Leora Zillman Reinhart
February 9, 1919 – January 28, 2020
Last year we celebrated her 100th birthday. Then I saw her in the summer. In her great old age, all of us knew she was gravely ailing when October came, so I managed to visit her then for ten days. The timing was right. On that last trip I felt sure to have bid good-bye to her for the last time, and frankly, began my period of mourning.
Yet she lived on. With Ron’s help we continued to speak every day. In our conference calls she was answering me less lately except for an occasional exclamation (some one-liner pulled from out of the blue) or a wink, yet we struggled on as best we knew how to do, despite the distance and the inevitable. But I can still clearly remember one month ago her last real words to me on the phone: “I love you, dear. Love you so much!”
They reported to me a couple of days ago that she was “not responding,” and instinctively although helplessly I felt more and more that my place was at her side, to be there until the end. Luckily the flight I arranged at the last moment got me home yesterday, Tuesday, with twelve priceless hours to witness Mom’s tremendous last fight to live, even against all odds. It was a unique and unforgettable human experience to see her frail body literally refusing for hours to “go gently into that good night.”
Several dear friends from town were present during the day, Bill, Linda, Heather… Then Ron and I kept the long night vigil by her bed accompanied by the still silence of a winter sky while a dusting of snow softly fell outside. As she gasped for her last breath at 3:43 Wednesday morning, I was holding her hand. Then, silence.
My Mother who loved Beethoven, could recite Shakespeare, who loved all those many dogs and who knew all the wild birds, who tended her wonderful flower garden for fifty years, who purchased for me my first piano at age seven with her first paycheck, who read every day from her well-worn Bible until she could not make out a single word in the blur and the dimness, and in whom I confided my every secret, will inspire us all to carry on, even as we experience the pain of great loss.
The picture is from 2005, in a quiet place she loved.