The Kiss

Yehuda held on to the hope that his wife would recover, even though she had been in this Jerusalem hospital for almost 12 years. Edna lay in bed with her eyes open, yet it was doubtful that she could see anything. She had once been a concert violinist. Now after a heart attack that left her deprived of oxygen for too long, she was attached to a host of tubes including a ventilator and a feeding tube.

She didn’t respond to people’s voices, to the nurses, to the doctors or to her family. Yehuda was retired from his job as a high school biology teacher, so he came to the hospital every day to be with her.

I was training to be a pastoral counselor, visiting patients to offer some form of comfort. But I couldn’t find any here.

Yehuda had told me his story on previous visits: he and his wife were both been children during the Holocaust. He was hidden for three years in the barn of a Christian family, his father's business partner. Then when he was 10, he escaped and joined the partisans in the Polish countryside, sleeping outside in barns and the woods, helping to fight the Germans. Both of his parents had died in concentration camps.

In the convent, Edna completed the Hebrew words of the Shema for the visiting rabbi. She was rescued and eventually reunited with her mother.

His wife was eight when she was taken to a convent in France and hidden there. Edna had learned how to cross herself, how to say the Lord's Prayer. A few years later, the nuns brought a group of men wearing black hats and suits into the convent dining room. As the children continued their meal, the men walked around the room and recited a Jewish prayer, the Shema, to see which children responded. Edna completed the prayer for one of the men. The Hebrew words for “God is one” returned to her, and she said them out loud. After that, she was rescued and eventually reunited with her mother.

Now she lay in the hospital bed listless, her tongue drooping from her mouth. She was in a vegetative state. Yehuda patted her lips with gauze pads, taking a wet cloth to clean her face and hands. He told me that he gave her injections more skillfully than any of the nurses. He was busy at her bedside, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his wife’s arm, recording the results on his own legal pad. He nodded, satisfied with the results. Next, he massaged her feet with moisturizing lotion he grabbed from the night table. Then he unplugged the plastic feeding tube from the machine to wash it in the sink and wipe the tube clean.

"You know the nurses here don't really care,” he said. “There's one. She doesn’t take care of my wife correctly. She doesn’t clean the feeding tube properly. I'm so angry at her. I yelled at her but she doesn’t change. So I care for Edna as much as I can. Of course, that's why I don't like going home from here. But they throw me out. The nurses insist that I go home.”

He was here almost every day from 1 to 8 PM. Every day, for the past 12 years.

The room was set up like a bedroom, as if he had moved in. He was here almost every day from 1 to 8 PM. Every day, for the past 12 years. He had a blue cloth easy chair he had brought from home, a calendar with photos of the kids and grandkids hung above a small desk. On the wooden table he had brought from home there was a lamp with a small ship inside. On the wall hung a painting of boats, a small TV positioned on brackets.

He told me that their five sons did not approve of him visiting his wife so often. They wanted him to go back to work, to play cards with friends like he used to do, to travel, to do something other than be in this room.

But he told me that this was his job. He would not leave her. He was devoted to Edna. I thought of the way he had lost his parents when he was young, and the way he would not let himself lose his wife. But I agreed with his sons. Maybe it was time for him to stop spending so much time here.

Before I could broach the subject, he told me that he was going home early for a dentist appointment.  He smoothed the blanket out over his wife and kissed her on the forehead. Then he bent down and kissed his wife on the lips. And I witnessed something unusual, so unexpected, shocking even.  His wife’s lips seemed to close and purse and brush his.

“Is that what I think I saw?” I asked him as he wrapped a scarf around his neck, his body stooped.

“Oh yes,” he said, looking at me. “Go figure. It’s the only thing she can still do. And I don't think it's just a reflex. Maybe it is. But she seems to want to kiss me. I mean she puckers her mouth.”

Her lips pressed together. I couldn’t believe it. She was a person who seemed almost dead, and here she was, kissing.

He bent down and put his lips to hers, and she kissed him again. A small pucker. Light. Gentle. Her lips pressed together. I couldn’t believe it. She was a person who seemed almost dead, and here she was, kissing.

It wasn’t the story of Sleeping Beauty. Edna was not going to wake up. But there was a part of her, I knew it now, that had never gone to sleep. I remembered a verse from the Song of Songs: I am asleep but my heart is awake.

I felt as if that statement included Edna and even my son Koby who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists when he was 13. A person could seem asleep, even dead, but there was always a part of them that was awake—the soul. A piece of eternity, a touch of God, something that could never be destroyed, here in this room, hidden in the bedside kiss.

Excerpted from "Reaching for Comfort: What I Saw, What I Learned, and How I Blew it Training as a Pastoral Counselor."