On her Mom’s first yahrzeit, Deborah recalls:

My mother lived alone, and until the last year or two of her life was okay. Or at least that’s what we thought.

Mom wasn’t easy to deal with, and not because of the onset of dementia or old age. This was who she was. But, she was still my mom, the woman who gave me life, and raised me as best she knew how.

To be clear, we weren’t nor are we now Torah observant Jews.

My aunt Francine died four months from the day she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was a very smart, determined, progressive woman who was involved in politics.

Her husband had passed away a few years prior, and she had no children. We were close growing up, and during her illness, my husband and I helped her with whatever she needed.

My brother, Rebel, was one-of-a-kind. His name said it all. He was a free-spirit and a self-proclaimed hippie. Though Rebel was not a practicing Jew, he was very proud of his heritage. When Rebel was diagnosed with a curable cancer, he refused treatment. He didn’t believe in modern medicine.

Rebel’s dying wish was to be buried in the most natural way possible and under a mango tree. We had a mango tree in our childhood backyard, which Rebel loved, and he did not want a casket for environmental reasons.

My dad made his preference about afterlife care very clear – he wanted to be cremated. We are not very observant, and when we asked around about cremation, we were told that cremation is now permitted in Judaism, and that my father can even be buried in a “cremation section” of a Jewish cemetery, so we were happy. When my father died, we went through with the cremation and that was that.