Elise, you were a person who experienced the world as a deep embrace.
Your foundational drive was to touch, feel, see, hear, taste everything the world has to offer. Hungry for contact, ready to consume every experience.
Maybe the content was different, but it’s something we had in common; our drive to feed our sense of wonder. Our approach to the world – open-eyed, curious.
And what you seemed to always know, more than I’ll ever be capable, is that the key to experiencing everything is to give of yourself, whatever you have.
Sometimes that was in asking the right questions. Sometimes that was in making a meal. Sometimes it was the simplest forms of kindness – smiling at someone… And many times – an expert amount of times – it was the most complex form of kindness: overcoming the natural, human urge to judge others.
And twenty years ago, I got you wrong. I hope you forgive me. I never really took the chance to ask your forgiveness because I didn’t come to express it until I stood across from the newly laid stone.
I don’t know if you heard me; but in case you didn’t – I owe you an apology. I made a terrible, terrible mistake.
An assumption.
I spent years believing I had been judged on first sight; and I spent years believing that if that was indeed true, it meant that I was stamped in your book and that was that.
But I was terribly wrong. I was the one judging you, closing myself, not making enough space for you – not giving you enough of my own kindness. I failed you in that.
I’ll never, ever forget the kindness in your eyes when you gave me the space to talk about my brother without judgment. I saw the blind kindness, and it washed over me while we spoke, and it was then that I learned I had been sorely mistaken about the woman who raised my amazing husband. It’s when I learned that I had foolishly not added up the equation, that there was so much I could learn from the woman who had taken 100+ foster children into her home over the span of 11 years; the woman who accepted anyone at her shabbat table; the woman who considered everyone – almost literally – in her shabbat candles; the woman who could not take no for an answer if it meant not being able to offer help.
Last year, on the first shabbat after you were gone, I saw my first kalanit of the season. It cascaded into all these little things I would have loved to show you after finally making aliyah. The flowers in February in Israel – the reds, the purples, the yellows. We would have gotten you there to see it.
It took me a year to write this. I’m still not sure why. The loss of you has been stuck in my throat since I sat with you, the evening before the middle of night you passed. I held your hand and I couldn’t comprehend it. I did in an earthly sense but in a spiritual one it didn’t compute.
Now when I look at your photos all I see is life. You were a person filled with life. I don’t know how much more life could have fit in one human frame. If life reached out to you, you grabbed it. In words, in deeds, in expressions. In smiles, in hugs, in cheek pinches.
I think the choking hazard for me over the last year has been realizing that so much life could be cut from us. Plans unfinished. Mid-living.
If you can spare your generosity just once more – aside from your forgiveness, I’d just as much like the opportunity for you to accept my gratitude.
You did me the honor of humbling me. I walked into our relationship guarded; feeling judged. It was easy to laugh it off but it was real. But I was judging you. I didn’t realize it until years, a decade and a half later. And even then the realization crept up too slow; I was too slow. Too closed, too stuck to truly acknowledge it.
You were curious, filled with wonder. I cherish that feeling, too. But the way you expressed it throughout your life – I’ll never forget it. Your last kindness to me.
Whadya got: