| Magazine Feature |

Measure of Comfort

By Mishpacha Contributors | August 14, 2024

Writers share the stories behind their source of solace following a significant loss

In a time of sorrow, it’s often those seemingly innocuous things that are somehow infused with the power to soothe. It could be the clock you inherited, the personalized pillow you knitted but never got around to giving away, or a bag of muffins handed to you by a stranger who knew you’d be hungry. Writers share the stories behind their source of solace following a significant loss

Cushioning the Blow

Rina Kaufman

I take comfort in: The pillow I made for my mother

hen I was 21, I decided to take up needlepointing — not a very popular pastime, but I was bored being an “older single,” and since my mother was one of those who needlepointed at the bungalow colony pool, I thought it could be a shared hobby.

Much to our surprise, I was actually good at it. My mother and I never had much in common, but the time we spent needlepointing or discussing projects and stitches brought us closer together.

When I was 23, I decided that I wanted to surprise my mother by sewing her a pillow as a Chanukah present. It would be brightly colored (she loved lively hues) and filled with intricate and complicated stitches, including some I’d never tried before — something that would not only make her happy, but also impress her. The problem was that the project I was envisioning would take at least six months of steady work, and it was nearly Succos.

I decided to do it anyway, and for the next two-and-a-half months, I didn’t have a life outside of sewing. I would come home from work at 5 p.m., eat a quick supper, and sew until 3 a.m. I would then sleep for five hours, go to work, and repeat. I took my lunch breaks at the needlepoint store, working with the staff to perfect my rhodes, cushion, and byzantine stitches. No friends, no family, nothing but needles; I wonder what my mother thought I was doing.

Sunday, November 18th was two days before my deadline — the canvas had to be completed with enough time to be professionally finished into a pillow, and I was almost there. I was in my room, halfway through a row, when my brother called my cell phone.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “I was on the phone with Mommy, she was in the car, then I heard a loud sound, and now I can’t reach her.”

Another driver ran a red; Mommy died on impact.

When I finally made it back to my bedroom many hours later, I found my needlepoint on my bed waiting for me, the last row of stitches unfinished.

Mommy made supper for me, I suddenly remembered. It’s still in the oven.

I went to the kitchen, choked down half the chicken, and stuck the remainder in the freezer until I could deal with it.

hivah was exhausting; I don’t speak much generally, but I felt that if I stopped talking about Mommy, she would be forgotten. As I sat one day with people who came to be menachem avel, I finally brought up my needlepoint project and how pained I was that my mother never got to enjoy it — or even to know what I was doing all those weeks in my room. I remember telling the mother of one of my sister’s friends about how I spelled out Mommy’s name in bright red, a color she loved, when she interrupted me.

“Your mother knows about the pillow now. And she loves it, and how much work you put into it. But you know what? That pillow was never meant for her. One day, you’ll get married and have a daughter that you’ll name after your mother. And when she’s old enough to appreciate this pillow, you’ll give it to her. She’ll see her name, ‘Chaya,’ in red, and you’ll tell her about your mother and how that was her favorite color. She’ll see all those intricate stitches, and you’ll tell your daughter about how your mother loved to sew, and how she appreciated the beauty in things. You’ll tell her the story behind the pillow, and she’ll know how much you and your mother loved each other,” she said. “This was never your mother’s pillow. Put it away somewhere safe, and finish it when it’s the right time.”

I remember those words verbatim 12 years later. And while I still wait in my house full of boys to be bentshed with my own Chaya (and to finally finish Mommy’s pillow), these words of nechamah still bring me peace.

Rina Kaufman is a writer in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Time Will Tell

Rabbi Ron Yitzchok Eisenman

I take comfort in: My mother’s cuckoo clock

have a daily morning ritual that I observe like clockwork. To be more precise, the ritual is clockwork.

Before I leave my house for shul at 6 a.m., I descend the stairs and head straight to the eastern wall of our dining room, where I make a beeline for the object of my avodah, approaching it with a sense of purpose and reverence. I reach up and pull on two chains, elevating the weights they bear to their full height, after which I gently push the pendulum. As the pendulum swings, the weights begin their descent downward, and my mother’s cuckoo clock is ready for another day.

A cuckoo clock, for those who don’t know, is a handwound mechanical clock that strikes the hours with the sound of a common cuckoo bird’s call. It is pendulum-driven, using gravity and not batteries nor electricity to keep the time, and it keeps time with a swinging weight — the pendulum — which arcs back and forth at a precise rate. My mother’s is a one-day cuckoo clock, meaning it takes 24 hours for the weights to reach the bottom, and it needs to be wound daily by pulling the chains.

My first avodah every morning is to set the cuckoo clock in motion. The whole process takes a minute or two — not very long, but it is very meaningful to me.

lmost ten years ago, when my mother passed away, I told our family that I wanted her progeny to be the recipients of her mementos.

Let the grandchildren and great-grandchildren have the things, I thought. I have my memories.

Yet my wife, with her binah yeseirah, suggested we retain the cuckoo clock my parents had purchased on a trip to Switzerland decades earlier, because she knew that my mother had cherished this clock, as she had set it daily since my father passed away in 1999. We had it restored and hung it in our dining room on the wall facing Yerushalayim.

I confidently predicted that the clock would remain dormant after the first week of excitement had dissipated, but my wife’s insistence that we embrace this vintage timepiece contained more than an element of foresight. As Hashem would have it, I became the keeper of the time — and I have never looked back, because my morning ministration allows me to connect with the cherished memory of my mother.

The consistent effort necessary to keep my mother’s cuckoo clock going, I soon realized, actually epitomizes my mother, a woman born into poverty during the Great Depression who made every day count. Her determination to achieve an education allowed her to become a teacher, facilitating the payment of our yeshivah tuition — despite the protestations of family members who were convinced she was sentencing us to life as perpetual immigrant Jews and precluding us from assimilating into the American Dream. Every day, as she sent me and my brother to yeshivah and she went off to work, my mother calibrated her own personal clock, her avodah a conscious decision.

The clock has become more than a conversation piece for the Shabbos guests; it provides me with the regular opportunity to engage with my memories of my mother.

The fact that it needs attention has not been a chore. Quite the opposite: my mother’s cuckoo clock is a daily labor of love.

Rabbi Ron Yitzchok Eisenman is the rabbi of Ahavas Israel in Passaic, New Jersey, and the author of three books.

Double Comfort

Barbara Bensoussan

I take comfort in: My grandsons

MYdaughter Miriam a”h was born on September 11. Not the famous 9/11 of 2001, but over a decade earlier, in 1988. When she was twelve years old, I marked her sister’s May birthday on the family calendar hanging in the kitchen. In a spirit of sisterly teasing, Miriam added the words “tragic day.” Not to be outdone, her sister picked up a pen and wrote in the square for September 11 “tragic day.” A year later, it proved prophetic.

Miriam’s Jewish birthday was Erev Rosh Hashanah, but since that was always such a hectic day, we tended to celebrate it on September 11, aside from a shofar-shaped cake on Rosh Hashanah. After 2001, 9/11 meant a mix of birthday celebration and sober memories.

In Iyar of 2017, at age 28, we lost Miriam following complications from childbirth. She had lain in a coma for four months, so we’d had time to get used to the idea that things might not turn out the way we wanted, but we never stopped hoping and the final loss was obviously devastating.

Summer turned into fall, and the approaching September 11th birthday was a real trigger for me. The night before, I had a meltdown.

I had been awake only a few hours on the morning of September 11th when my son from Lakewood called to tell us his wife was in labor. A few hours later, he called again to say she’d given birth.

I have been told there’s a gemara that says that when a baby boy is born in the year after a family suffers a loss, it produces a great nechamah. Well, it was a boy. In fact, it was two boys. Twins! Our tears turned to exultation as we jumped into the car and hightailed it to the hospital to greet our newest grandsons. There are no twins in my family, so the sight of those tiny, swaddled bundles side-by-side seemed nothing short of miraculous.

Miriam had always been extremely generous by nature. She was the one who would send lavish kimpeturin meals or heaping trays of desserts, or organize parties for lonely seniors in a nursing home.

“Look,” her siblings said now. “Mimi’s sending us a double portion of nechamah!”

It did seem as if Mimi had arranged things with her Superior to ensure that from this day forward, September 11 would have associations of joy for our family. (Of course, we mourn our loved ones and cherish their memories, but we are told that intense, protracted mourning only pains their neshamos, and knowing my daughter, she would have wanted us to remember her, take care of her family, and then live our lives as joyfully as possible.)

Three years later, my other son and his wife also had twin boys (although not on 9/11). A year after that, when my eldest daughter made the family’s first bar mitzvah, the only date available for the party was September 11th. It was starting to feel like there was a Heavenly conspiracy to steer us from depression on Miriam’s birthday.

A skeptic or nonbeliever could dismiss all this as coincidence. To me, it felt like signs that Hashem loves us. We don’t know His agenda. He did what He had to do. But He made sure to show us He still cares, softening the blow by sending us precious consolation prizes, one bundle of nachas after the other.

Barbara Bensoussan is a longtime contributor to Mishpacha and other Jewish publications, and the author of Pride and Preference, A New Song, and A Well-Spiced Life.

Comfort Food

Mindel Kassorla

I take comfort in: Whole wheat chocolate chip banana muffins

was a regular Tuesday morning almost nine years ago when my phone buzzed.

It never rings this early, I thought as I glanced at the screen flashing the caller’s name: Abba. It’s midnight in New York, why is Abba calling?

“Elchonon was niftar,” my father said.

At first, I thought he had misspoken or I misheard; my mother’s brother was very ill and we were expecting a call any day.

“You mean Uncle Normy?” I asked.

“I said Elchonon.”

And just like that, the conversation was over. I slumped onto the couch and choked out the same cryptic words to my bewildered husband.

I’m the youngest — one of five, and the only child living in Israel — and my brother had been chronically ill for years, but we never thought it would be fatal.

Now I’m one of four? How?

We got on the phone with our travel agent and by nine a.m. I was heading to the airport to make an El Al flight to Newark at 11. The prospect of taking public transportation alone in my fragile state was terrifying. Fortunately, we were able to call on my close friend’s mother, one of the few people I knew with a car in Jerusalem. What a relief to ride with someone who had no need to ask for information and understood exactly why I was flying out so suddenly. We sat in silence.

But once I got out at Ben Gurion, this comforting feeling sped off with her car, and as I looked around at the bustle of the airport street, the buses and suitcases, I felt utterly alone. All of these travelers couldn’t perceive the tornado of emotion swirling around me as I moved through the automatic doors and onto the check-in line. They were chatting, laughing, eating, probably heading to or returning from some exotic vacation. And I… I was on my way to a funeral, where I would have a front-row seat.

Something about that moment was eerily familiar, like a déjà vu of sorts, but I’d never experienced the pain of a loss this close.

I know this — it’s like Tishah B’Av.

Tishah B’Av is a day when the whole world goes on with their business, enjoying the fun and freedom of summer, but not us. We are a nation that dwells alone. We sit on the floor and mourn concepts foreign to passersby; a glimpse into this aspect of our lives would baffle them.

But on Tishah B’Av, we mourn as a nation, unique and united in a common loss. My current reality, though, was a deep and completely private loss — and I was so, so lonely.

When the man behind the counter asked, “How are you doing today?” I almost burst into tears.

I’m an extrovert by nature — social interaction is my lifesaver — but as I made my way through Ben Gurion, I couldn’t imagine bringing anyone into my world at that moment. The thought of engaging in my standard airport-stranger schmooze felt nauseating.

hour later, I had settled into my seat on the plane. I pulled out a book of hilchos aveilus — I can’t believe I’m actually reading this for practical purposes — and opened to the section on aninus, the stage between death and the funeral. I was an onein.

An onein has a unique set of halachos to observe, some reminiscent of mourning and others that free up his time to ensure a swift and proper levayah. Because of the latter, an onein cannot involve himself with positive mitzvos; he is still bound by prohibitions like not eating nonkosher and not stealing.

Just before boarding, I phoned my rav, who explained that this second area did not apply to me while flying because obviously I could not be involved in planning the levayah midair. Though I hadn’t made a single brachah since I spoke to my father, he instructed me to resume performance of positive mitzvos like making brachos and davening as soon as I boarded. Now, as I perused the sefer, I discovered a halachah of aninus that did apply to me on the plane: I was forbidden to eat meat.

In my backpack was the food my husband, who stayed home with our baby, had pulled together in those last moments before I left: a delicious steak sandwich, left over from last night’s dinner. Now it mocked me. I felt a painful lump in my throat as I realized I had nothing to eat.

But more than food, I was aching for social interaction. I got up and took a short walk up the aisle to the restroom. As I waited my turn while standing awkwardly on the side, I noticed a woman in the front row who seemed about my age and looked like she could have come right out of my Jerusalem community. I was drawn to her, so I did what I do best — I schmoozed.

With a bit of Jewish geography, we figured out that she is my mother’s close friend’s granddaughter. I have no recollection of what we said past that, of whether or not I told her I was flying because my brother just died, but it was simply a comfort to be standing next to someone who I could tell, who would likely “get” it, someone who somehow entered my impenetrable bubble of isolation.

“Do you have food — are you hungry?” she asked as she extended a hand with a bag of muffins. Whole wheat chocolate chip banana muffins, to be exact. She could not have known, of course, that a few months earlier, someone had baked me a batch of these after a difficult surgery and that this particular treat had become a comfort food of mine.

I thanked her and walked back to my seat.

So much of that flight is a blur… but one thing is not.

I remember — with absolutely clarity — the healing taste of those muffins. How they seemed sent to me straight from Shamayim and found me right there in the sky. How they filled me with a small but powerful dose of camaraderie in my time of need.

The taste lingered when the plane landed in Newark and I found a frum couple whose phone I borrowed to call my family. It followed me when I heard my brother’s voice on the other end of the line, telling me they had arranged a pickup. It kept me going for the next half hour, until finally, Abba came to get me, and I had the comforting presence of close family for the first time in 15 hours.

The power of those muffins went far beyond what their benefactor — who I wouldn’t recognize if I saw her again — could have ever intended. They gave me the comfort of connection.

Mindel Kassorla is a teacher, writer, and shadchan who lives with her family in Jerusalem.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1024)

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