Resthome happenings (3 of 3): Death.

The other week, there was the first death of a resident who I really knew, this older woman who was getting to be up near a hundred.

A few weeks before she died, she told me some about her mom, who was a Lithuanian Jew who was a socialist and never really practiced anything.

When she was 7 back in Lithuania, her mom's mom went to go apprentice her mom to a seamstress in a neighboring village, and her mom said she wouldn't go, unless she got some brown shoes.

And, her mom's mom told her mom to go, and she'd get the brown shoes there.

After a week there where she had to take care of several kids younger than her and work all day and maybe learn a little sewing at night, her mom realized that the brown shoes weren't coming, so she just set out and walked the five miles home by herself, and when she showed up on her doorstep, her mom's mom was so surprised, but her mom was like, "Where's my brown shoes?".

And, she stayed at home until she got her brown shoes, and then she went back and was apprenticed to the seamstress.

"Eastern European Jewish women were tough," I was like.  "They were all labor agitators here, back when unions were illegal."

"Yes, they were tough," the resident was like.

The resident also told me that in our city, she went to a Yiddish school, and at home her parents would speak Yiddish to her, but she'd speak English to them, since they wanted to learn English.

She also said that they never really celebrated Jewish holidays at home.  On Yom Kippur, which is when you'd usually fast, they'd eat like normal, but their mom would say that they could only do that until the upstairs neighbors who were Gentiles came home to the two-flat that they lived in.

And, at the first footsteps above them, their mom would sweep off the table cloth and everything on it and pack the food away, so if their Gentile neighbors saw them, they would look like they were fasting.

She also said that though they didn't really do religious stuff at home, once with some of her extended family they did a Purim play, and her dad played Haman.

"He was a good Haman," she was like.

She then said that Yiddish theater had such good actors, and she named a few of them, obviously relishing thinking of them and saying each of their names in turn, as she named a handful.

The first story she told me a few weeks before she died, and the second story the night before she died.  She went quickly at the hospital, and so very fast, though she had time to call all her children.

What a very nice and encouraging person to me, and what a good death.  She was nearly a hundred, had it good all the way to the end, and then she went, very quickly and pretty painlessly.  Who wouldn't want an old age and a death like that?