I heard more details of her personal story during subsequent visits. Harold, her only son, had moved to Houston because of the oil business. He had prospered in the early days. She moved from Brooklyn to live near him. The grandchildren would be near by. The climate was warmer and more comfortable for her arthritic bones. New York had become intolerably crowded and violent. Too many blacks in her old neighborhood.
“Those days were wonderful, but then…” she stops in the middle of the sentence. Her voice turns sullen and melancholy, “The oil business went sour. Harold became anxious and withdrawn. He was unable to cope with the collapse of his company. The day before Chanukah, I forget the year, he went down to Galveston and shot himself. My God! My God! He took his own life. They were lighting candles in the synagogue. The family had planned to buy him some gifts. Instead, I had to rehearse and say the Kaddish.”
After Harold’s death, her daughter-in-law decided to move back to New Jersey to be near her family. Mrs Greenberg had no one to go to. She stayed in Houston. It really made no difference now where she lived. With the passing years, she began to have more difficulty caring for herself. Her vision loss accelerated. Her arthritis became painful and deforming. Her finances got tight. Her loneliness was a vice around her heart. There is nothing so horrible as dying alone, she said. She moved into the nursing facility in 1989.
We decided early on that we would read from the Torah and the Prophets whenever I came to see her. A thread to keep her connected to her past, I thought. The routine lasted for a couple of months. At each session, her attention span shortened, until I had to re-read passages several times. With the passing of the weeks, I began having trouble keeping her awake. I do not know just when it began to happen, but it was during one of our reading sessions that I noticed a dreamy look in her eyes. A demeanor that seemed focused on some far away place. Her personality was undergoing a reverse metamorphosis. The butterfly I had met that summer was now retracting into her cocoon. In this process of retreat, Mrs Greenberg would often startle me with some piercing exhibition of emotion. They were mixtures of random laughter and despair. Once, as soon as I greeted her, she rose from her chair, and stretching up her arms, she screamed, “Chanukah! Chanukah! Is it Chanukah, yet?”
“Doctor,” she pleaded gripping my arms, “do you believe in the ressurrection of the dead? Where is Harold?”
I fumbled for words. From some hidden place in the subconscious, I remembered a passage from the book of Daniel and that is what I read to her, “As for you, go your way to the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”
Before the last sentence was read, she had retreated into silence. I tried asking her about her thoughts, but her replies were neither relevant nor coherent. Twice she asked me if I knew the doctor who had promised to visit her. I was unable to convince her that I was that person. The bridge of our friendship had collapsed. Esther Greenberg was gone. She had left that nursing home through a flight of dreams. I was unable to see her down to Earth again.
Our final session was coming to an end. I took her hands into mine, but any vestige of familiarity was gone. I made one last effort to feed her some chocolate shake, the only thing that she would accept. She remained frozen and hunched in her chair. I crouched beside her and tried to decipher the direction of her gaze. Outside her window, we both looked at the darkening sky.