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.