Copyright 1998 Sarah Siegel

So I was 16 and that spring, my father’s mother, Sabta, died. When he returned from shivah in Israel, I told my dad to go to the doctor because his eye whites looked yellow and he had a hacking cough. He didn’t until my mother got back. She had stayed on in Israel after shivah to buy Judaica, now as a fledgling art dealer, and to visit with my sister Deb, who was studying at Tel Aviv University. My father had to come back and return to work.

Maybe he knew and didn't want to have to tell us before telling my mom that what he had would be fatal. He might have sensed the cancer. Or maybe, as usual, he was just being neglectful of his health.

He hacked for two or three weeks. Just my sister Kathy and I were with him. My mom came back, then he went to the doctor and was told he had six months to live. We told Deb and she returned from Israel, as it turned out, permanently.

Except for my mother sharing the diagnosis with us, my father referred to his impending death just once: It was Rosh ha-Shanah a couple of months before he died. We had to make a service for him in his hospital room because by then, he was too ill to go to shul. During the makeshift service, my father said, "I won’t be written into the Book of Life for the coming year," and then sobbed quietly for just a moment....

That summer, for his birthday, my mom and I had bought him a cotton seersucker suit and an electric-blue, long-sleeved "Grand Patron" Izod shirt. He never had a chance to wear either one.

For his birthday, too, Kathy and I designed a cake: angel food, a ring, which we cut in half to add a layer of lemon ice cream. On the top we squiggled in green writing in Hebrew and English transliteration, "L'Chaim" ("To life!" and "To Chaim;" Chaim Mordechai was my father’s Hebrew name). We knew it would be his last birthday....

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