A Year On – Remembering Rebecca

Today is the first anniversary of the death of a dear friend, Rebecca Dale. She passed away after battling cancer for many years. Rebecca would have been 45 years old today and leaves behind a wonderful family who, however you try and positively frame it, have been denied an amazing, kind and loving mother and wife.

In the week before she passed, as she lay in bed, drifting between pain and sleep, she struggled  to try and work out how to help me with my children as my wife was out of the country. That sums up the type of person she was. When I came to the US several years ago, it was clear to her that I, and later my family, would live with them, until we found our feet, even though she didn’t know us very well (her husband and I go back 30 years and he and my wife are good friends).

Over the past year we have tried to be there for her husband and children. But everyone gets embroiled in the day-to-day and I left with the distinct feeling that we never did enough … that we can never do enough … that the task is simply to awesome.

Today, in the Jewish tradition, her family and friends will gather at her grave and leave a permanent marker – a stone setting, we call it. Then we will return to the family’s house and have a barbeque and exchange memories and stories. There will be many people because Rebecca touched the lives of so many.

We will try and celebrate the life of an amazing woman, but it won’t be easy. It never will. It never should.

——————————————————————————————————

Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/ and on Twitter (@alonshalevsf).