I'm Scared

 

Faye Jacobs Young

1957

 

My mother's breast cancer took its time.  She had become concerned about the lump in her chest that turned into the size of a lemon.  My father begged her to go to the doctor, but her friends insisted it was a cyst that could be reduced with homeopathic medicine.  My mother knew it was cancer, and she was afraid and didn't want to hear the prognosis from a doctor.

She went as far as taking her first and only airplane flight.  My father borrowed money $200 from a neighbor.  My mother flew to the Hoxey Clinic in Dallas, Texas, where they put several types of pastes on her chest and many bottles of pills inside her.

The doctor told my father that she had waited too long.  Eventually, her breast had to be amputated, her skin burned with radiation, and the chemotherapy poisoned her.

Those last days she looked at me, my sister, and her husband Joseph with knowing eyes.  Knowing that she would never see her husband age, her children marry, or the future of her dreams.  They were scared eyes.  "Go away," she cried at the end.

 

Bessie Dwoskin Portnoy

1958

 

"She scared," the colored nurse said.  At first, I thought she said she was scared; at least she pronounced it that way.  We were on the second floor of the old River Garden Hebrew Home in Riverside.  This was hospice back then.

My Aunt Bessie was lying in a bed, wasting away at age 69.  She had more than a few scars in her life.  Here she was in a bed with railings to keep her from falling out on the floor.  I had never seen a hospital bed before.  I was only thirteen years old.

Aunt Bessie was always a small-framed woman, but now she looked like she weighed fifty pounds.  Skin hung on her like cellophane paper sticking to her arms and legs.

My father spoke to her in Yiddish.  She didn't respond.  She was drugged and couldn't hold her eyes open.  "This is Charles, my son, and he's your great-nephew," my father shouted at her assuming that she couldn't hear.

She slowly turned her balding head toward us and smiled a toothless smile.  They had taken out her dentures.  "Kiss Aunt Bessie goodbye," my father instructed me.  With effort, I leaned over the bed rails and pressed my lips against her old soft and wrinkled skin.  The smell of her breath of death arose to meet my face.  "Goodbye, Aunt Bessie, I hope you will get better," I said.

She never did.

 

 

Gertrude Hershberg Jacobs

1960

 

My Aunt Gertrude fought with my father over who was responsible for paying my grandmother's room and board at River Garden Hebrew Home.   My father loved my grandmother, who was his mother-in-law.  He made a point to see her once a week and would bring her to our home on weekends to be with her grandchildren.

Gertrude was a cold childless bookkeeper, married to my mother’s brother, Felix.  She didn't care for us, as she thought of us as street urchins.  She didn't care for my mother and father, and she believed that she came from a better class.  She was a Reform Jew, and in her mind, we were still from the shtetl.

One eventful day she came to our house.  She demanded that my father start kicking in toward his mother-in-law's maintenance at River Garden Hebrew Home.  My father tried to explain that he was broke and was trying to raise two young children.  As the argument progressed, he suggested that Gertrude discuss this with Anna's other children: Marie Rosenbloom, Salome Abrams, and Joseph Jacobs. 

She replied that she did many times, but they never paid a dime of their mom's rent.  My father kicked Gertrude out of the house, and I didn't see her for a long time.  Gertrude's husband, Felix, called and said he was apologizing for her.  He acknowledged her bruskness and general lack of empathy for others.

Much later, Felix called again.  Gertrude was dying in St. Luke's Hospital of cancer.  It was leukemia and had spread.

My father took me to the hospital to visit her.  He stayed in the car.

"Where is your father, and how did you get here?" Gertrude asked.

"He is in the car downstairs," I replied.  

 "I would have forgiven him if he had come up to see me." She said.

Gertrude looked weak, but well.  She was fully made up for guests in a new night coat as she sat propped up on the bed.  The doctors and nurses had removed most of the medical equipment from the room at this point.  It just looked like a bare minimum motel room due to the advancement of her condition.

"What did she say?" my father asked me when I returned to the car.  "Only that she would have forgiven you if you had gone up to her room to see her," I said.

"Was she scared?" my father asked.  "No, she looked like she had gotten better and would be leaving soon," I said.

She left the hospital, but not the way she or I imagined.  They came into the room to shut her eyes and pull the sheet over her head until the doctor could arrive.  They called my Uncle Felix.

My father never forgave her.

 

Anna Haber Jacobs

1962

 

If my grandmother was ever scared, she never showed it or discussed it.

 

Her family was taken from Lodz, Poland.  The Nazis packed her brother, sister, mother, and father on trains and took them to Auschwitz.  At least those who weren't shot or hung ahead of the camps.

 

Her husband Chaim had immigrated with her to Belgium, then London and finally a boat trip across the Atlantic and down to Florida where her cousins were waiting for them.  Her journey across the Atlantic was the same route as the Titanic years before.  If Anna was afraid, her children never mentioned it.  Except for the sounds of ice banging against the metal hull as they sat below deck in steerage.

 

Anna was resigned to live.  She expected her husband to die before her.  She put her children to work.  She went to work herself selling bread, butter, and eggs on Post Street.  She expected her children to abandon her, and everyone except my mother did.  When she couldn't walk up and down the stairs anymore, she checked herself into River Garden Hebrew Home on Stockton Street. 

 

There was always some question concerning who was going to pay for her maintenance.  Anna worked in the kitchen at River Garden when she could.  Eventually, her heart started to beat slower.  Photos show her swollen ankles and the Mother Goose shoes she had to wear that resulted from the lack of circulation in her legs. 

 

Finally, an aide at the nursing home would have to help her get up and get dressed.  She refused to use a wheelchair, so she began to eat in her room rather than in the large dining area.  She peacefully listened every day to an old radio my father brought her.

 

Anna didn't get up one day.  She had her hair washed the night before and made sure she had makeup on when she went to bed.  She just closed her eyes.

 

 

 

Paul J. Koerner

Company A – Fort Benning

1969

 

 

I stood there in the barracks at Fort Benning, looking down at the young man slumped in the showers.  "He's dead, ain't he." Said another recruit.  "Yes," I replied.

 

"Who touched him?" "Did anyone try to give him CPR?" "This soldier has meningitis." "It's contagious."

 

I went to Supply and got a sheet.  An ambulance showed up, and they took the body.  I looked at my platoon.  These brave soldiers had just spent a whole day shooting rifles at the range.  Now they all looked afraid.  Paul spent his last days on earth, throwing up in an Army shower until he couldn't anymore.

 

Who remembers Paul Koerner now?  I am sure that his mother and father have died.  Maybe just his younger brother whenever someone asks him if he has any siblings.  Paul would never become the soldier who knew the fear of battle.

 

 

 

Joseph Young

1978

 

 

My father was afraid of death.  He was well-read and lived a hard life.  He had seen many people die.  My father had been a pallbearer at many funerals.  He had thrown dirt into many graves right after they lowered the body into the ground.  He had visited many homes in the South where the deceased was lying in a casket in another room.  The visitations were brief.  The dead looked like they were asleep, according to him.  He had come to pay his respects to the families.

 

"I'm afraid." he would mumble to himself over and over again as he worked in his garden.

 

It was a beautiful cool August day when he decided to sit down on the couch in the living room.  He was probably just cooling off from working in the backyard.

 

That's how he was found—just sitting there on the couch.  His eyes were open, and his lips were blue.  He looked like he was expecting someone to arrive.  He had a full life and a good death.  But he never said goodbye.

 

Mary Hecht Wolf

2013

 

Mary said she was ready to go.  "Make sure a lot of people are notified and come to my funeral." She told me.  At age 90, she had outlived all of her contemporaries and most of her family.  She outlived her children and her husband.  I was her business manager and later trustee of her estate.

 

I explained to Mary that she could not drive nor live in the huge house by herself.  The day Mary left her house, she said to me that she needed some specific books and a knife.  They found a knife in a drawer at River Garden Hebrew Home and took it away.

 

Mary died deaf as she refused to wear a hearing aid.  She descended into dementia and her thoughts.  We never really discussed the future.  She was upset that Martin, her husband, had left the house one day and picked out a joint headstone without her knowledge.  But Mary was glad that Martin had purchased plots abutting the cemetery road so she could be seen.  She didn't want to be buried on the back row.

 

 

Iris Young

2017

 

 

I believe that Iris spent her life living because she was always practicing what death would be like.  She lived more lives than most people. 

 

In the hospital, she looked up at me and said, "I'm afraid.  I can't breathe." "You will be fine," I replied.  They won't let you stay here forever."

 

I think I believed it.  Iris had to be taken to the Emergency Room many times in an ambulance.  But this time, she had deteriorated from lack of solid food.  They moved her to the Intensive Care Unit.  "Where is my wheelchair?" she needed to know, expecting to use it immediately after her discharge.

 

"It's right here in the room, charging up," I answered.

 

The doctor called me into the hall.  "Do you have the Power of Attorney and Medical Directives?" “This is it.”

 

Hospital death is a blur of witnesses, paperwork, consulting on the exact time of death, removing tubes, turning off machines, and then quiet with everyone leaving except for the family.

 

Iris was afraid all of her life.  She had a right to be.  She had more than enough of the challenges but seemed to push through them.  Due to her physical condition, she gave up her dignity on many occasions.  She returned the stranger’s stares with a smile, and she gave her friends and family hope.