For These I Cried

Storytelling is a gift. Never more so than when writing people’s true stories, the fabric of real life.

To write someone’s story is often to touch his spirit. The writer enters another world, with its own unique palette of experience, its own challenges, struggle, and heroism.

Writing tributes to some of our community’s coronavirus victims for “Every Soul a World,” on Mishpacha’s website, was a heartrending assignment. Every document I opened, each family I reached out to, tore some of the veil off the opaqueness of these times, and brought the underlying pain into sharp relief. For these I cried. Each individual was the center of his loved ones’ world; they all left families so suddenly orphaned, so alone. I would speak to the freshly bereaved family, start to write, and then the loss would hit home as I phrased the sentences.

It wasn’t only the bitter pain of the spouse and children. As they described their loss, I heard that the death of a grandparent had also left hundreds of grandchildren bereft. Who can quantify the loss of a bubbe in a child’s life? Every child passes milestones big and small, rides a two-wheeler, gets to his Chumash seudah, goes to camp for the first time. It’s his grandparents who never tire of offering the love, attention, and kvelling he craves. They are the cushion of love and approval, never seeing his flaws, even when his parents can’t see past them. They are the ones who take interest in everything about their einekel, who see a two-hundred-child-strong choir walk onto the stage and point to their own. “There she is!”