Their house held us like a museum holds artifacts. The smell was indefinable — furniture polish and phantom cooking, and old stories they never told us. Rugs layered over carpets, everything preserved and untouched.

My mother sent us over at least once a week. She conducted her own visits alone, as she’d been doing ever since she moved into our home, which wasn’t far away.

We would enter the hushed sanctum of the front room and perch on their little wooden footstool, two children balanced precariously, squabbling (mostly) silently, until one of them (usually Edith) would snap, “Go fetch a chair from the other room.”

That other room, their pristine lounge that no one ever used, where the grandfather clock chimed like a heartbeat, marking time that seemed to stand still. We’d linger there, sensing something sacred and sad, before returning to stand awkwardly, trying not to fidget, afraid to breathe too loudly.

“Siddown!” was the next command.

We did, ogling Edith’s swift needles flashing through her woolly yarn, our hands itching to show Ruth the puzzle piece she needed but was too proud to ask for help finding. They interrogated us on anything deemed newsworthy to two ladies deprived of family life, their questions quick, their attention absolute.

“What did you eat for dinner today?”

“Where did your mother buy that sweater?”

“Why do you have an ink stain on your sleeve?”

Only mundane topics. Nothing deep. But gazing into their open coal fire, we felt that more than the coal, it was our visits that were the prime source of warmth in their home.

They never married. I once heard my mother say their father only wanted them to marry talmidei chachamim, and there were none in the small community when they were the right age.

Was that true? I never knew. Edith and Ruth never spoke about their loneliness, the empty house that didn’t echo with the voice of a child until we came over.

They never said they loved us. Never once.

But I learned to read the language they couldn’t speak. The sharper Edith’s voice became, the greater her need. The more brusque her commands, the deeper her desperation.

It was in the quiet moments that I could see something more.

“Let me put on your hearing aids,” Ruth would say to her sister. And I watched silently as Ruth tapped Edith’s arm gently after fitting her hearing aids. A gesture so tender, so fleeting, that it felt like a private whisper. They never really learned how to touch and speak softness, how to tell someone they mattered.

We knew we mattered, anyway. Oh, how we mattered.

We knew when Edith would pause her knitting, needles suspended, and look up with sudden intensity.

“Did you have a party for your birthday?” she’d ask, as if the answer carried the weight of the world.

They knew all our birthdays. Remembered them. And they hung on to every word we spoke, hoarding every scrap of information about our lives.

And we knew every Rosh Hashanah, when Edith and Ruth would present us with a fresh piece of honeycomb, dripping with the sweetness of wishes they couldn’t express.

Edith and Ruth were woven into the fabric of my days and weeks and years. Part of every milestone, big and small. When I finally got engaged, I dutifully brought my chassan over to meet Edith and Ruth. After the chasunah we moved away for three years, but I wrote to them faithfully. Not from a sense of duty, but because they pulled my words across continents.

When we returned with our three children, Edith and Ruth welcomed us back with their particular brand of gruff relief, as if we had returned a missing piece of themselves they could never have asked us to restore.

The hunger in them was bottomless, and now it was my children who came over for weekly visits to perch on same narrow stool I had sat on as a little girl. Theirs was a home where time seemed to stand still.

Six years after moving back to my hometown, we found a suitable home for our growing family. Of course, Edith and Ruth knew exactly when Moving Day was. They begged — these proud, rigid women actually begged — to have my seven children for dinner on the evening of the move.

“We want to have the kinder for dinner,” said Edith. She didn’t say, “please,” but I heard it anyway, hanging in the air between us.

I had to coax my reluctant children to go, understanding what they could not: This was Edith and Ruth playing at being grandmothers, serving a feast on their parents’ yellow ceramic dishes to children who would fill their silent house with life for one precious afternoon. The chaos must have exhausted them. But they didn’t say a word.

AS they grew older and more needy, they began to call us for help at impossible moments: during children’s baths, on wedding days, after births, at dawn.

“Can you come down? Now.” Always a command wrapped in need. And we went. Me, my husband, and — when they were old enough — my teenage daughters. To fix the setting on their stove. To straighten out the latest financial tangle on the neat, copperplate writing of their business account. To buy and then talk about the outrageous prices of tomatoes in the local grocery store.

We went, because we understood that behind their demands lay the kind of terror that comes from having no one except each other and the family they claimed as their own.

They were involved in every facet of our lives. Purim was the inevitable visit for the bag of hard biscuits. Simchas Torah meant slipping out of the dancing to run down the hill and tell the sisters about the celebration… then return to rejoin the joy. If we were hospitalized, it meant reaching out from a public phone box. Away for a few days meant sending a postcard. The children went to parade their new clothes before Yom Tov.

They were part of every simchah, every sorrow, woven so completely into our lives that their absence would have been unthinkable.

And we were part of theirs, whenever they allowed us to be. When Edith hurt her leg and the local doctor paid a house call, she let me hold her hand while he worked on her injury. I gripped her soft, cold hand as she grimaced in pain, and she clutched at my fingers until I didn’t know anymore — was I holding her hand, or was she holding mine?

Decades passed and time unraveled their strength, days and months turning into the ugly specter of old age. There was little to do to plug the hole called loneliness, but we tried to find caregivers — at times two — to help with their personal care. And in their absence, my daughters and I would step in, ever watchful of Edith and Ruth’s dignity.

“How was your visit today?” I casually asked my 17-year-old daughter, shifting the baby to my other arm and stirring the soup with my free hand.

Just as casually, she explained why she was a little late. When she arrived that afternoon, she realized one of the sisters had had an accident — too late to the bathroom, dignity scattered on the floor. She cleaned her up and found fresh clothes in the heavy wooden wardrobe. No fuss, no drama. It was what you did when someone needed you, as natural as breathing.

They never thanked us.

They wanted to love us the way families love, with abundance, with joy, with easy generosity. But they were women who had never learned that language, never been taught its rhythms. So they gave us what they could: rigid structure, fierce protection, and a love that could only express itself in sharp words and intensity.

“I want you to meet Rochel,” I said to Edith and Ruth. That was the day I wheeled my newborn in her pram on the short five-minute walk to their house (and was then struck by the breathless realization that I wasn’t long after birth).

Ruth’s face softened for the tiniest moment before she scowled. I could tell she loved Rochel already, but she still needed to show her disapproval. Every time I put on maternity — again — there were always the sidelong glances, the loud queries to my children about whether I was giving them proper, hearty dinners. My children loyally kept silent about the sandwiches I sometimes served on the days I was too tired to cook, and it was clear to us that large families were an alien concept in their rigid, orderly world.

But Rochel was born six years after my last baby, and both Edith and Ruth treated her with silent, extra tenderness. They never held her — refused to touch her — but they loved to look at her, their eyes caressing her soft cheeks and wispy hair. And Rochel smiled back at the old women, capturing their crusty hearts.

A few months later, when Rochel was about seven months old, she landed in intensive care with a serious infection, fighting for her life. That was when their phone calls came every morning without fail.

“How is she? What did the doctors say?” Edith and Ruth, their voices usually so controlled, trembled with an urgency that betrayed them. These women who had spent nearly eight decades perfecting emotional distance were suddenly, helplessly, grandmothers in crisis.

I had to answer their calls even as I was preparing for my son’s wedding that same week, trying to balance the impossible mathematics of joy and terror.

“She’s doing fine,” I reassured Ruth, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

Years after Rochel finally recovered, when she was old enough to understand, I told her about their relentless worry.

“I think you lived because of them,” I said to her, only half joking. Some things, I believe, are earned through fierce devotion.

The day Edith fell, I rushed to the hospital straight from work.

When she saw me, something broke open in her face — relief so profound it was almost painful.

She gripped my arm with surprising strength and called to a nurse across the room.

“You!” she commanded, pointing at me with trembling fingers, a smug expression on her face, “Tell her how many children you have! Go on!”

I stood there, stunned. For decades, the sisters had made it very clear that they disapproved of our large family. But here was Edith, dying and desperate, celebrating my children as if she had birthed them herself.

I davened that she should be able to welcome my children into her home once again. But weakened with the passing of years, Edith didn’t have the strength to fight her way home anymore.

I visited her as often as I could during those hectic months, divided between Edith in the hospital and Ruth at home.

And then one day, a few months after her fall, Edith, weak and pale, beckoned me close to her bed.

“I have… Chanukah gelt… for the kinder,” she whispered. It was a yearly gift, a few immaculate bills we always had to supplement to buy our children presents, their way of being part of the family life that had always been just beyond their reach.

One of the last things she ever said to me.

It was hard when she left us. And Ruth, who waited in vain for her sister to come home, began to fade. In her last months, Ruth’s mind retreated to a beautiful place where her parents and sister lived again, as she sat dreaming in the confines of the nursing home. I visited her twice daily, often walking 40 minutes each way, trying to be an anchor in the storm of her forgetting.

Four months after Edith died, Ruth was gone. In our town, the minhag is to bury in consecutive order in the beis hakvaros, rather than burying families together. Incredibly, nobody passed away between Edith and Ruth: B’mosam lo nifradu. Even in death, they were not separated.

After Ruth’s death, I walked around in a daze, my heart hollow. For over 30 years, being needed by these women had shaped my days, given weight to my hours. Their death robbed me of a role that defined me, a love that sustained me even as I sustained them.

“I feel empty,” I admitted to my husband.

Then came the comments.

“At least now you’ll get what you’re due for all those years of devotion,” a casual acquaintance remarked.

Others were less subtle.

“Surely they remembered you in the will?” asked another, eyes bright with curiosity.

I hadn’t even thought about that, was still too dazed to think about it.

But everyone knew Edith and Ruth had owned a lot of valuable property — although no one knew precisely how much. And the natural curiosity stirred up by (alleged) tremendous sums of money made exaggerated rumors fly around the neighborhood.

The whole community buzzed with pleasurable speculation: Surely the family that had devoted decades to these wealthy women must have received something substantial?

They never knew the truth.

Thousands, possibly millions, to distant relatives. We never knew the exact sums. Generous donations to charity. Their house gifted to the yeshivah.

We received nothing. Exactly nothing.

Fifteen years later, I still think of them every day. Walking past their old street, I feel their absence like a physical weight. Their memories linger: Two old women, wounded by loneliness, whose sharpness had always been love turned inside out, whose fierce desire to be part of a family was so raw it could only survive behind armor.

Edith and Ruth. In the end, they found a family by giving up the pretense that blood is what binds us; it’s something even more enduring: chosen bonds of love.

They left us thousands: thousands of moments when devotion wore the mask of duty, when tenderness hid behind sharpness, when two lonely women and one ordinary family discovered that the human heart can hold more than we imagine.

They gave us nothing.

And they gave us everything.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 961)