In memory of my grandfather

I know...lately so many of my posts seem to be titled "in memory of..." In less than 4 years, I lost my grandmother, my mom and last week, my grandfather. Yes, it is the cycle of life. I understand...and yet the sorrow is still very real.
My grandfather was an incredible man. And in time I will write about him - with humor, wit and with a lot of zest for life. But for now, here is something I wrote for my grandparents in 1999 (translated from Russian). My grandparents gave me everything, including the most incredible gift - unconditional love.

To my grandparents

1999

I am the continuation of your river,

I am a sunbeam from your sunlight,

I am a star, and my sky

Is your love and understanding.

I am the symbol of your depth and height,

The symbol of your victory over the cruel fate,

I am like the spring flower growing

Upon your welcoming soil.

I am the rhyme in your song,

A melody made up of simple and clear tones.

In the fields of life, I am a little straw,

And you are my summer rain, my sustenance.

In memory of my mom: a year later

In less than two weeks, I will graduate into the second year of life without my mom. The divide between “before” and “after” has now widened by a year.
As a tribute to my mom, I am publishing the email I sent to the young Rabbi who was asked to officiate at her funeral. This is a somewhat edited version, because the original was incredibly raw (I wrote it the night my mom died), and had details that my very modest and private mom wouldn’t have approved of me posting on the World Wide Web…
This email is not profound. It’s not even all that well written. It’s not unique. But it’s true. It’s real. And it’s important to me to pay my respects in this way to the un-sung hero of my life, the woman who raised me, nourished my heart and soul, and have left me a better person for knowing her.
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Dear Rabbi,
My mom always said that you could write a book about any person’s life. Her life, she would argue, was in no way remarkable. I always disagreed. To me, she was just the sweetest, kindest, most well-read, interesting person and a real life hero. The twists and turns of her life are absolutely worth a book. So, since you’ll be a very important person who’ll help her soul to get to wherever it needs to go, I wanted to tell you what I know about my mom and share questions/thoughts that are running through my mind:
As a child, she LOVED to read. She taught herself to read at age three and then read EVERYTHING. I mean, every single printed word she’d get her hands on, or, I should say, eyes on, because it included not just books but newspapers, street signs, and posters…She devoured Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” at age six or seven. She LOVED art. She wanted to get into the art university in Ukraine. But Jews weren’t accepted because of severe and wide-spread discriminatory unwritten rules. But she held out hope. She applied, and applied, and got all the A’s on her entrance exams and still didn’t get accepted. The Dean of the art school took pity on her and told her directly that because she was a Jew she would never be accepted. And she ultimately became an engineer and learned to love her profession…BUT she instilled the love of art in me. She took me to museums when I couldn’t yet speak or walk. My childhood books were large illustrated art history books. It’s no wonder that I am now in a graduate school pursuing an art history MA.
My mom was a true hero. When we came to the America, she went to work for FREE for over a year to confirm her chemical engineering degree. She worked three hours away from our apartment in Brooklyn at a hospital, late evenings and night shifts. We didn’t see each other at all during that time because she was never home. But to her it was all worth it. This was the first step towards the American dream. When she finally got a job in a hospital laboratory, she was on cloud nine. That was the first time we actually bought some furniture as oppose to picking it up from the garbage...
My mom was also the kindest, most generous person. For instance, she knew everyone’s birthdays, anniversaries, and all the other important dates. I have a card from my mom for nearly all the birthdays of my life. Here is just one example of her selfless giving nature: She had a friend in Ukraine, who stayed behind when we left. She was a widow with two young girls. For years, my mom sent them clothes, food, and money. It didn’t come easy, she had to work extra hard to collect the money for these gifts, but she did it. And at the end, her friend’s kids grew up and her friend stopped writing her letters…But my mom wasn’t looking for “repayment”. She knew true meaning of mitzvah – it’s when you give from your heart and expect nothing back.
It was so hard for me to accept the terrible diagnosis, when in 1990’s my mom was told that she had the incurable disease called Multiple Sclerosis. I was angry. I wanted her to just “snap out of it”. My mom was so scared. I was young and stupid. It took me years to come to terms with reality and to fully accept MS for what it was – a cruel and awful devil of a disease which sneaks up on you when you least expect it. In the past several years, as her condition worsened, my mom really fought for her life. And I fought alongside…There are things that I can’t stop thinking about and questions that I will be asking myself for the rest of my life. I had no premonition that she could die so suddenly. I made myself believe that what I wished for, namely her steady recovery and her prolonged life, was possible. But she died…Have I said “I love you” to her enough times? Is there such a thing is saying I love you enough times?
It’s in those years of struggle, I became aware of and was most amazed by people’s incredible kindness. My hat’s off to the nurses and doctors in all the hospitals that my mom had been to. I will never forget their compassion, their hugs, and their gentle ways. They would go and warm up blankets to cover my mom, they cried by her side sitting right next to me, virtual strangers, they marveled with me at how beautiful she is – no wrinkles, beautiful hair, beautiful skin. They smiled at my son's pictures. They didn’t want to change shifts and asked me if I needed them to stay by my side. They offered coffee, listened to me saying “no, thank you”, and brought it anyway. To me it all seemed both incredible and so right, because my mom deserved nothing less for all the kindness she offered to the world.
When I saw her for last time, I remember thinking that she must be in the room, but cannot be possibly in that body. I imagined her hovering over me, watching everything unfold. Was she sad? Did she hear me as I was whispering “go, just go, don’t worry about us?" Was she in fact comforting me, comforting my father, in the moment when I thought I was comforting her? Rabbi, do people really “turn” 33 when they die? If so, she was most beautiful when she was 33. She dressed fashionably, she had lots of friends, she had a job she loved, and she had a family who loved her.
I know it sounds cliché, but I really don’t care: My mom was a wonderful woman. Some girls have “issues” with their mothers. I didn’t. I adored her with all my soul, with all my heart, and with all my spirit. She was really a wonderful mom. I LOVED spending time with her. I loved making her laugh! We spoke every day, sometimes more than once a day on the phone. I would always end my call with, “I love you so very much. I adore you….” And she’d say, “me too”. And it was priceless. Yes, of course, we argued and I used to drive her mad. Yet, I know she poured a lot of attention, energy and time into me. She took me with her everywhere. We were pretty inseparable for all of my childhood: ice-skating, swimming, art classes, galleries, poetry, books, “heart-to-hearts”, exchanging jewelry...
She often said to me that she “programmed” me to be a certain way. When I was in her womb, she said that she talked to the Universe and wished for me to be strong, resilient, smart, successful, and beautiful. All the things, that in my Mom’s opinion, I’ve become. She also programmed me, she said, to be the opposite of her. I think she always thought there were major things that didn’t work out in her life as she had wanted them to…and the reason they didn’t work out, she felt, was partially or completely her fault. The crazy thing is that, her programming was a bit faulty. I am a lot like my mom in many respects. For starters, whenever I miss seeing her face, all I need to do is look in the mirror.
Because of MS, I’ve been saying good bye to my mom for years…but they were always followed by hope and hellos…but now I have to get used the fact that hello may only be possible when we meet again in the eternal world. And I know, she would have wanted it to be a long, long time from now.
There is so much more write, so much more to say… But like her life ending suddenly and too soon, I am going to let this email end suddenly as well…

About nothing and tea

Many of you have been asking me, “why no blog posts” for so long…thank you for caring and for asking. My ego did grateful and happy circles around the globe to hear that sometimes what I write resonates with someone. Marc Chagall, one of my favorite artists, once said, “If I create an image from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” I guess all this time I’ve been waiting for something to originate from my heart. After my mom died, everything seems so different. I had to find where I fit in as half orphaned, grown woman. I am still not certain of any of that, but I do have something to say now. Something about nothing, that is.

Have you ever had a deep urge to turn everything off? As if the world was a big oversize loud TV set and you had a remote control with the “power” button? To simply stop all the noise? Not in a mean or spiteful way and not in a cowardly way either.To kind of put on internal ear plugs and shut off the valve of everything and to gaze into nothing.. …Well, I have.

What I’ve always known, or at least I thought that’s what I’ve always known, is that I am more like a human “doing” rather than a human “being”.  Doing comes easier to me than being. I tried to sit still many times in the past. I even tried to be "kind and compassionate" to my thoughts, to be the observer, to find the core self that is calm and magnificent...Every time with disastrous results. Nothing eluded me.

In those rare moments when I gathered the morsels of my will to “vacate my life” for any amount of time, my mind did amazing things to sabotage my meager attempts. These tricks included: sickening intellectual pirouettes where one thought is immediately followed by its opposite, i.e. “I don't want to die young. But I don't want to grow old”; ferocious sprints, when a whole bunch, hoards of big hairy, wild thoughts (imagine a mix between a bull and a gorilla) run in every possible direction. Kind of like a disorganized American football, where there is no hope for a touchdown – just wild, directionless mass. Without any protective layers or rules of the game, my beastie thoughts step on and bump into each other, roar uncontrollably…you get the un-pretty picture.

In her book called “The Joy Diet”, Martha Beck recommends “vacating” your life for 15 minutes every day (20 if you can manage). She calls this form of meditation a doze of “nothing”, where only mindless activity such as sitting while staring  at a candle, running or rocking is allowed. Beck says that in her practice as a coach she often meets people who feel that there is “something” missing in their lives. Do you ever feel that way?  Well, Beck tells her clients that they should start with that which their spirit hungers for, namely - “nothing”. 

I am finding that in grief, one’s yearning for the deep, deep silence is almost palpable.  When a loved one passes away, I believe they return to the source, into the big, magnificent nothing which is also somehow everything.  Since loss brings up many questions with no obvious answers, maybe it urges the soul to reconnect with something bigger.  Or maybe it’s just me…

A new sense of clarity came when I recently visited the beautiful land of Turkey. What I realized is that the process for finding peace within might be MUCH less complicated than I ever imagined. All you need is tea. Well, sort of. You see, in Turkey tea is a ritual, a form of simple meditation. They seem to drink tea to get in touch with their inner core, with each other or sometimes just because it tastes good. Tea accompanies business discussions, heart-to-heart talks and first dates. It is served at weddings, funerals, or just on someone’s front porch. It all starts with a smiling face of the host or hostess who asks, “Chai?”  The practice includes two kettles, stacked on top of one another – one with the hot water (on the bottom) and one (on top) with tea leaves. Whenever I visit Turkey I get nearly mesmerized with the tea tradition and everything associated with it. It’s so incredibly simple and yet therapeutic: just two shiny metal pots, some water, tea, and beautiful little glasses, with a golden rim and a little spoon.

Being in Turkey brings out the worst out of my “human doing-ness”. Used to the manic pace of New York, Turkey represents serenity and quiet wisdom and I sometimes get antsy there. And yet, my Turkish friends just smile at me and offer me a glass of tea. When I appear restless, bugging them about details of their life, their plans for “doing more stuff” (or our lunch plans), they shared them with me, joyfully, happily, and without reservation, all while sipping on a tea. And at the end, my Turkish friends often add one simple wise word. They say, "bekliyoruz", which in English means “we will see". But to me what it really means is, "It's so nice to be sharing a wonderful little glass of tea with you and tell you of all my plans and ideas. But, ultimately, some things are not up to me or up to you. That's the wonder of it all, isn't it? So, we will see how it all works out. More tea?"

The near-manic doing, the endless “to-do lists” create chaos and makes you mistakenly believe that you are in full control all the time. And when sh-t hits the fan, you get confused (or I should say I get confused) and think to yourself “wait, that wasn’t suppose to happened that way. I had it all planned differently.”  What I am beginning to learn is the quiet and peaceful nothing is always here, right inside me. I am still in search for it, but now I am convinced that it’s just a glass of flavorful Turkish tea away. In fact, I am sipping some hot tea right now. Would you like to share a glass of tea with me? It may bring you closer to…nothing. And a little bit of nothing is what we all need sometimes.

"...My soul is not asleep! My soul is not asleep!
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its clear eyes open,
far off things, and listens, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
It listens at the shores of the great silence."

~ Antonio Machado (thank you, Martha Beck, for introducing me to his poetry)

At the intersection of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love

“There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving

It’s been 113 days since my mom suddenly passed away. Ever since she died, I’ve been the fortunate receiver of  countless messages, emails, letters, cards, texts, compassionate embraces and incredible outpouring of support in every form imaginable. And each time someone asked me, “How are you dear?” I had the urge to say, “How much time do you have? Because there is so much to say – about my amazing mom, about our love for reach other, about…” Fortunately, for those wonderful well-meaning people I pretty much limited myself to a plain “I am hanging in there. Thanks so much for your support”.
But all the while, I’ve been keeping a mental journal of all the things remaining to be said. The irony is that as much as I love to talk, I find that writing is much, MUCH better in situations like these. When your world crumbles, it’s what my mom used to call a “hurricane in your cup”: it’s invisible and incomprehensible to everyone else, but you are drowning, covered in sweat and tears, gasping for air, unable to find the edge of the cup to hang on to… Spoken words somehow cheapen the memory and make something profound seem ordinary and inconsequential. Perhaps, that’s why I couldn’t really give a proper eulogy at my mom’s funeral.

In the past few months, several people I know lost one of their parents… Even today, a friend of mine who lost her mom a few days ago asked me “Does it get better?” I told her “it gets…different”. Ancient wisdom teaches that if you come across suffering, it means you have the power to make a difference. I began to wonder, would it help someone else if I wrote about the past 113 days and what it's been like for me? After all, my blog is about my life as I know it. Could it help even one soul, also trying to grasp for the edge of the cup and learn to swim in the raging waters of their sadness? I am not sure. But I think it’s worth a shot.

They say, life is a journey. These days I am wandering through the streets of sorrow and joy, desperately trying to figure out how to navigate the narrow and perilous intersection of overwhelming grief and the unspeakable love. And here is what I am finding…

• Step lightly and don’t expect too much of yourself. Just be. Moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day…Forgive yourself for the unwashed hair, unwashed dishes, for the missed calls, for not being graceful, for the messages left un-responded to, for the laundry not done...
• Grief comes in waves. Love is a constant undercurrent. Never underestimate its power. Become its tireless messenger.
• Concentrate on healing the little bits of yourself with the glue of silence…and do it as best as you know how.
• Know that everything is possible. You are MUCH stronger than you think. When you believe that there is no imaginable force that could make you open your mouth and say to your 89 year-old grandfather that his only daughter died, somewhere from deep inside you, bigger and stronger you finds its calm voice and does the deed. And then you realize that impossible is truly nothing.
• Be patient with people. They are trying…It is a very delicate process to say the right thing to someone who is grieving. When people ask you “How are you feeling dear?” or “Are things getting back to normal?” or “I hope you don’t miss your Mom too much?” - they mean well. They say it out of love for you. But because you are drowning in the hurricane of your own sorrow, you might have the urge to say something mean back, like “I feel like shit! I am not recovering from a flu…Things are never going to go back to normal”. And instead you smile politely and you say something more appropriate, “Hanging in there” or “as well as can be expected” and “I miss her very much and always will”.
• When someone dies unexpectedly, it feels like a slap in the face. Like someone’s phone service suddenly got disconnected in the middle of a very important conversation and there is no way to get back to them. Without this “phone” connection, all that’s left is waiting until you see them again…
• Losing your mom, no matter what age you are when it happens, makes you at least half an orphan. And it’s a hollow and lonely feeling.
• The best antidote to grief is love. And it’s not the love you receive that makes you joyful, but the love you give. The positive energy and spirit your pour back into the world as a selfless offering.
• When my mom died, it was almost 8 pm…and when we came outside, it was around 8:30. The harbor view was spectacular. The sun was saying good bye to Seattle and gently sliding behind the mountains. I said to my father “Look how beautiful. Mom is here. Mom is everywhere now”.  There is beauty in everything.
• Having lost someone you love, especially you parent, doesn't make you an expert in the grieving process. But you do cross over to a new "reality" and become a “member” of a group that sees the world maybe a little bit differently.
• Love, kids and nature are antidotes to grief. Pour yourself into something or someone living.
• Martha Beck calls grieving for a loved one“clean pain” which, if you let it, can have regenerative and creative powers. I haven't experienced it yet, but I hope she is right.
• “It” doesn’t get better. It gets different. But you have the potential of becoming a better person – more compassionate, kinder, and more understanding. And that’s something!
• It’s okay to laugh again. In fact, it's as necessary as breathing.

And, one more thing, at the intersection of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love, sometimes a simple of act of writing helps.

In memory of my Mom

A little poem that I wrote for my mom in January 1998:

Картина Климта не сложна,
В любви написана она,
Той безкорыстной и простой,
Той материнско и святой:
Вот мать, вот дочь,
Вокруг цветы,
Всё так понятно - я и ты.
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Klimt’s painting isn’t complicated.
With love and care it was created.
With love that’s unconditional and simple,
A mother’s love which is sacred.
A mother, a daughter,
Flowers are all around.
Everything is very clear: it’s you and I.

Truth about me and my walkman

This morning, on my usual subway ride to work, I couldn't help but overhear a conversation which made me reflect on the role of pretentiousness and truthfulness in our lives. Ok, MY life...

Several young and beautiful "friends" were on their way someplace on the B train. Come to think of it, they were all really pretty - in both feminine and masculine terms, like the set of characters on the sitcom "Friends". They immediately grabbed my attention, because, I don't know about your commute, but beauty is not something which is served up on the New York subway in large quantities. The friends were chatting and laughing. They were clearly talking about someone less perfect than they are. Words like, "desperate", "unattractive", "loser" were thrown around. One of the friends was a young beautiful woman, with long shimmering golden hair, who laughed especially hard at the jokes of the others. It just seemed like she was having a whale of a time. She flipped her hair and slapped her hands on her knees, when someone mention that certain OTHER who is a major loser.
After some time most of the friends got off their stops, after a lot of smooching and ciaos. And eventually the gorgeous blond was the only who stayed behind. I was certain, on her way to even cooler things and even more stunning people...BUT as soon as the "witnesses were gone", she totally changed. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. She cradled her face in her hands for a few seconds. And when she lifted her eyes again, her perfect make up was a not as perfect. She put her long blond hair in a simple ponytail, with a few stands sticking out in a funny, messy and yet endearing kind of a way. Our eyes met (or was the fact that I've been starring at her caught her attention?) She looked at me and I looked at her.... This was a young woman in a simple ponytail. The glamour was gone. The strained laughter was gone. And then a thought hit me - could it be that the process of trying so hard to fit in made her so exhausted? I am not sure why, but this whole scene stirred something in me. I suppose enough of something to write a blog about it. Of course, I haven't a clue whether they were talking about actual desperados and losers. Or whether she was just exhausted from lifting bricks the night before at her construction job. Then again, maybe part of it is the American thing...That idea of putting your best "face on" when others are around. It took me years after I came to the US to realize that when people asked "how are you", most of the time, they were expecting "great" in a form of a response and not the results of the most recent MRI!

But if my intuition is right, and she was tired of being someone else, what does it mean? Why do we cover up the truth about ourselves? Who are we kidding??? Because I believe, the issue isn't just with the subway riders. I recently attended a very posh event where pretentiousness and the truth collided with such speed and intensity that nearly each conversation could have started a small fire. Since nobody is perfect (if such a thing even exists), the friends on the B train, may just appear as such, but what lies beneath the appearance and how much energy does it take to keep up the appearance? We all think have to put out a persona or a version of ourselves that is more or less acceptable to the world (or at least we think it is). But what if we start a little truth trend?

What would happen if we all disclosed some truths about ourselves; those weird idiosyncrasies that make us unique? Would it be so bad? You know that feeling of connectedness you experience when you realize you are "in the same boat" with another human being or, holly smokes, MANY human beings. If we disclosed at least one truth about ourselves, wouldn't it make the world a little friendlier and a little less fake? Maybe this is part of the success the Alcoholic Anonymous and group therapy in general – people bond by first acknowledging that they are far from perfect.

So, I'll start. My name is Rina and here is one of the truths about me (and yes, I realize that I am posting it on the World Wide Web, thankyouverymuch):

I have a walkman radio. It’s black, worn out and it just FM. It has one dial, no buttons, and no screen. When I first turn it on, it needs a few moments to “warm-up”. I've had my little ugly walkman since I was in High School. I love it. I cherish it. I have nightmares about loosing it because it would be irreplaceable
But the truth is I feel a little...oh, what the heck, a LOT, embarrassed carrying it around. So, when I am on the subway, I try to hide it from people's prying eyes. Why is that? What am I trying to hide or prove? To whom? Who cares if I get the puzzled looks like "what the heck is that?" I suppose, the truth is I care, because I don't want to feel inferior to the people with I-Pads, I-phones and I-whatevers. If you asked me, I'd tell you that I am very confident and comfortable in my shoes...but what's with the walkman situation? Maybe, it’s that deep inside I am very conservative and kind of old-fashioned...and sort of the opposite of cool. I don't like admitting it! I get attached to "old things". And the other part of the truth, which is even more concerning, is that it is possible that I may have made fun of someone else who is attached to something that seems ridiculous and old-fashioned to me. I was covering up my own truth by devaluing someone else’s. And not unlike the beautiful, tired friend on the B train, it made me feel empty inside, exhausted, as if something essential got chipped away.

Lost in my thoughts, I nearly forgot about my new subway friend. Now she was standing closer to me, waiting at the door for her stop. And when the door opened, she smiled, a very warm genuine smile, and said, “Nice radio.” I looked down on my lap, and there it was – the little black radio walkman, which I forgot to turn off since we went into the tunnel. Now it was sending equally soothing and annoying sounds into my ears – the cracking and hissing “sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”.

So, here is to all old-fashioned losers out there, beautiful young Goldilocks, and everyone else, whether you have an old warn out walkman or not, lets bond together and just be more real with who we are...and with time even more comfortable in our skins.

What's your truth? My point is you don't have to post it on your blog. But acknowledging it even to yourself could be really liberating.

“If it wasn’t for you…” A toast to my grandfather on his 89th birthday (translated from Russian).

A long time ago, when you were only a toddler, your family settled in the “promised land” (Israel) to grow oranges and camels. Fortunately for me, in just a couple of years, all of you returned to the land of promises (the Soviet Union).
When you told me this story I was very young, but it made a big impression on me. Over the years I’ve often thought that there could have been myriad different reasons and circumstances that would have prevented you from being my grandfather. Your family could have stayed in Israel. You could have been killed in a pogrom or in the World War II…And even if you had survived all of that, instead of my grandmother, you could have met someone else or no one at all…and so on. My point is that, I am convinced, had we not “met”, my world would have been a much bleaker place. You see, I not only love you as my grandfather, I really, really like you and respect you as a human being. So, today, on your 89th birthday, with gratitude and love…a little bit of awe, I want to tell of the things that couldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for you.

• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know that my “real” name is “shainer punim” or “sweet face” in Yiddish. The memory of you calling me that special name since I was a little girl, its warmth and beauty, are always in my heart.
• If it wasn’t for you, I would have never tried skiing, or fallen off a bike, or broken my arm trying to ice-skate. Considering how “un”, or should I say, “anti” athletic I’ve always been, basically, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t even come this close to any sports-related activity.
• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have believed that real, passionate, mad kind of love between a husband and a wife could last more than 60 years…And then, when the time comes, it could just evolve into a new form and become eternal.
• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have known that any dish could be SIGNIFICANLY improved by mixing in the right amount of finely chopped, fried onions (this includes desserts too!)
• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be so self-confident. When I was called bad (horrible) names in school, you were the one who told me, “You are a star. So, there will always be people who are envious of you. Get used to it and then revel in it.” And now I know we are all stars! I was just fortunate enough that you taught me that secret early on in life.
• If it wasn’t for you, our family wouldn’t have made it to America. You took care of it all – the tickets, the paperwork, the red tape…and, to a large extent, thanks to your energy and persistence I am here today.
• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know that it is possible to be both a major pain in the butt and enormously loveable at the same time (yes, I am talking about you!)
• If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know an awesome, multi-purpose Yiddish expression “Oi vey”. Two tiny little words that can easily express deep sadness, surprise, exhaustion, annoyance, etc.
• And finally, it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have known that an undying, vibrant sense of humor combined with a passionate, hungry, almost greedy love of life, could be considered an official, personal religion. I learned it from you and doing my best to practice it every day.

Happy birthday…and, God-willing, many, many more good years ahead.
Yours always,

Sheiner Punim