In order to follow through on my invitation, I had to get myself recognized as an approved foster parent, which involved home visits from inquisitive social workers and plenty of paperwork. When that process was finished, Fraidy came to live with us. She stayed for a year and a half.

A different summer, I hired a girl in my bungalow colony to work as a mother’s helper. At the end of the summer, I paid her $900, and when she returned home, her stepfather appropriated the money, telling her that she owed it to him because he paid for her food and utilities.

She worked for me again the next summer, but this time, instead of paying her, I took her shopping for clothing and a new coat. “I’m holding on to the rest of your payment,” I told her. “Whenever you need money, come to me and I’ll give it to you.”

The third summer, I did the same thing — but this time, her stepfather got mad that she hadn’t brought home any money from her summer job, and he beat her up. She came running to my house, and stayed with us for several months.

Later, we took in seven children from one family. One of their sons was in the same class as one of my older sons, and when he told my son about the abuse that was going on in his house, we invited them to stay with us. These children stayed with us for seven years, and called me “Ima.” Even after they moved on and married, I remained in regular contact with them.

I never looked for needy souls to adopt, but these people heard about us from their friends, and they just came. The way I looked at it, Hashem gave me a big eight-bedroom house and room in my heart; how could I say no when He sent me His children?

My kids knew that any day when they came home from school, they might find someone in their bed. “She’s divorced, she’s abused, and she’s sleeping in your bed,” is the way one of my sons cheerfully encapsulated it. Had my children been resentful, or felt neglected, I would have stopped taking in other people’s children, but they were completely on board with it.

By nature, I am very organized, but I trained myself not to let the mess and chaos bother me too much, recognizing that when you have a house full of people, things aren’t going to be exactly the way you want them to be. I didn’t surrender completely to entropy, but I did strive for a healthy balance between organization and flexibility.

Living under the same roof as a bunch of people with diverse personalities and backgrounds spurred me to think very carefully before I spoke. Rather than reacting to a situation immediately, I would ask myself three questions before opening my mouth: Is it necessary to say this? Will it hurt someone’s feelings? Will it accomplish anything? I avoided lots of mistakes and heartache this way and managed to maintain positive relationships with the many members of my household.

Although we tried to help as many people as we could, I can’t say we were successful in every instance. Not all of our Shabbos guests ended up keeping Shabbos, and not every one of our foster children and houseguests became a functional member of society. But our attitude was, “Lo alecha hamelachah ligmor” — or, in the vernacular, “Seize the day!” Our job wasn’t to rack up successes; it was to start, to try, to do what we saw needed to be done. The outcome was out of our hands, and was often not what we would have liked, but that didn’t stop us from reaching out and trying again when an opportunity arose.

Eighteen years into our marriage, Baruch started experiencing some worrisome physical symptoms, including tremors, tingling, and vision loss. It took five years until a definitive diagnosis was delivered: chronic progressive multiple sclerosis.

We went to see a top neurologist, but all he could tell us was, “He has MS. What do you want me to do?” At the time, there was no medication available to halt the progression of the disease.

With conventional medicine having no treatment to offer, we tried all sorts of alternative remedies. If anyone told us about a possible cure for MS, we’d try it, no matter how cuckoo it sounded (think snake venom and bee stings). One remedy we heard of required soaking the patient’s feet in ginger water, so for a while I was buying out all the ginger stock of our local grocery.

For an entire year, Baruch was on an organic, vegan, macrobiotic diet. This involved prodigious food preparation, and became a family affair. We’d start cooking the food Motzaei Shabbos, and on Sunday we’d line up all the different courses on the dining room table assembly-line style, with one person putting in a vegetable in each meal tray, another person putting in the protein, a third putting in the starch, and a fourth closing the tray and packing it into the freezer.

Even after receiving the devastating diagnosis, Baruch encouraged me to continue taking in people who needed a home. More beds appeared as my kids got married and left the house, and these empty beds were filled with various and sundry houseguests and foster children.

After Baruch’s diagnosis, we began to reap the dividends of the spiritual investments we had made. By the time we really needed to cling to the concept of gam zu l’tovah, it was already embedded in our souls. Years of internalizing the idea that everything Hashem does is for the best made it possible for us to see Baruch’s illness in a positive light and focus on the good in our lives. Without having gone through that process earlier on, I don’t believe we could have endured the heartache a progressive illness brings.

As Baruch’s body gradually failed, he went from a cane to a quadricane to a wheelchair to being bedridden and requiring the help of an aide. But the smile never left his face. Even when he lost the ability to control his facial muscles, you could see the smile in his eyes. Never did he question, “Why me?” For as long as he could speak, he would say, “Hashem doesn’t do anything by accident. Everything has a purpose and a lesson to be learned.”

Even after Baruch was unable to hold a siddur or learn from a sefer, he would sit at the computer and learn Mishnayos or say Tehillim. Once he was bedridden, he made sure that someone helped him put on his tallis and tefillin every day. When he could no longer sit or speak, he would listen to a tape of Shacharis that my son made for him. Throughout the day he would listen to recorded shiurim.

When Baruch had visitors, he wasn’t interested in small talk — he wanted inspiration. Once, some people came to visit Baruch on Shabbos, and they started talking about the stock market. Baruch, who by then could barely speak, screamed out, “Torah!” That shook up the visitors, who quickly changed the subject and began discussing the parshah.

Other people in Baruch’s situation would have inevitably fallen into depression at some point. But he warded off depression with his emunah — emunah that he had built when he was healthy.

For my part, I worked very hard to keep the atmosphere in the house light and happy. Baruch’s illness, I felt, was traumatic enough; why add personal drama to the situation? I had children to raise and foster children to nurture, and I needed a healthy, happy, spiritually evolved atmosphere in my home in which to do it. Just because the kids had a sick father didn’t mean they had to live in a sick environment.

To keep the mood upbeat, I put a smile on my face, turned on music, and printed out jokes, which I read aloud at mealtime. I also tried not to overwhelm the kids with excessive demands, even if I didn’t have a husband who could help me.

And my children did not grow up disgruntled. They learned to give, to put others first, to roll with the punches. My younger two daughters, who never knew a healthy father and were teenagers when he passed away, were so inspired by caring for their father that they both decided to train as nurses.

Baruch lived with MS for 24 years, much longer than most people with the disease survive. I attribute this to the fact that he was cared for at home by people who loved him; most people in his condition would have long been institutionalized and faded away.

At the end of his life, Baruch needed a feeding tube and a breathing tube. Six years ago, he was hospitalized, unconscious, with total organ failure. The last five days of his life, all of the kids came to the hospital to be with him, and we sang his favorite songs and laughed, cried, and reminisced together. When he finally passed away, he left behind the same tranquility and peace he had lived with despite his suffering.

His levayah was packed with hundreds of people whose lives he had touched. One man I did not recognize said to me, “I came from Baltimore to be at your husband’s levayah, because he changed my life. I was at your house for one Shabbos, and when I moved to Baltimore, I decided to model my home after yours.”

For all that Baruch was a spiritually powerful man, he was an unassuming person, not a rabbi or a rosh yeshivah. Prior to becoming ill, he put so much effort into recognizing and appreciating everything Hashem had given him that even when his fortune turned, he was able to continue enjoying his life and making the most of what he still had. People marveled at his emunah and his ability to maintain his equilibrium under the most dire circumstances, but what they may not have realized was that this was the product of years of internal work. He wasn’t born great, nor did he become great overnight.

After Baruch’s passing, one of my children found a list hidden away on the computer, in which Baruch had enumerated all the things he was thankful for. The list, which Baruch had written when he was already very ill but still able to type, included an expression of gratitude to Hashem for “all the yissurim He has given me so that I can have a great reward waiting for me in the World to Come.”

During the years of Baruch’s illness, I never had time to feel sorry for myself; I was too busy. But even if I would have carved out a few moments for self-pity, I couldn’t have taken myself too seriously, because Baruch himself never descended into self-pity. The motto in our family was, “If Abba can do it, we can too.”

Today, all my children are married, baruch Hashem, and I am living on my own, so I no longer take in long-term houseguests. But people in difficult situations continue to turn to me for support and guidance. What I have found, though, is that some of these people are not really interested in being helped; they want me to enable them to continue feeling sorry for themselves. When I share spiritual ideas or hashkafah with them, they often get upset. They want to hear how bad their lives are and how difficult they have it, not how they can alter their perspective to see the good in their situation and take hold of their future.

I agree that validation and empathy are important when you’re going through a tough time. But even more important is to make the best of your situation and make a life for yourself despite your difficulties, rather than wallow in self-pity.

Looking back, I wonder how in the world I managed to raise ten kids and host countless foster children and guests while holding down a full-time job and caring for an incapacitated husband. The only answer is that Hashem gave me the koach to do what I had to do when I had to do it. I didn’t feel pulled in a million directions at the time, even though, in retrospect, I was. I just put one foot in front of the other and kept going, focusing more on what I could do for the people around me than on the difficulty involved.

It wasn’t easy, but who said life has to be easy in order for it to feel good?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 669)