Walking Mom Home:
Sharing the Blessings of this Life's Final Journey
By Miriam Millhauser Castle

Chapter One

I sat in the quiet of my Jerusalem apartment and pondered once again of what to do about my mother. She was in her eighties and lived alone in Baltimore, Maryland, the city in the United States where I had grown up. When I moved to Jerusalem years earlier I had been comforted by the fact that my sister lived ten minutes away from my mother. While I knew we would miss each other, I wasn’t as concerned about her well-being. But in the intervening years, my sister, Malka bas Eliyahu, z”l, had died quite suddenly from a misdiagnosed illness. So now things were different.

My mother rallied remarkably well from the tragic loss of her daughter, accepting Hashem’s will as she had so many other times in her challenging life. I had no questions about her emotional strength in the face of adversity. She had survived the Holocaust and the loss of her parents in concentration camps. She and I together had nursed my father, z”l, through a long and grueling bout with cancer ending with his death at the relatively young age of sixty-four. And she had fought her way back from her own almost fatal illness years earlier.

Still, now she was much older and for that reason alone, more vulnerable. The years ahead were likely to grow more difficult as she faced the inevitable effects of aging. Right now, though, she was healthy, vibrant, and more energetic than many people I knew half her age. Just the year before, she and I had gone on safari in Zimbabwe and then visited friends in Cape Town, South Africa. She had made the twenty-two hour trip on her own, meeting me in Johannesburg.

So I was confused. Do I go ahead with my plans to buy an apartment and settle permanently in Jerusalem or do I go back to the States to be closer to my mother in what, even under the best of circumstances, was approaching the end of her life. The alternative of her coming to live with me in Israel was not an option. Though I wanted to explore the possibility with her again, she previously had made clear that she wanted to remain in Baltimore. There she was independent, surrounded by friends, familiar with the environment, still able to drive, and comfortable living on her own in the house she had lived in for decades.

To uproot and start again in Israel where she didn’t know the language, would have to make new friends, couldn’t drive, and would, by necessity, be more dependent on me, didn’t appeal to her at this point in life. I didn’t blame her. The adjustment would have been enormous, even at an earlier stage in life. And the experts agreed. Almost all the professionals I heard speak on the subject cautioned children not to move their aged parents from familiar environs unnecessarily, and especially not to Israel where life is different and difficult even in the best of times. To help me think more clearly about my decision, I attended lectures on halachah (Jewish law) relating to the obligations of children to parents in the later stages of life. Though always interesting, they were never definitive. It seemed that my situation, before the parent has or expresses a specific need for assistance, is a gray area left to the discretion of the child. Once the need is explicit, the obligation becomes clear. So for me, it was back to a matter of the heart. Jewish law was not going to decide this one for me.

Nor was my mother. Every time I asked her what she thought, she told me it was up to me; it was my decision and I had to do whatever I thought was best. That was the stance she almost always took in my adult life. Once we passed out of childhood and her sphere of responsibility as she saw it, my sister and I were on our own. She had made her views and values clear to us as children. How we chose to live our lives as adults was up to us. Even in this situation that so intimately involved her, she wouldn’t offer an opinion. Though I could have surmised that she preferred to have me live near her, she might just as easily have wanted to see me settled in the land that would be my home long after she was gone. In truth, she probably felt pulls in both directions, as did I.

So the ball continued to bounce around my court. I went back and forth in my mind, sometimes preparing to use the waning days of my aliyah rights to bring my lift from America and settle in, and other times preparing to put my belongings from my Jerusalem apartment in storage and head to Baltimore. For reasons that I didn’t yet understand, the decision felt pressing. I prayed that Hashem would show me the direction in which He wanted me to go. The mitzvah of honoring my mother seemed pitted against the mitzvah of settling the land. I wanted to do G-d’s will; I just didn’t know what it was.

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