SAN DIEGO — All of us probably know someone who suffers or who has died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Sadly, my mother has been living with this terrible affliction for the past several years. Two years ago, my sister and I made the heartbreaking decision to move her from her Los Feliz apartment of nearly 40 years and get her settled into the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, where she receives around-the-clock care and kosher meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But there is no such thing as improvement, and her condition has worsened significantly over the past several months. So when my daughter became a bat mitzvah at Tifereth Israel in San Carlos last month, my mom was about the only living relative in an extended family of siblings, cousins and in-laws who couldn’t make it. She is just too ill.
This past Saturday, my wife, my daughter and I were in LA for the marathon and stopped by to see my mom for a few hours. Since it was Shabbat, we wheeled her down to the synagogue (they have a small one on the campus) and sat her in the front row. I grabbed a Siddur and began the Saturday service in Hebrew. When we finished the preliminary prayers, my daughter donned a talit, pulled a Chumash from the shelf and chanted the Torah portion from her bat mitzvah. We, in effect, brought the bat mitzvah to my mom. True, there wasn’t a minyan (a required minimum of 10 Jewish adults), but G-d was there, and he wasn’t complaining. When I sat down and watched my mother gazing upon her granddaughter reading from Exodus in Hebrew the way her father once read, tears welled from her eyes. And mine.
It was one of the more moving moments I’ve experienced. And it reinforced what I’m sure everyone here who reads these posts already knows, but often forgets: Life is short. Relish the good times. Stop complaining about things that, in the larger picture, just don’t matter.
Sometimes, it takes someone who has lost almost all memories from a rich past to remind us of such things.*
Ogul is a member of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego. This reflection is reprinted with his permission from the newsletter of the 919 Gang, which consists of former and current employees of the San Diego Union-Tribune. The photo was taken at Grossmont College, where Ogul was a guest speaker at a journalism class.
