Darkness is falling fast as her nurse and I push Esther’s all-terrain wheelchair down the long steep hill towards the burial ground of the Woodcrest community. Esther chatters brightly to us as we race past the factory and garden, hoping to make the most of the dusky pinkish-orange glow that’s still left in the sky. We come to a stop in front of the large wooden gates at the entrance to the burial ground. Esther’s chatter promptly stops as well, as she gazes up at the tall pine trees, silhouetted against the glowing sky, and the rows of graves covered with flowers that blend with the colors of the sunset. It’s just as she had imagined and described it to her friends, only even more beautiful.

Esther is in the last stage of terminal cancer and has come to Woodcrest to die. For many years she’s been our neighbor but we didn’t know her. Now, through a set of extraordinary circumstances and coincidences—Esther would call it simply “another miracle!”—she’s become more than just a neighbor. She’s become a mother, a sister, a grandmother and a friend.

Born on a kibbutz in Israel in 1940, Esther was the granddaughter of Jewish-German entrepreneurs who had fled Nazi persecution, and the daughter of members of the fledgling kibbutz movement. When she was eight, her family moved to the United States and settled on a farm near New Paltz in New York State. She went into social work and ended up becoming a therapist. As she put it, she “wanted to use my gift to be able to tell people the truth without hurting them.” For many years she practiced in New York City.

The help that many received from her was hardly conventional: she steered her patients away from becoming absorbed in their own problems and miseries and opened them up to the vastness and beauty of the world around them. As one former client of hers put it, “What Esther always taught me was to love and to forgive. She used to tell me ‘it’s the same in every religion—the most important thing in finding peace is to be able to love and to forgive.’”

Esther knew that it was hard work to love and to forgive. For ten years she battled cancer and underwent the grueling treatments and chemotherapy that came along with it: although she personally would have opted for less aggressive treatments or none at all, she kept doing them out of love to her mother, who could not bear the thought of having to watch her daughter die. Not long after her mother passed away in October 2008, Esther stopped chemo. Her mission of love to her mother had been completed. Esther’s only wish now was to fulfill God’s plan for her life and to find peace and forgiveness. She knew she didn’t have much time left, and prayed that—when the time came—she would not have to die alone.

That prayer was answered when a friend stopped in on her one day and, horrified at the state in which she found Esther, turned to Woodcrest for help. The same answer that blessed Esther also blessed the Woodcrest community: we became the lucky ones who were allowed to take Esther in. Within days she had found a firm place in our hearts.

As she became weaker and her illness progressed, Esther had to close her counseling practice in January of this year. At that time, she offered her clients the opportunity to stay in touch with her. As she put it, “I wanted to give them the chance to experience someone’s dying and death and come close to it so as not to be afraid of it anymore.” Many of her clients—by then turned friends—took up Esther’s offer and in so doing became bricks in the wall of love and support that surrounded her in her last days.

Esther spent three exciting and wonderful weeks at Woodcrest, filled with daily challenges, joys, sorrows, frustrations—and lots of laughter and singing. Her walls were plastered with pictures of pumpkins, smiling grandmas, autumn leaves, and angels, brought by the children who visited her every chance they got. She passed away peacefully the evening of September 30th. Although she is now gone, her story, words, and the peace she found at the end of her life will linger in my heart—and in many others—for a long while yet. And every time I’m down in the burial ground the golden evening there with Esther will shine brightly in my memory.

 

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