Saying Goodbye to Ima 

I grew up in Cleveland, then moved to Eretz Yisrael after I got married, as did most of my siblings. Shortly after my wedding, my parents joined us in the Holy Land. Fifteen years later, my mother fell sick with a terminal illness, and she flew to New York for treatment. We children took turns flying to New York to help my father care for her.

I was in the hospital with my mother, due to fly home shortly, when the doctors told us there was nothing more they could do and that our focus had to be on keeping her comfortable. After conferring with my siblings, we decided the best option would be to have Ima transferred to a Cleveland hospital, where her former talmidah’s husband was the head of a department. He told us he could give her a private room with an adjacent room for the family, and assured us he would care for her like his own mother.

My flight to Eretz Yisrael was scheduled for the same day as Ima’s transfer, so I visited the hospital the evening before my flight to say goodbye. When I came, though, I found she had already been sedated in preparation for the trip. I tried to say goodbye, but it was like talking to a shell. She may have looked like my mother, but it didn’t feel like my mother.

I tossed and turned the whole night, tormented by the thought that I hadn’t really said goodbye to my beloved mother, whom I would most likely never see again. Goodbyes are overrated, I rationalized to myself. Saying goodbye forever to your mother is too traumatic to even contemplate, certainly to experience. It’s unfathomable, too surreal. Perhaps it was for the best that it hadn’t worked out, I told myself. But I wasn’t consoled. I felt on a deep level that I needed closure. But there was nothing I could do about it… or was there?