I have just completed the year of avelus for my mother. I can’t say I know how you feel because I don’t. We each experience a loss differently because our relationship with the nifter/nifteres is a special and individual experience. Even siblings have different and separate memories and emotions.
But I do know what it feels like to suffer a loss and to mourn that a loss. Yes it is sad and lonely and yes there is definitely a missing piece to our emotional puzzle. But as the year came to a close I had to shake off the sadness and stop mourning her death and start celebrating her life. The same way I gave tzedaka l’zecher nishmos, I have to do things in her name and to celebrate her life instead of concentrating on her death. I can’t just sweep everything that made up who she was into that small compartment that is “death”; she was alive and did so much good in her life. That is what I have to think about and honor. That is what I have to concentrate on. I can’t yearn for her hugs and kisses, I must remember them with love and joy. I can’t sit and cry about the things she told me, I have to go out and put them into practice and apply them to my own life. If I don’t look at anything else that she did, one thing I can look at is that she taught me well. She was the epitome of a good example and I must go on without her and follow her lead.
She was NOT as lucky as I was. i had her all my life until she reached the ripe age of 90. She shared my simchas, my nachas and my joy through the birth of my children, their weddings, and the birth of my grandchildren. Her mother died when she was just about 20 years old. B”H my grandmother did NOT fall into Nazi hands and was spared that horror, but my mother and her sisters and brothers lost their father when they were very small and cared for a sick mother in their teens. They had no parents by the time the Nazis reared their ugly heads. What my mother wouldn’t have given to have her own mother for just another day. Look how lucky I was to have my own mother till she was over 90 years old B”H. She taught me to have faith and bitachon in Hashem. She, a holocaust survivor who answered the question many times “how can you believe in G-d after what you went through?” And my mother would answer “How can I not?”.
So I quote her words, I smile at her memory, I throw her kisses to the wind. I hug the thought of her, I feel the warmth of her, I keep her in my heart so close and so near to me. She is always with me wherever I go. And I also do and behave in a way that she and my grandmother would be proud. Their lessons did not fall on deaf ears.
So AYC, what can you do to honor your friend’s memory and celebrate her life?