Three young widows share the struggles, the sorrow — and the faith that sustains them

Michal Kelly

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773

Michal Kelly doesn’t need a mussar sefer to tell her how fragile life is. She knows this from up close. To her, the Yemei Hadin don’t mark the end of a single year, but almost five years of great pain and suffering — and myriad tefillos and intense emunah.

A mere few hours earlier, she accompanied her husband Yaron to his eternal rest. Then she had only a few hours to sit shivah before the Yom Tov began. In those scant hours, memories —joyous ones, painful ones, and everything in between — flew before her eyes.

The tefillah she would daven in a few hours, as Rosh Hashanah began, would be different. While she would continue to daven for the health of her children, her parents, and her mother-in-law, she would no longer be desperately praying for her husband’s recovery; only for an aliyah for his neshamah.

“We were a young couple, only 24,” she begins, “parents to two young children, a one-year-old boy and a month-old girl, when my husband began to suffer from a sore on his tongue. The family doctor didn’t think it was anything that needed treatment, but the situation deteriorated and a second doctor sent him to the emergency room.

“I’d just given birth, so my husband didn’t tell me anything. Only after I noticed he was down did he wordlessly hand me the papers from the hospital. They suspected that the growth was cancerous.

“The world began to spin,” continues Michal. “But then I caught myself, and told my husband that we were going to Kever Rochel, immediately.” There, the tears flowed as they begged Hashem that the results come back negative, and that this nightmare should soon be behind them.

But He decreed otherwise: The growth was a malignant, fast-spreading tumor. Medical askan Rabbi Elimelech Firer sent the Kellys to a medical center that specializes in treating this type of tumor. There, Yaron had surgery and radiation, and the disease seemed to have been vanquished.

But — “through Hashgachah pratis,” insists Michal — the doctors decided not to irradiate one particular area, and the tumor grew back in full force in his throat.

“I only found this out in the last months of his life, when there was almost nothing left to do. When doctors in a hospital in Germany reviewed Yaron’s medical file, they said this had been a poor decision. When I first heard that, I felt as if the sky had fallen on me, but then I understood that the decision had not been made from recklessness, but out of a desire to minimize the damage caused by the radiation. And even if the doctors had made a well-intentioned mistake, it was HaKadosh Baruch Hu directing everything behind the scenes.”