but to sit there near her and hear her breathing and heaving was to witness true agony and despair. I've never felt so helpless before in my life.

On the way out of the hospital a day earlier I took this picture, which I'm proud to say is my first decent black and white photo in years.

I wrote the following to tell folks that Ima had passed away, or Left, as Karyn would prefer to refer to it.

Dear Friends -
My mother, Bat-Ami Sofer, the amazing friend who introduced me to Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters, The Beatles' Abbey Road, and Bob Dylan (to name a few), passed away this morning at Brigham and Women's hospital.

She had been diagnosed with lung cancer in December of 2003 and had lived peacefully and fairly independently at home for the last 14 months. For the last 3 months she discontinued all treatments and enjoyed her family, many friends, and the bird feeders on her balcony which she could see from her favorite armchair. She had been treated at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute by two wonderful physicians. Surrounded by grandchildren, family, and friends we celebrated her birthday last Sunday: she turned 63 on February 16th. She was alert, active, and ornery until nearly the very end.

Her funeral will be held tomorrow, at 1 PM on Tuesday the 22 of February at her temple, Sha'aray Shalom in Hingham (1112 Main Street). My family will be sitting Shiva at my sisters' home in Framingham (36 Berkshire Road) beginning tomorrow evening.
Thank you for all your support throughout this past year.

I've also been working on a makeshift obituary that today, reads like this:

There are some things we don't expect to see and learn from our parents. My mother's strength and courage at the end of her days is one of those things; she was terrified of dying - she didn't deny that. But knowing that it was imminent rarely dulled her joy with the life she still had. She had an incredible and often times impossible to express love and devotion to her children and grandchildren. Her love of life's small surprises is another strength I will take with me from her teaching: at the end of her days the birds that visited her balcony to eat at her feeder caused her intense joy, as did a recent MFA exhibit of oriental pottery. She was easily pleased with simple things - a good Red Sox game, a bargain at J.Jill, a moving voice.
Let me give you a little history about my mother that may illuminate the most telling aspect of her life. In the 1960's my mother and father met on Kibbutz Orim in the Israeli Negev. I like to say they had a disease called Zionism - I am sure this might not be taken kindly by some, but I mean it most affectionately. They had incredible ideals and they were at the age where one's ideals can dictate one's destiny. Together they made Aliya to Israel and lived happily in the heady world of the Kibbutz. Eventually they wanted to take their passion and dedication to the Israeli dream to another level, and together with 9 other couples they founded and built from scratch Moshav Sde Nitzan in the Negev desert. It's in that beautiful and wonderful spot, in my parents' utopian oasis, that my sisters and I were raised as no other family I know (at this point!). The Moshav was one of my mother's proudest accomplishments, perhaps not often remembered since she left it almost twenty years ago, long before she ever thought of making the south shore of Massachusetts her home.
In 1986 she moved to Sde Bocker in southern Israel, partially so that I could attend a privileged private school, and partially to maintain proximity to my sister Tamar (at the time an officer in the Israeli air force, positioned in a nearby base.) Sde Bocker is only an hour or so away from the home she had built (and felt that she lost) at Moshav Sde Nitzan; it was at the beautiful and remote Sde Bocker that she made her and I another home. Two years later she moved again, but this time for a bigger, more monumental change. She reversed course and came back to Boston, to the United States, to the city she had lived in as an undergraduate and the country she had left nearly thirty years earlier as a wide eyed and youthful Zionist.
Again she made a home for me and herself, and was close by for my other sister, Nomi, who was studying in nearby Brandeis. She got a a degree in library science - again, since her Israeli degree wasn't valid. She worked a job while studying in the evenings, and it was through her job that her coworker, a kind and talented young man named Jonathan Rubel, would meet my sister while teaching me the most essential blues chords on the guitar. Soon the two would fall in love and start a family that my mother was so very proud of.
A few years later she'd move to the south shore of Boston to become a public library director. This choice echoes her idealism (not at all dampened after thirty years in the desert) and her belief in public works and Tzdaka. These are things it might be easy to forget as her children - that my mother never stopped being an idealist that continued to dedicate her very life to causes she so firmly believed in. She donated her life's prime to the Israeli Negev, and she was rewarded with a beautiful grandson of the same name who brought her intense joy in the last months of her life, in his first four and a half months on this beautiful and cruel planet. I think now that the Negev was her first love, and of her contributions to it she was very proud.
I want to remember my mother in ways I wasn't always keenly aware of when she was alive. She gave me Mao's Little Red Book and Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, along with mind-altering records by Lightning Hopkins; she was one of those rare people who lived as her heart dictated, and her heart dictated idealism. Even as recently as last month she fulfilled a dream and became a lifetime member of the Haddasah women's organization, right after making a donation to Rosie's Place, a women's shelter in Boston. She'd want us to remember her as someone who thought that good deeds are done by doing, everyday, all the time, for the long haul. She'd want us to remember her as someone who had an incredible love for her family, one that she couldn't always express in words but in retrospect I can see that she expressed in deeds.
Today my heart has a new pain I've never met. I want to call and tell her that I just lost one of my best friends, a subtle and old friend who was always there for me, a painfully honest friend. But she's gone - there's no one at her phone except an answering machine that plays what has become a special message. Recently I always listened to it when I couldn't reach her: it's my mother's voice before she lost it to the disease, telling the world that she couldn't come to the phone, but that she'd call back as soon as possible.