THREE SENIOR LOVE STORIES

❤️ When my Grandma Rifka died at seventy-five, my Zayda (grandpa) Mutka was bereft. He was twelve years older and you’d think he’d be content to live with his memories for his twilight years. Instead, he offered to take me to Paris—this was in 1970—to visit my grandmother’s family.

I wore outfits in the fashionable style of the mademoiselles and ventured out daily to museums, shops and cafes, playing the part of a Parisienne. Although I was twenty-six, Grandpa forbade me to leave the apartment after dinner. No amount of entreaty moved him. I did not have adventures in nighttime Paris of any sort.

I had no inkling that when I walked miles all over the city on warm autumn days, Grandpa and my grandmother’s older sister Blima were conversing in Yiddish over kosher meals and planning their future together.

I was not aware of the true purpose of the trip until months later, when Grandpa announced that, with the blessings of her family, my great aunt would emigrate to America to marry him. They were together for two years of sweet companionship until Grandpa died at eighty-nine. Blima was an excellent baker and I imagine my grandfather dunking a flaky croissant into his morning cup of coffee, marveling at his good fortune.

Blima returned to Paris to live out the last ten years of her life. My cousin David took her and her satchels to the airport to board her Air France flight, at which point she was called upon to exercise her resilience again—to resume speaking French and begin her life as a widow.

I pay tribute to my grandfather’s passion in crossing the ocean to follow his heart, revealing the deeply loving and emotional nature under his gruff exterior. When I think of what my great aunt did in her elder years, leaving her family and her country at eighty-two to start life anew, I am moved by her brave choices.

I remain inspired by the two of them to this day. The example of their lives and their love is my most precious family inheritance.

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💙 My mom Rose had been widowed for twelve years. At seventy-six, on a visit to Massachusetts, she visited my mother-in-law at Revere Beach senior housing. In the community breakfast room, a tall gentleman of eighty-two asked my mom if he could ”borrow” a page from her notepad to write a letter to his estranged brother.

Then, he asked her to proofread the letter. My mom, a retired teacher, didn’t hesitate to pick up her editor’s pen. Next step, he decided to deliver it to his brother in New Hampshire, and would she like to accompany him? Rose, a people person, agreed.

That night I received a telephone call from my mother, “I’m getting married! ”

It was all I could do to remain calm, sure that she was completely off her rocker. She sold her home in New Jersey and never looked back. They planned their wedding immediately—they weren’t kidding around.

Rose and Eli attended Knights of Pythias conventions, services at the temple in Brookline, and all manner of social and family events. Eli’s son said he had never seen his father happier.

Eli passed away three years later. Mom outlived him by eighteen years. She always referred to him as “the whipped cream of my life.” I celebrate this pair who knew their hearts and stood ready to take a chance on love, unafraid of the future.

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💜 I visited my Weiner grandparents in the Workmen’s Circle retirement home in the 1970s when they were in their mid-eighties. Grandpa had dementia, but I was too young to understand what was wrong. No one in the family or in society in general openly spoke of these things.

I remember sitting with them on the veranda on a humid summer afternoon, typical for inland New Jersey. Grandpa looked thinner to me, his cheeks sunken.

Grandma was feeding him spoonfuls of his favorite flavor, coffee ice cream, from a large container. I’m sure Grandpa didn’t have room for dinner after that. It was sort of a binge.

If he got distracted or looked off into the distance, Grandma would nudge him, “Eat, Chaim, eat.” She knew what was best for him. He trusted her to know that. Food was her language of love. Eating her food was his.

I hold that vision in my head of the two of them so clearly. I knew enough then to understand that I bore witness to love in its purest, most powerful and life-affirming form.

And that moment speaks to me of love, to this day.