I had no idea why I felt such urgency to visit my mother
Just before Rosh Hashanah of 5764 (2003), I started getting regular calls from my two older brothers in America to update me about my mother’s health. Of my parents’ three sons, I am the only observant one, but we three brothers always have kept in close contact with one another. Our mother had been fighting cancer on and off for 40 years, but now things were getting worse — and quickly. In my shul in Bnei Brak, I started to say extra Tehillim for her during the weekday minyanim.
The day after Yom Kippur, I started shopping for arba minim for my two sons and myself, and we began to make a succah off our living room porch. Succos is my favorite Yom Tov, and I planned on spending every possible moment in my succah, just like every year.
But on Erev Succos, I got another call: My mother was now in the hospital. My oldest brother, Charles, and my middle brother, Danny, had flown to Sun City, Arizona, to supervise her care, as our aging father no longer had the cognitive ability to do so.
I went into Succos with a heavy heart. The last time I had seen my parents was when they came to visit us in Israel after the birth of our sixth child — our first son — more than ten years before. As a result of her health problems, that trip had not been easy for my mother, but she had enjoyed herself immensely.
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