Within minutes, Hatzolah whisked him off to the hospital, but by the time he got there, it was too late,
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hat’s the worst thing in the world that can happen to someone? As a teenager I asked myself this deep philosophical question and I thought the answer was obvious: losing a parent.
I had no reason to think it would happen to me. My parents were both healthy and vibrant and with ten energetic children to care for they had busy full lives. My father was a businessman my mother a full-time homemaker.
Despite my father’s busy work and learning schedule he was a very involved husband and father and did everything he could to make my mother’s life easier. When I was a kid some 25 years ago the first cellular phones came out on the market. At that point they were a luxury item and very expensive. Only the really fancy people had them — and we weren’t fancy people by any stretch. But the day after my father heard my mother say how nice it would be not to have to search for a payphone to call home when she was out he went out and bought my mother a big clunky cell phone.
On Shabbos morning he would daven k’vasikin and then come home and watch the kids so that my mother could sleep late. If he came home from work early during the week he would urge my mother to go take a nap and he would cook supper.
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