You share forty-five years of your life with someone, and then, in a single moment – it’s all over. How can that be? Just like that? No warning, no sign? Even when you know – as people say – that this is life, it feels impossible. Unfair.
Gail, my beloved wife, was truly special. Everyone said so, but I didn’t need anyone to tell me – I knew. She was endlessly generous, warm to everyone, always ready with a kind word or a compliment, even when I thought it was unnecessary or overdone.
When COVID came, she sewed masks for the whole street. Every other week, she cooked for lone soldiers – chicken with wine and herbs – and made me label each box to the last detail. After the tragedy at Kibbutz Be’eri, she mobilized quilting groups across America to send beautiful handmade patchwork quilts to families who had lost everything.
She came to Israel at nineteen, all alone after the Yom Kippur War, studied special education, brought children from institutions home on weekends – so they would feel they too, had a home and warmth. Later, she became part of Israel’s very first class of dental hygienists.
She was a devoted, patient mother of three, who always said “It will be okay” — and somehow, it really was. She never judged people, rarely got angry, and if she did, it was only at herself.
Gail loved people. She loved life. She found beauty in the smallest moments and shared it freely with everyone around her.
Now, after just a few days, I already feel her absence in every question I didn’t ask, in every little thing left undone. How do you say goodbye to someone who was your whole life?
They say time heals – I’m not sure. Maybe it only teaches you how to live with the empty space they leave behind.
If there’s comfort, it’s knowing that her memory stays, that this love doesn’t disappear – it just stays here with us, in a different way.