GOOD-BYE, BELOVED SYLVIA!
We met sixty-two years ago one September evening in the West Portal Branch Library in San Francisco. Sylvia was fourteen years older than I, and from the very first, like the wise “older sister” I never had! Together we rode the “M” streetcar that night, home to the neighborhood where I lived at the top of one street, and she and her husband at the end of the next street over. We would live that nearby for the next four years, during which there were many bus and streetcar rides when she and her husband Steve would introduce my sister and me to the beauties of San Francisco and its wonders: Fisherman’s Wharf, Coit Tower, and especially Golden Gate Park, with its museum and aquarium. I was a heart-broken fifteen-year-old, home-sick for the Los Angeles in which I had been reared, and where my two sets of foster-families lived. I was forbidden to see one of them by my mother, and eighteen months would pass before I could sneak in a brief visit with one couple during a few days when I returned to L.A. As I write in my memoir of Sylvia and Steve, “Over the next five years, they were my emotional anchors in the stormy sea of my adolescence, and my having to cope with Mother’s many unpredictable moods.”
Whenever my parents went away, my sister and I were stashed over at Sylvia’s and Steve’s home. They had no children but welcomed us with open arms and hearts, giving us a key to the house while they were away at their day-jobs. At that time, Sylvia was not an immaculate housekeeper, so, when I got home from high school, I often did the dishes, some left over from the previous night, and set the table for supper. My sister and I slept in their den.
It was Steve who wrote the letter of recommendation that helped me to be awarded a scholarship at the University of California at Berkeley after high school graduation. He had graduated college in New York City in the worst year of the Great Depression. He knew what a good education was about! And Sylvia knew that a high school graduate needed to have a good-looking coat to start University. She was working at Hale’s Department Store on Market Street, and used her employee discount to help me buy a fashionable winter coat, claiming I was her “little sister.” Yet the two of us couldn’t have possibly been blood sisters, as Sylvia had the beauty of an Elizabeth Taylor, white, white skin, violet eyes and black hair, and I was somewhat blonde, and blue-eyed.
When Steve bought a car, there were trips on Sundays to Mt. Tamalpais and the Muir Woods in Marin County, or perhaps
to the park that abuts the hills above the campus of “Cal,” and I would be left off at my dorm or at the home where I served as a live-in babysitter, high atop the Berkeley Hills. These are beautiful memories of that couple that brought a grace and tranquility to those turbulent “coming-of-age” years.
Then I returned to Los Angeles and U.C.L.A. for my last year of university, and was not to see Sylvia and Steve until my first marriage dissolved eleven years later. In the meantime we corresponded, and a wedding gift and baby gifts arrived after the births of the three children I bore. In that first year of my divorce, Sylvia and Steve came to Los Angeles “to hear my story” and to visit me and the children in the little house I had bought for my children and myself. The following summer they welcomed us at their home in San Francisco, when I took the children on a grand tour of California over four weeks. Soon after, I met Cliff, and after we were married, we went to San Francisco. Sylvia and Steve fell in love with Cliff, too, and took us to their favorite Japanese restaurant where we sat on little mats and tasted our first Japanese meal.
Later Cliff and I and the children moved to a picturesque Northern California town, and Steve and Sylvia came to stay in our guest house. For the next three years, when I attended teachers’ functions in San Francisco, they were my hosts at their new home out near the San Francisco Zoo. On these solo trips to see them, I could always turn to Steve for wisdom and advice.
I surely needed it, as I was a working wife and mother trying to get her master’s degree, and juggle all life’s priorities. During this time Sylvia wrote out a recipe for how a busy woman unwinds slowly at the end of a hectic day and schedule. Believe me, I used it!
When we moved to Modesto, and adopted our two children during those four years, Sylvia and Steve were the first ones to make a bee-line to see the children. It was almost as if they became ready-made grandparents. Especially with the baby boy, a life-long connection was made that would last the rest of Sylvia’s life. But more about that later!
In 1972, Cliff and I and the five children moved to Ontario, Canada, where Cliff had been born and the remainder of his family lived. So the visits between Sylvia and Steve and ourselves became one-way. Every time we visited California from the East, there was a joyful reunion. In my solo visit to California in 1984, I was to see Steve for the last time. They had now long since retired from work-lives, and though Sylvia was attending San Francisco State as “a mature student,” and Steve was learning Italian on his own, I could tell he was “tired.” Later that year they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. In 1990, Steve entered hospital for heart surgery in mid-December, telling Sylvia as he entered the O.R., “Sylvia, I am so tired and I love you.” He never regained consciousness and died New Year’s Eve. But before he left for the hospital, he gave Sylvia a copy of the quatrain he had written for her for that year. It was his annual anniversary gift to compose a love quatrain that she would read on each December 26. Later I would receive a copy of that last love poem, and it is one of my most treasured of documents.
When Sylvia wrote us of Steve’s death, I cried profusely, knowing I could never again access the wisdom and guidance he had so freely offered me over 44 years. Someone very wonderful had left my world! Sylvia gallantly learned “to live alone,” and not as part of the inseparable couple they had always been. She flew to Europe, toured the British Museum all on her own, visited a life-long friend in Denmark, and all this in her mid-seventies. In 1993, joy of joys, she even flew to Syracuse, New York, where we met her and drove her north to our Ontario home. She spent a week with us. We ate at every fine restaurant we could find, -- that was a favorite pastime for her-- and even attended a play with her. On one day she and our son spent the day together touring Queeen’s University, where he was studying for his Master’s. This was the son to whom she had become an instant grandmother two decades before.
It was during this visit she told me, “Don’t plan anything for Wednesday! I always have a day-off then. I do nothing. It’s my rule of life!” She also shared there were three things she never wanted to discuss with anyone: the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and World War II. So we three all stayed shy of those subjects from then on. Steve and Sylvia had called themselves merely cultural Jews, although as long as I knew them there was a mezuzah mounted to their outside door frame.
On Sylvia’s 80th birthday, in 1997, while we were on a visit from Canada to our adult children in California, our younger son joined us for the gala birthday celebration in San Francisco’s Stern Grove. Sylvia proudly danced with her newly replaced knees in the arms of her physician, then with my Cliff. A glorious memory for all of us!
Then after we moved back to California in late 1997, we never left our desert home to visit Northern California without stopping to see our Sylvia, and usually “dine out.” Now in her eighties, it would have been too much to have stayed, as before, “in the den.” Her retirement schedule amazed us. For years Sylvia had volunteered in the League of Women Voters, often chairing big public gatherings to ask candidates, with a poise beyond belief, questions that made them squirm. She could put a big-time Mayor or Senator “on the spot” when one of them attempted to usurp time not allotted to them. Then there was her volunteering to read to 3-and-4-year-olds at a nearby preschool. Finally well into her eighties, she helped 5th graders achieve reading skills at a nearby school to which she could drive her Volvo. Steve had taught her to drive and arranged a “reverse mortgage” before he died, so her later years would be a gentle, worry-free passage of time.
I saw Sylvia three times during the last four years. Once when I was promoting my book at my old high school, I did stay “in the den.” Her incessant coughing at night worried me, so in the morning I called her physician, who had me drive her to the hospital to have her admitted. Six months later, when I was on a book tour, she arranged a hair appointment for me. Driving me there, I mentioned to her the recent illness, and she curtly shut me down, “I don’t want to talk or think about that,” she said abruptly. Then twenty-two months ago, I arrived on her doorstep, staying at a nearby hotel, but coming to help her celebrate early her soon-to-be 90th birthday, the party for which I could not attend as I had another book tour whose date conflicted with the big event. This visit I was ill with a back problem and she sent me in a cab to the same hospital emergency room as we visited before. I returned to rest on her den couch, and then I asked to hear the story of her courtship and marriage to Steve in the “dirty thirties.” She had been 17, he 24, and they had to spend their honeymoon in the old bedroom he had shared with his brother. We laughed at all these details and their implications! So glad I am that I asked for this one last sharing of that great love affair! She gave me a copy of that last anniversary quatrain he had composed and given her weeks before he died, the one she had read on their 56th anniversary, as he lay in a coma in hospital.
With Cliff’s and my moves these past five years, Sylvia sent gifts our way: a small marble globe from Gump’s, a Japanese wind-chime, a small carving of a female figure that Steve had made, and on our most recent move, the gift of several frozen meals from her favorite supplier, the Omaha Steak firm. These last years we e-mailed often, usually a sharing of puns, and we called occasionally. She always ended the conversation with a joke, but her voice was growing ever weaker as her last final illness took its toll. That we never discussed.
And during these last same four years, our son would make frequent business trips to San Francisco, always stopping to sleep at Sylvia’s neighbor’s “spare room” so he could take Sylvia to dinner, or they might “order in.” They had this “grandmother/grandson” thing still going strong. (And he was not the only “adopted” grandchild Sylvia had accumulated!)
One such business jaunt was planned for mid-October this year. But he was called and told Sylvia was in the hospital “for tests,” and he could see her there. Oh, but Sylvia had other ideas! She came home from the hospital just in time to have one last “order-in” of Chinese food, and the next night, Sylvia’s wonderful care-giver made soup they could share. The meal visits were brief, but Sylvia let our son take two last photos of her with his cell phone. Ten days later she died, on a Wednesday—her “day-off,” as she had called it.
I never got to say good-bye. So this is why I write this essay. I want to honor my “big sister” by a “life-review” of my relationship to her, to share with the world what she meant to me, and thereby simultaneously to work through my grief for her death. (I did not learn of her death until our return from our recent cruises.) On hearing that Sylvia died, I cried all day, only reassured by another friend present at her death, who said among Sylvia’s last words, she said, “I am dying a good death!”
This precious lady who knew of my years as a hospice volunteer, but would never discuss with me this volunteer work, left me that message because Hospice had been called in to ease her transition. She knew those final words would comfort me. And through our son and his last visit with her, her letting him photograph her, she said her own unique good-bye to all three of us.
I will miss you “big sister Sylvia,” and I promise you on your 74th wedding anniversary this coming December 26, Cliff and our son and I shall raise a glass to toast you and your wonderful life you shared so generously with so many persons. We’ll say what I know you would love to hear, “L’chaim,”—to Life!
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