Reprinted from this week’s Jewish Standard.
On Shabbat morning, August 8, 2015, my mother died. On Sunday, October 16, her gravestone will be unveiled. Here is the eulogy I delivered at her funeral.
“My mother, my teacher,” is how we refer to our mothers when we pray for their blessing in the Grace after Meals.
My mother unquestionably was my earliest teacher, but those earliest lessons date from long before my memories coalesced. What I can remember, though, what stands out for me, and what I want to share, is what my mother taught me in her final months of cancer and illness, through both example and conversation.