My grandmother passed away

I spent 4 weeks in the US visiting my grandmother, Riva Kipovskaya, who was very sick already for a while. On March 16, two days after Purim, my grandmother passed away. She was 85.

When we were leaving the states for Israel, back in August, she said to me, my wife and my kids, “I just wish I would get to see you all once again one last time.” And she did. The day we came to visit her she was still conscious, and even though she had a stroke a month before that and couldn’t talk very legibly, she recognized all of us and talked a little to the kids. The next day I visited her again, but something happened. She wasn’t really talking any more and didn’t seem to respond much. As time went on she deteriorated and eventually had to be placed on life support. She stayed on it for a week, but being tough as she was, despite all doctors’ predictions she got off and lived for another week on her own. She passed away really quietly in her bed in the nursing home without being hooked up to any machines.

As much as I was prepared before that she is passing it didn’t help at all. It came as a huge shock. I guess there is something inside of us that believes that everything will be ok no matter what, and it keeps us going.

Because her funeral was on a Friday afternoon there were no speeches and almost no prayers. That made me even more upset. But now I can tell the story that I wanted to tell then if I could.

It’s a story that my grandmother told me that happened to her during WWII when she just became a doctor.

She graduated medical school on a sped up program in Leningrad in 1942, in the middle of the blockade and was evacuated out of the city to a small town near by called Budogosh where she was the regional doctor. One day she gets a call from some emergency office that in some village really far away there is a woman who is giving birth and she is bleeding to death and that she is the closest doctor around. She said that she has no way of getting there, but the dispatcher was said that they have a small army fighter plane that will be dispatched to get her and bring her there. When the plane arrived it was a tiny open plane with 2 seats in a row. The front seat was for the pilot and back seat was for the gunner. The pilot told her to get into the gunner’s seat. As they flew, the plane shook like crazy and she became really sick. She vomited all over the side of the plane. The plane landed in the middle of some field. My grandmother didn’t see any village. The pilot said that the village is 10 km (6 miles) away from where they are, but there is no open field there to land and so he had to land here. He kind of showed her where to go through the woods and so she did, for 10 km.

When she got to the village they were already waiting for her. They brought her into a tiny filthy wooden house and there, lying on a bed, was a woman who was screaming her head off. She wasn’t so much in pain, but she was so scared that she was bleeding and was going to die that she was completely freaking out. My grandmother realized that the reason she is bleeding is because there is a piece of the placenta stuck in her womb and never came out. She asked for soap to wash her hands. Everyone around laughed. It’s the middle of the war and they didn’t have any soap anywhere. What about alcohol or vodka? Of course they have that. That’s what they drink all day. So my grandmother washed her hands with vodka, stuck her hand up to her elbow inside her womb and pulled out the placenta. The bleeding stopped.

I don’t know how she got back to where she came from. She said that she thought the woman would for sure die from infection since the house that she was in was filthy and my grandmother’s hands weren’t really properly disinfected. And yet, a couple of months later she gets a phone call from that village that the woman and the baby are fine and that she saved their lives. Talk about tough people, the doctors and the patients.

I told this story to a bunch of doctors and nurses in the ICU while my grandmother was on life support so that they should know what it was like to be a doctor in Russia in the middle of WWII. And when they tell me that there is no point to keep her on life support, because she will die right away anyway, I told them that during her life time she literally saved thousands of lives and all that they want to do is to speed up the road to the cemetery. As I said already, they were wrong. She got off life support and lived without it for another week. When she died she just stopped breathing in her sleep without any agony.

My grandparents were married for 58 years and 28 of them, spent raising me. Just like my grandfather’s, all her wishes came true. She got to see all of us one last time.