Three young widows share the struggles, the sorrow — and the faith that sustains them
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773
Michal Kelly doesn’t need a mussar sefer to tell her how fragile life is. She knows this from up close. To her, the Yemei Hadin don’t mark the end of a single year, but almost five years of great pain and suffering — and myriad tefillos and intense emunah.
A mere few hours earlier, she accompanied her husband Yaron to his eternal rest. Then she had only a few hours to sit shivah before the Yom Tov began. In those scant hours, memories —joyous ones, painful ones, and everything in between — flew before her eyes.
The tefillah she would daven in a few hours, as Rosh Hashanah began, would be different. While she would continue to daven for the health of her children, her parents, and her mother-in-law, she would no longer be desperately praying for her husband’s recovery; only for an aliyah for his neshamah.
“We were a young couple, only 24,” she begins, “parents to two young children, a one-year-old boy and a month-old girl, when my husband began to suffer from a sore on his tongue. The family doctor didn’t think it was anything that needed treatment, but the situation deteriorated and a second doctor sent him to the emergency room.
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