In March we lost a member of our family, my father’s wife Lily.
Lily and my father met around the age of 70; for each it was a second chance at love. They met in 2004 through an Jewish online dating service, something that still makes my family laugh – they were quite the trendsetters at their age! I remember my dad was so excited to meet someone who shared so much with him — she had a similar background as an Eastern European Holocaust survivor, and both grew up in Israel and emigrated to the U.S. as adults.
Lily was born in the 1930’s in what is today Ukraine. During the Holocaust she and her family lived for a time in the ghetto in Czernowitz. Afterwards, her family fled to Israel, but they were held in Cyprus for a year. She spoke often of her memories of these places. She also spoke often of her time serving in the Israeli army. She was good for my father because he so rarely spoke of his memories. She and her family traveled to Israel often, and I think she gave him a part of his past back because he could travel to Israel with her and experience it the way she did. Lily spoke German, Hebrew, and English but was most comfortable speaking in Hebrew. She often said to me that she loved German, her first language, but my father hated to hear it, so she wouldn’t speak it around him.
In 2008, my dad moved to Maryland to be with her; in all that time they were almost never apart. At their age, and having suffered many losses, they wanted to be in each other’s presence at all times, even if that meant doing what the other wanted to do.
When Lily came into my life, she was volunteering at the National Gallery of Art, and we would meet there regularly for lunch. She never came without a hug, a smile, and a big bag of gifts – usually from the gallery or the kosher bakery, sometimes from her travels. She welcomed my husband and me into her family without reservation, and it was wonderful to have a whole new family in my area to celebrate the holidays with.
In recent months, when I came to visit and see how she and my dad were doing, she constantly wanted to make me something to eat, and she wouldn’t sit down until I’d eaten something – even while she wasn’t feeling well and could barely eat herself.
Most of all, I’ll remember Lily for her optimism, even in the face of cancer, memory loss, and my father’s health struggles. She always spoke of wearing “rose-colored glasses” and that life had taught her that the most important thing was to be positive. She encouraged my father to say a prayer before bed so he’d sleep better, and she swore he did because of it. My father and I are not optimists by nature — I see a lot of my own anxiety in him. In that way, and in many other ways, Lily was the best thing that could have happened to him.
When I talk about my father’s wife, as I have quite a lot in recent months, people often call her my stepmother. I never called her that since I was over 30 when they met. But in every way she was a part of my family, and a very big part of my life in the DC area. A woman of traditional values, she often said that women should be “soft” — which always made me smile as she was one of the strongest women I’ve known.
I’ll miss her greatly.
