Dealing with Challenge

One month ago, I was literally running out of breath. The breath of life. My lungs were dying. And while my hope and belief in life were alive and well, the idea was to get my body to catch up with my faith. This required some work...

From the outside, people think I am doing great. They compliment how patiently I am waiting for my double lung transplant and how well I am preparing for it. But truth be told, I am not really handling it so well...

I seemed to spend my days ping-ponging between the cold, grueling reality of chemotherapy and an over-emotional outpouring of kindness and compassion...

When I was a child, I always felt different, an oddity among my peers whose parents had no foreign accents or horrific memories of Nazi death camps...

Like all children with such a background, I am very aware of the fact that it is possible that I may have never been born...

I wanted to be free of the thoughts that kept me in bondage, but I didn't know how to let go. I couldn't talk about it. I was so ashamed...it was my fault Mama passed...

My mother-in-law Riva, is a survivor of life, and her dolls symbolize her experiences and struggles along the way. Each doll tells a story...

There was something about the immense love that permeated the home that made it hard to believe that outside those walls, the foundation of everything around us was being ripped to shreds...

Slowly the shelter came to life. My mother got up and prepared breakfast--a few crackers with some jam we still had left, but neither my two sisters nor my mother touched the food…

The large signs in the entryway to our apartment building made it so that even if you didn't want to know, you knew. One of my neighbors had died...

I would be asked what my name is, to which I would respond "Riva." I would then be called a "Judovka," and have rocks thrown at me...

And here I stood sobbing over this plant and this card with my friend who had just come over for coffee. Why? How am I courageous? This woman has lived through so much more upheaval than I could imagine...

At every juncture, on every bridge, at every bend in the road, with every turn of the head, someone lives, someone dies, someone waits, someone cries...

As an eighteen year-old college student, I had only begun to wade in the waters of Jewish observance when I made my first visit to Israel in 1972...

When we contacted my mother's relatives in order to find out where my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried, we ended up banging our heads once again against the old, now-petrified veil of silence...

"Wow! He's a hero!" I guess. "You mean he actually can shoot a gun?" I'd hope so! "Did he kill anyone?" I'm not about to ask but I suppose he did. "Is he a general?" No, he's a corporal. "Does he wear a dog tag? What are they for anyhow?" Um...

I can recall the day Tova died as if it were yesterday. I was eleven years old, and I had never experienced a loss like that. I was in shock...

This young woman, with her dark, black shiny hair, had a spirit and effervescence I could only admire. I thought to myself: she has no idea of the pain I am living with, the weight of what I carry...

I am one of the lucky ones. I may need a lung transplant and am entering a new decade, but I have friends in the here and in the now...

Just a month after my first seizure and diagnosis of brain cancer, I had spent last night completely alone in the emergency room with a second seizure. Even food and water had been prohibited...