Dear WholeFamily Visitors,

Have you heard the expression, "An 'aha' moment"? It means when something happens in your life that makes you say, "Aha! So that's what it's all about."

I'd like to share with you two personal "aha" moments I've had over the last year. They are moments that, like our WholeFamily centers, have to do with a bridging of the generations within families.

Maybe if you read about my "aha" moments, it will help you to remember some of your own and be grateful for them.

The most precious seder plate in the world

The day before Passover last spring, we climbed up a ladder to what we had thought was a very well concealed outside storage area to take down our boxes of special Passover dishes. We discovered, to our chagrin, that more than half of our precious dishes, collected over twenty-five years, had been stolen, including a very large and beautiful silver serving piece known as a "seder plate" that is the centerpiece of the festive Passover table.

I refused to believe what had happened. I thought I must had stored some things at a friend's house, a neighbor's, or with my sister-in-law across the street. I called them all. I was wrong.

At the end of an hour, my daughters prevailed upon me to face the truth. "Mom," they said, "give it up. They're gone. Now let's move on. There's cooking to do." My teenaged son wasn't around and Matanya, our 10-year-old, said nothing.

But I couldn't move on. I sat there on the couch for another fifteen minutes, mourning the loss of my beautiful material possessions. Finally I got up and joined the work.

Meanwhile, I saw out of the corner of my eye that our son Matanya, who was ten at the time of this story, went out to the porch and got busy doing something with bits and pieces of materials from around the house. I was just happy he wasn't underfoot.

Several hours later, while I was taking a coffee break, he came to me and held something out to me. It was a carefully sawed piece of plywood covered in wood-patterned contact paper, with the names of the various seder dishes written on it in magic marker. "Here's a seder plate for tonight," he said. "I made it."

I almost hugged the breath out of him as I cried and said, "This is the most beautiful and precious seder plate I have ever owned. It will always be the one that graces our Passover table."

"They're your children, too."

The second story is about my mom.

I live thousands of miles away from my parents, so when my mother suffered a heart attack recently and I went to stay with her, I had plenty of time to sit by her bedside in the hospital.

In addition to heart disease, she is dealing with cognitive impairment. I watched as she thanked each doctor and nurse who treated her, saying to them things like, "I love you," and "You're so good." I watched how she suffered difficult treatments in quiet equanimity, how she tried to smile weakly whenever I walked into the room and how she held on to me in fear, sometimes, when about to undergo a new procedure.

There were some legal and financial issues to deal with as well, so during the long evenings back at my parents' apartment, after my father went to bed, my brother and I slowly went through the boxes and drawers of papers and documents they had collected over 55 years of marriage, deciding what could be discarded and what should be saved or dealt with.

Among those papers we found letters addressed to my mom from people all over the country - from women who had worked for her more than 50 years ago who still sent her Seasons' Greetings' cards in which they wrote, "You're the most wonderful woman I ever worked for. I will never forget you." We found thank you notes from organizations for which she had raised money, warm, loving retirement cards from her employees, achievement awards and plaques designating her lifetime membership on an educational board. Much of what we found was previously unknown to us.

I placed the cards and letters in a box, together with some family photographs, and brought them to her, so she could flip through precious memories and reread the loving wishes of the last 50 years.

One day, while my mom was looking at photographs of my children, she asked me, "Tell me about them." She asked me this often and usually I would tell her about what they were doing - their schools, their hobbies…But this time, I told her about their characteristics. "This one is vivacious, this one is persistent, this one has a great sense of humor, they all have hearts of gold…" As I ran through their qualities, I felt myself choke up.

I was describing her.

"Are they all mine?" she asked, her Alzheimer's kicking in strong that day. "Are they my children?"

"Well," I answered, truthfully, "in a way, they are. Because they have come from you, too."

There is no past. It all continues.

It was at that moment that I thought, Aha. Nothing ends. Our lives, who we are, what we have created - it all continues through our offspring. And if there are no offspring, it continues through our family, our friends, our students, our colleagues, our clients. It continues through the actions and good deeds we have performed in this world. Everything we do sends energy into the world and goes on.

Do we all have "Aha!" moments? I think we do. The trick is to recognize them and to make them count.

May yours be plentiful.

- Toby Klein Greenwald

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