But the timing was all wrong. It was three weeks before Pesach and two months before my daughter’s wedding. Besides, the shidduch with Asher Ruban had been suggested ten months earlier, and at the time, he had said I was too big a package for him. So why was he waking up now with a yes?

When the shidduch had first been suggested ten months earlier, my rebbetzin, Mrs. Kunsloff, had done exhaustive investigations for me. After speaking to dozens of people, she was entirely baffled. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “Half the people I speak to tell me he’s a rasha, and the other half say he’s a tzaddik.”

Apparently, Mr. Ruban had gotten divorced 16 years earlier, when the oldest of his three children was five. His own parents and siblings blamed him for the divorce, and were quick to tell people what a nasty, horrible person he was. Mr. Ruban had once become engaged after the divorce, but his own brother had called up the kallah and warned her to keep away, so she had broken the engagement.

From Mr. Ruban’s shul and work, however, a very different picture emerged. His friends, chavrusas, rav, clients, colleagues, and neighbors held him in high esteem, and described him as a man with a big heart, a man who was kind, honest, and responsible, a man who loved learning and devoted a good part of his day to Torah study.

“I can’t figure out which of the two narratives is correct,” Mrs. Kunsloff said. “The only thing I can suggest is that you meet him and see for yourself.”

At the time, however, Mr. Ruban had said no to the shidduch, so I was spared the decision of whether to agree to meet him.

And now, Hashem was sending him my way again — just days after I had turned to Hashem and desperately begged Him for a way out of my situation.

How can I go out with a man whose own family warned people to stay away from him? I wondered.

My own experience helped me answer the question.

Before my divorce, I would never have believed that a family could turn against their own so cruelly. My own family was loving and warm, but I had experienced painful rejection at the hands of my ex-husband’s family. At the time of the divorce, my ex-husband’s family — whom I was close to — had turned against me, fabricating hair-raising stories about me and cutting off ties with their own grandchildren in an attempt to get back at me. Although they were wealthy, they refused to provide child support, effectively condemning their grandchildren to a life of poverty. Concerned that I would remain an agunah, the dayanim of the beis din had urged me to accept the get without a commitment of child support, although they did insist that my ex pay a minimal amount that would cover food.

I thought of Mr. Ruban, a man whose own flesh and blood hated him, and my heart went out to him. I knew what it felt like to have people telling hateful stories about you. Even if the stories were true — and the people outside his family insisted they weren’t — how could his own family be the ones to spread those tales?

Now that the shidduch had come up again, I called Mrs. Kunsloff and asked her what she thought. “If you don’t meet him,” she reflected, “you’ll always have that doubt in your mind that maybe you should have met him. So why don’t you just meet him once? Then you can cross him off your list.”

“List?” I exclaimed. “I don’t have a list to cross anyone off of! And it’s right before Pesach!”

“Just meet him,” she urged me. “Then it will be behind you and you can make Pesach with peace of mind.”

I was curious to meet Mr. Ruban for one reason: I wanted to know why, after ten months, he had changed his mind and agreed to meet me. So I said yes.

We arranged to meet in a hotel lounge, and I arrived a few minutes early. When he entered and introduced himself, the first words out of my mouth were, “What took you so long?”

“I’m right on time,” he said gently, pointing to a clock on the wall. He didn’t realize that I was asking something else entirely.

The conversation took a different direction after that, and my question remained unanswered — until after our engagement several weeks later.

At that point, I asked Asher again why he had changed his mind ten months after the shidduch had first been suggested. And then he explained to me what had transpired on his end.

Rabbi Gerlow had attended a simchah in the city where Asher lived, and Asher had struck up a conversation with him, during which he mentioned that he had just finished paying child support for his own children and was looking to marry a woman with children. “Until now, I had Shabbos children,” Asher had said wistfully. “Now I want to have everyday children.”

Rabbi Gerlow had immediately thought of me. “I know a wonderful woman with seven children,” he had said. “But she has almost no child support.”

“Oh, no,” Asher had responded. “Two or three would be fine, but seven is too many.”

“Why don’t you look into her anyway?” Rabbi Gerlow had urged him. “I think it’s worth your while.”

So Asher had looked into me. He liked what he heard, but his financial situation at the time didn’t allow him to commit to taking on seven children and a wife who wasn’t working. In the ensuing months, however, his business had prospered, and now he felt ready to take on the responsibility of supporting a ready-made family.

“I’ve gone out with many divorced women,” Asher told me, “and every one of them wanted to know how much I was earning, so they could figure out whether the finances would work. I said no to all the women who asked that question, because I felt that they were after me for money, not for a relationship. You were the first one who didn’t ask me anything about money.”

He paused. “Why didn’t you?”

“Well,” I said, “I knew Rabbi Gerlow had made it clear to you that I had no income. You’re a businessman, and I figured that if you agreed to meet me, you could afford to support me. So why should I care how much you’re earning?

“Besides,” I added, “I really wanted to marry someone whose learning was more important than his work. A person has to work because of the curse of Adam Harishon, but I wasn’t interested in getting married primarily to have someone fulfill that curse on my behalf.”

Three weeks after Suri’s wedding, Asher and I got married. His father had passed on, and his mother wasn’t able to attend the wedding, but several weeks later, she came to visit.

I had thought that after her son had been seeking a shidduch for 16 years, she would have been happy to see his new kallah. Instead, her first words to me were, “Well, you’re much prettier than you looked in the pictures, that’s for sure.”

Her next words were even more startling. “I don’t know why you married Asher,” she told me. “He’s the most difficult person I know. What an impossible child he was! I’ve never liked him.”

“I actually do like him,” I said. “I think he’s very nice.”

She gave me a pitying look. “Just you wait,” she said. “You’ll see.”

Had I been a young, first-time kallah, I would have been so shaken by my mother-in-law’s comments that I would have started seeing my husband as the monster she made him out to be. (Which, I later learned, was exactly what had happened during Asher’s first marriage.) But I was older and wiser, and had experienced the pain of being vilified by the people I considered family. So I understood that my mother-in-law’s words said more about her than about her son.

The first time I met Asher’s sister, she told me, “I’m not going to mince words. I never got along with Asher, and neither did anyone in the family.”

She, my mother-in-law, and Asher’s brother expressed these hateful sentiments to me anew each time we spoke. And each time, I reiterated that I thought Asher was a lovely person.

Asher did have character flaws, like everyone else, but I didn’t define him by those flaws; those were just things we had to deal with. When, at times, he would get angry and say things I didn’t like, I would think to myself, It’s all hot air. I would also be angry if my family had rejected me.

But Asher wanted to work on himself and improve, and he was willing to accept hadrachah and follow daas Torah. So when issues arose between us, or between him and the children, we sought advice from rabbanim and professionals, and we worked things out in accordance with the advice we had received.

The entry of a stepparent into a family is never easy, and Asher and I made plenty of blunders along the way. But all in all, we succeeded in building a harmonious, stable home and raising happy, healthy children.

We had one bank account, and there was never a question of whether I could spend “his money” on “my children.” It was our money, our children.

Knowing how painful it is for a father to be spurned by his children — his own children had been poisoned against him and wanted nothing to do with him — Asher encouraged my children to have a relationship with their father, something that I supported as well. And he encouraged me to go back to school and learn a profession. “You never know when you’ll need it,” he said. So I got myself a degree in family counseling and began working in that field.

I appreciated Asher, but I can’t say my children always did. Sometimes, after a particularly frustrating interaction between him and the children, Asher and I would look at each other and think, In a few years they’ll all be married and out of the house, and then we can just enjoy each other.

Ten years after we got married, when I still had three children at home, Asher started to experience mysterious pains all over his body. At first, the doctor dismissed these pains as sprains or muscle aches, but then Asher started losing control over his muscles. At the point when he began to lose mobility and had to walk with a walker, we were told that he was suffering from a degenerative disease that would gradually destroy his body.

A few days after he received the diagnosis, Asher told me he wanted to give me a get.

“Why?” I asked. “You don’t love me anymore?”

“I did research on the disease,” he said flatly. “It’s a horrible illness, and the amount of care I’m going to need is far beyond what I would expect of you. So I want to free you now to remarry.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Who’s going to take you to the beis din to give me a get? And who’s going to bring you home? You can’t go yourself, you know. And I’m not willing to take you.”

“Well then please put me in a home,” he begged.

“Absolutely not,” I replied. “This is the home we built together, and this is where you’re staying.”

Asher’s illness affected only his body, not his mind. “It seems to me that the Ribbono shel Olam doesn’t want you to do anything besides learn,” I told him. “So from now on, you’ll take care of our Olam Haba, and I’ll take care of our Olam Hazeh.”

That arrangement went on for the next five years. Asher learned, and I took care of him. In the morning, I would bring him in his wheelchair to the beis medrash, and he would stay there and learn for most of the day. Even when the muscles around his mouth weakened to the extent that he could barely speak, he somehow managed to communicate with his chavrusas.

Once, he complained to his neurologist that he couldn’t concentrate as well as he used do.

“How long are you able to learn?” the neurologist, a frum man, asked.

“Only four hours at a time,” Asher replied sadly.

The neurologist was flabbergasted. “That’s a problem?” he exclaimed. “I’m lucky if I can concentrate on a gemara for half an hour!”

“But I used to be able to learn for six hours at a time!” Asher protested.

One day, Asher casually asked me to bake a cake because he was making a siyum after Maariv. Asher frequently completed masechtos of Gemara, so I was not surprised by the request.

“Of course I’ll bake a cake,” I said. “What did you finish?”

“Talmud Yerushalmi,” he replied matter-of-factly.

“And you think I’m going to bake a cake?” I asked incredulously. “We’re going to make a full seudah here in the house tonight, and invite all the people you learn with!”

And that’s what we did. We had 40 men from the neighborhood in attendance, including a world-renowned rav from the neighborhood. “I don’t normally attend siyumim,” the rav said, “but when a person in such a difficult situation makes a siyum on such a difficult limud, for that I have to come, to give kavod to the Torah.”

Besides his love of learning, Asher also loved going to people’s simchahs. Before he became ill, he would enthusiastically attend the simchahs of everyone he knew, and would often be asked to speak at those simchahs. Even when he was confined to a wheelchair and could no longer speak, he longed to participate in people’s simchahs, so I took him from simchah to simchah, with the help of a chesed organization that provided transportation for the disabled.

Remarkably, Asher managed to stay in good spirits throughout the duration of his illness, even as he went from being a very capable and active person to being unable to do anything for himself. His acceptance of the yissurim Hashem gave him was total, and never did I hear him complain or bemoan his fate.

Asher’s positive attitude rubbed off on me and the children, too, and made it possible for us to function as a regular family despite his illness and limitations. Once, I attended a meeting of a support group for women caring for ill husbands, but when I heard the women there talking about how miserable and dispirited their husbands were, I realized that I didn’t belong there, and I never went back.

Sometimes, people would gaze at me with pity when they saw me walking with this wheelchair-bound, frail man who couldn’t do anything for himself. “Why don’t you put him in a home?” people would whisper to me.

“He has a home,” I said simply, “and that’s where he belongs.”

But in my mind I was thinking, Do you know what this man did for me? He took me on with seven children, lock, stock, and barrel. Now that he needs me, I should abandon him?

On the first day of Succos, five years after Asher was diagnosed, he started running a fever. Concerned that he would dehydrate, I took him to the hospital, where he received intravenous fluids and antibiotics. His condition didn’t seem very serious, certainly not life-threatening, but because it was Yom Tov and the hospital was far from our house, I had to remain at his bedside for two days.

Asher’s mind still worked perfectly, but since his speech was completely unintelligible, I had to do all the talking.

I held a lengthy, one-sided conversation with him, in which I thanked him for all the chesed he had done for me. I described how difficult my life had been as an impoverished, harried divorcée, until he came on the scene and brought joy and stability to my life. I told him how grateful I was to him, and how much I loved him.

“And I know that you love me, too,” I said.

He couldn’t even nod his head or smile at that point, but he raised his thumb slightly, as if to give me a thumbs-up.

“And I know that if you could speak, this is what you would say,” I continued, and went on to express for him the words I thought he’d want to tell me. The repeated upward movements of his thumb turned the one-sided conversation into a heartwarming dialogue.

The next morning, he was gone. He had died peacefully in his sleep, without warning.

Sadly, we didn’t manage to enjoy each other’s company once the children were out of the house. But Hashem gave us the gift of those last two days together in the hospital, where I was able to express to him how much I loved and appreciated him, even though I had no idea that these were his final days in This World.

In my work as a family counselor, I have heard so many grieving people say the words, “I wish I had told him how much I loved him” or “I wish she had known how much I appreciated her.” We never know which interaction with our loved ones is going to be our final one, and I am exceedingly grateful to Hashem for granting me the opportunity to express my feelings that one last time, and allow Asher to express his.

Even in death, Asher has been kind to me. So many people loved and admired him, and since his petirah, I have found myself enveloped in concern and support. Most of all, he has left me with the warm memory of our relationship, and the gift of knowing that he died feeling loved.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 691)