“And no one can erase the days we left behind…”

As I lit a Yahrzeit candle for my wonderful, beloved parents, Sima and Izak, z’’l, last night on erev Yom Hashoah, I had a sudden flashback to the day my father died in 1987. They say he died of a broken heart. After all, my mother had passed away six months earlier, and the two of them had been through so much together in their almost 40 years of marriage – especially during the traumatic Shoah years. They were so absolutely inseparable, that clearly, he couldn’t survive alone and yes, that’s partially correct. Sima’s premature death, as a result of her ill-health and troubled heart, left him so anguished and bereft that the very essence of his being seemed, like a slow puncture, to depart from his body.

In truth though, my father’s life ended miserably and pathetically, in a hospital bed, with an overflow of water in his lungs, the victim of a drowning inflicted on him by medical negligence. He wanted so much to continue, to savour his last few years with his children and grandchildren. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. This wasn’t in the script. I can still hear his fading voice, pleading for his sons to be at his side, to help him confront what he, as a doctor, must have known, and with sheer terror, that he was breathing his last breath, that he was sucking up every last bit of........

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