One Year Without The Redhead

My grandmother was my best friend and today, one year since she died, I am reflecting what she left me with. When I was a little girl, I didn’t always think of my grandmother as my best friend. She was an immigrant with a heavy Eastern European accent. She made us eat brown bread when we went over. She freaked out every single time we crossed the street. She was old, really old. My friend’s grandmothers looked young and preppy, and they came to their door with wrapped presents on their birthday. My grandmother never brought me presents. While she looked great when she left the house, inside she wore a pink robe and a yellow turban. There was never a question that she loved us fiercely.

“My vitamins are here!” she would say when we came over to visit.  “Leib shein of the velts (beautiful hearts of the world). Lichtege gideles (shining treasures). Teirah nushumalas (precious little souls).” Then we would go sit on her bed with plates of tarte red apples that she would peel and cut, and we would watch My Fair Lady, Cyberchase, or Pippy Longstockings. I loved my grandmother; she was just so different.

As I got a bit older, I began to appreciate what made her different. She wasn’t like all the frenzied adults who had all the important things to do. When I was with her, she made time stop for me. She had nowhere else to be. I was the important thing. She had a calm wise energy to her that I knew came from all the years she lived yet for all her oldness, there was something almost childlike in her unrestrained wonder of the world. She sat with me and told me stories about her childhood. The old soul in me connected to the little girl in her who found the romance in everyday, who saw a magical song in the grass and the frogs and the stream. With each story, I fell more in love with her. I was a girl who loved books and to me she sounded like all my favorite characters. She told me how when she was my age, she had a crush on a boy and the only way to know if he liked her back was to do the flower trick. You pick a flower and pluck the petals off while chanting, “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not”. Whichever verse the last petal lands on is the truth. I laughed when she told me she threw away all the flowers that landed on he loves me not, until he she finally got her “he loves me,” on the last petal. She told me how when she was 18 years old, she was sent to Auschwitz. All her friends told her she was going to heaven from there, she said she was going home. All her friends said she wasn’t being realistic, but she didn’t care. She wanted to go home and so she did. My grandmother was a hero.

When I was a teenager, my grandmother sold her house and moved into an apartment a few blocks away. I loved having her close by. I would run up the stairs to her floor, the smell of chicken soup already surrounding me as I knocked on her door and quickly pushed the buttons of the combination and let myself in. My heart would beat with anticipation to see her.

“Bobby, I am here!” I would say. I am here. She made me feel like being there is everything she ever wanted. I have arrived, she has arrived, we are together, and we are here. She would shuffle to the door and her face literally lit up when she saw me. Her smile took over her whole being. I felt like I walked into a glorious sunshine, but a sunshine that loved me. “Ah Mamashein! Nechumala! You are here! How are you? Come sit down! Leib Shein of the Velt!”I would sit at her table, an aura of wellbeing surrounding me. I was calm and secure.  Together we would talk about life and our big ideas about the world (and about makeup and fashion). I would bring my friends over and show her off with pride as she heaped love upon them too.

I started going over to her every Friday night. After a thorough evaluation of my outfit, (you look so beautiful! Oh mine goodness, look at you! So chinush! But you know what, you should wear claushy skirts, your legs aren’t your best feature,) I would sing her Lecha Dodi, the song that welcomes Shabbos into our home. Singing is not my strong suit, but I belted it out with all my soul for her and she laid on the couch looking like there was never a more blissful moment to be in. She loved me wholly, unconditionally.  I felt seen and accepted and completely myself. When I walked down the aisle, I did it to the tune of that Lecha Dodi.

She fell in love with my husband (she would tell me to watch out), my first daughter and then my second. I moved away a little. I moved back. We spent time together every day. She was my instant mood booster. She made me feel most myself. She gave me containers of chicken soup to take home. We wrote a book together. We started an Instagram account together. My children sat on her bed with plates of peeled and cut tart red apples and watched TV. This time Paw Patrol instead of Cyberchase.

  Slowly her heart that was always big enough to love life and all the people living in it, stopped working as it should. When my sister and I went to visit her in rehab, she woke up to us talking to each other. She looked at us, smiled, and shook her head.

“I can never die,” she said. “I love you all too much.”

One day my mother called me that she was in the emergency room with her and that I should come. I rushed over there. I sang Lecha Dodi to her, my heart overflowing with love. In a weak voice she told me, “Eat, eat something, mamashein.” The doctors said she wasn’t going to make it and here she was still taking care of me. She did make it and even managed to go home for Passover. I was out of the country for Passover and spent every day with my heart in my throat, hoping I wouldn’t lose her. When I got back from my trip, I ran to see her, and we shrieked like teenagers reuniting. A few days later she was back in the hospital. I sat next to her bed and this time I knew it was the end. As I looked at her lying there, all at once it hit me; I will never be loved that fiercely, that wholly, that deeply, ever again. I cried the entire car ride home.

  But then she passed away and a funny thing happened. My older sister told me how once, when I was a baby, our parents went away, and we moved into my grandmother. My sister said I cried for hours and hours and all my grandmother did was rock me and sing a hundred Hungarian songs until I calmed down and fell asleep. Something clicked when my sister told me the story. My grandmother has been putting love into me since the day I was born. That love will never go away. My grandmother lost her father when she was five years old. While she was too young to remember the details, she never forgot his love. She often spoke about how good she felt when her mother would tell her how he would hold her in his arms and rock her to sleep as a baby. She told me how proud she felt when he took her hand and walked with her and let her hold the candle when he took her to the outhouse at night. She lost her grandfather, her surrogate father, when she was eleven. For the next 85 years, she spoke about his acceptance and unconditional love. When my grandmother passed away, her love didn’t pass away with her. It was in me and if I just stopped for a moment, I could access it. I knew that nothing was permanent, least of all the presence of my 96-year-old grandmother, but her love would stay with me for as long as I lived. It made me think of what Rumi wrote, “it is the love that holds everything together and it is the everything too.”

My grandmother was a hero. She survived the Holocaust with great bravery and grit, but that wasn’t the most amazing part of her. The most amazing part of her was her love. She was handed the world’s greatest hate and she took it and gave it back love. She made everyone feel like they were special, they were loved, they were the best thing that ever happened to her. After she died, someone confessed on the family chat that she said he was the favorite. We all chimed in that she said we were the favorites too. She wasn’t lying. We were all her favorite. She made us feel like the only one. She made us feel like we were the light of her life.  

I have always been ambitious and goal oriented. I have always wanted to accomplish, succeed, check off the to-do list, and that is all well and good. But since my grandmother died, I think less of what I want to do. I think more of my grandmother’s love and what that did for me. I try to be more present with my family. I try to channel my grandmother’s love towards other people. I don’t think I appreciated what my love can do for my children until my grandmother died. I think less of them as in the way, and more of how they are the way. I stop to enjoy watching them discover the magic I lost. When I miss my grandmother too much, I take a moment to really look at my children’s face and smile at them. They respond with an innocent, beaming smile back (well besides for the baby, he looks back at me and spits up in my face. We are working on it. Also, don’t come over by bedtime. There are no smiles dripping from rainbows then). When I feel gutted by the loss of her, I tell them, Leib Shein of the Velt, Lichtege Gidele, Teire Neshumala and I watch them fill with the love of my grandmother who is not here anymore but who will always be here.  

A few days before she died, I was with my grandmother in the hospital and said, “Bobby, Rivka keeps asking to go over to you. She misses you so much.” She was so weak at that point, but she managed to put a sly grin on her face and said, “She doesn’t miss me, she misses my TV.” I laughed. I only let Rivka watch on Fridays or when we went to my grandma. It was sort of an incentive for going. She was probably right. Rivka missed the TV and not her old, heavily accented great grandma.  But after she passed away, Rivka asked me if she can still talk to Bobby.

“Of course, you can,” I said.

“Hi Bobby,” she said. She waited, and then turned to me with a frown. “She’s not answering.”

“Oh Rivka, from now on she won’t be able to answer you in your ears, she is going to answer you in your heart,” I said.  She folded her pudgy hands over her heart and waited.

“What is she saying?” I asked her.

She looked up at me with a smile on her face and in a perfect imitation of an Eastern European accent, dripping with warmth and with a singsong lilt.  

“She’s saying, I love you Rivkale”.

And in that moment, I knew, even if we forget it, the love she gave us is forever. Every last petal will land on she loves me. It is the love of her grandfather, and her father and of her. It is the love she gave to my mother who gave it to me and to my children. It is a love that surpasses age and time and old European accents. It is a love that surpasses everything and it’s a love that is the everything too.