I was away in Israel for the year when my father met Helen and when they were married. At the time I really had no interest in having a stepmother. The whole concept was so foreign to me; the only stepmother I was familiar with was from the animated movie Cinderella, hardly a model to look up to. When I got back to the US, I first met Helen, and then at a later time, I met her three boys, two of whom were married already. From Cinderella to the Brady bunch, all of my TV watching was slowly becoming a personal reality. What was next, the A-Team?
Though I was not looking forward to now getting three stepbrothers, in a short while my attitude changed, and I was grateful and I am grateful for my new brothers in my life. The benefit of having stepbrothers later in life is that they don’t come with ‘noogies’ or ‘dares,’ they’re just great people. David, A”H, Ari, and Jay are just phenomenal people with amazing families.
In actuality, Helen was a master at bringing people together. She would sit on the phone with everyone and just ask questions to get a better understanding of who you were. She was always there for my father, may he have a long, good and healthy life; she cheered him on in whatever endeavor he would be a part of. Whether it was golf, which she knew nothing about, or Daf Yomi, Helen would comment regularly how proud of him she was. She would even push him to go do it more. Daf Yomi didn’t need a push, since my father is on his 6th cycle, it’s just second nature for him. She pushed him to do the things that she knew would be good for him. She wanted people to be happy, and my father was at the top of the list.
When my wife and I spent Shabbos of Shiva with my father, we went to a Shabbos take-out place to buy the many many varieties of food that Helen used to serve at her Shabbos meals. When we brought out all of the food, my father wondered in amazement why there was so much food. “We only have two or three dishes”, he said. My wife and I looked at each other incredulously. “You’re joking, right?” I said. “This is probably half of what Grandma Helen served when we came for Shabbos.” My father quickly brought clarity to the situation. There’s only a ton of food when there are guests, even one guest means 10 more dishes to be served. But for the two of them, simplicity was just fine. And all these years, I thought they served this weekly. Nope, only when guests come by, even just one guest; and she made sure to make the foods that you liked.
Once we had a child, she became Grandma Helen (GH) to us, and GH did everything for all of her grandchildren. She spent hours daily working on custom-knitted birthday gifts for all of them. For bar mitzvahs she made a custom Teffilin bag, for girls, custom machzor covers, for weddings custom challah covers, and wow, were are gorgeous. During shiva, a woman from the knitting store, Stitches, came by. Grandma Helen was her best customer. And when she got up to leave the shiva house, she took all the unfinished projects that Grandma Helen was working on and said, “We at the store are going to finish all of these in her memory at no cost.”
She suffered greatly in later years, but she never kvetched about it. Nobody could figure out how or why, but she just didn’t complain. In her early years, she raised three teenage boys by herself, took them wherever they needed to go, had their friends over whenever they wanted, and opened her house to be warm and accepting.
Over the last few years she had many tzaros, but if you asked her how she was, she would say, everything’s fine. She never complained. We don’t understand why Hashem causes some people inordinate amounts of suffering, but I can tell you, she passed the test of not complaining or being angry at Hashem, simply remarkable.
My father and Helen’s marriage was one of mutual respect for 28 good years. They spent hours together, listened to each other, and celebrated everything together, all with no fanfare. No fancy cars or vacations, just simple companionship and caring for each other and for others. She gave him Simchas HaChayim and a renewed lease on life.
Thank you Grandma Helen for all that you have been for my father and our family. May your neshamah be for a blessing and may HKBH shield you in the wings of His Divine presence.