He passed away in a rehabilitation center. My mother and sister MSH were with him. I had just walked out of his room to say goodbye to one of my Aunts. The doctors had warned us his time was up, but of course one is never ready for death.
In the few seconds after he took his last breath, my other sister MSB, who had been with him the whole afternoon but gone home to be with her children, called on my mother's cell phone. We answered.
"In case Daddy dies," she told us. "We have to recite the Shema." (The prayer is a declaration of faith that Jews repeat twice a day.)
"MSB," said MSH crying. "Daddy just died. Let's recite the Shema together."
And that is what we did. With my sister on the speaker phone, my sobbing Mum and sister in the room, we recited the Shema for our faher. "Hear o Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is One."
Five years have gone since that night. Five years in which my mother has been sipping her morning tea alone. Five years in which I haven't heard his voice, or felt his warm hand or heard his mischivous laugh. My children will grow up without his teasing and without having him as an example to follow.
One big consolation is that my father was 82 when he died. A good age to die, I guess, in a world in which you hear horror stories all the time. He lived a good life and knew it. He was a happy man who never regretted decions he made, right or wrong. He loved his family: his four daughters and his wife. Even if his body and mind were ready to leave us, he did not will it, as he wanted to continue protecting us as he always did.
"Do you need anything?" he would never fail to ask at the end of our phone conversations over the years (for many years we lived in separate countries). "If you do, you know when to find me," he'd say. At restaurants he'd announce: "As long as I am alive, I'll pay the check." And if we were worried: "Don't worry worry, till worry worries you."
He was never a man of big words or gestures. He plodded along. And he got far. In India, Italy and Israel, the three countries in which he lived, together with my mother, he built a strong network of business and friends. He looked everyone in the eye, prince or pauper. All of them he would drag home with him, for a whiskey, his favorite drink, and a tasty meal prepared by my mother. He was warm and direct, at times annoyingly so, and always fair.
In Italy, where he lived for more than 30 years speaking broken Italian and always proudly saying he was an Indian, he had friends in every bar, restaurant and cafe'. He would chat up the barmen and waiters and leave a generous tip along the way. After he died, when we went back to Milan to visit, we were amazed at the amount of restauranteurs, barmen and shopkeepers who conveyed their condolences, warmly holding our hands, their eyes wet.
Unknowingly, my daughter MG ordered the same dish (she loves stuffed pasta). "I'll have this one," she said. The waiter who served us, whom I thought I recognised from past years, hesitated. Then looked at me. And said: "That's the dish your father always ate." My father died five years ago, and had not been back to Italy for two years before that. After seven years, the waiter still remembered what my father loved to eat.
This morning we drove from Tel Aviv towards Jerusalem. To the cemetry on the Judean hills in which my father is buried. We put stones on his grave and said our prayers, as per Jewish tradition. We cried, lit candles and drove back to Tel Aviv. Back to our jobs, homes, children and car pools. "That's life", my father would sigh and say.
After five years the pain is perhaps not as fierce. The emptiness in our chests is maybe not as black. But that doesn't make our loss easier.
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ME,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this beautiful story.
debi