Lois was an ebullient, enthusiastic and giving personality.  She was a very  pretty young lady, but not just externally. She had a true Neshama Tehora-a beautiful soul and a warm, loving and giving heart. Whether it was staying awake as a child waiting for her MD father to return home from an emergency late-night call back to the hospital, or spending three days and nights on a blanket making her beloved pet  basset hound comfortable  just prior to the dog having to be put to sleep, from her earliest days, Lois demonstrated an internal empathy for every person and every situation. And so truthful! When she first learned to drive and had a very minor parking lot  fender-bender with a car that had hundreds of dents in it, she nevertheless left her name and phone number for the driver to call-she couldn’t rest knowing that she might have caused even minor distress to any individual. Later as a young Mother, and despite having early teenage daughters and a pre-teen son, she would open her home weekly on the Sabbath to bring at risk teenagers into a warm and wholesome family milieu.  These less fortunate teens would learn from her children, and not the reverse, was her firm belief. This giving nature also prompted her to become a volunteer EMT  with a local ambulance company, which ultimately resulted in a serious accident that left her with a brain hemorrhage and in an induced coma for many weeks.

 

So committed was she to helping the downtrodden, that in spite of her heavy family commitments, she went back to college and graduated Magna Cum Laude from John Jay College, specializing in the scourge of pedophilia. She wanted to spend the rest of her life helping these horribly abused children. But alas, this was not to be! The ravages of the acute leukemia which were visited upon her, gradually won out, and shortly after receiving her diploma presented to her by Sheriff James Kralik of Rockland County, NY, in a special ceremony at her home while she was on a ventilator, the angels  from above won out, and she was summoned to her eternal rest.

 

For us, her parents, like every parent who has lost a child, there has never been, nor will there likely ever be, any consolation for this loss.The natural course of life is for children to bury their parents, not the reverse; and there is absolutely nothing that anyone can ever say or do  to assuage the loss of a child. The process of Shikcha-of natural dimming of memories leading to forgetting-does not work in the area of losing a child. And although the years may fly by, the minutes never do, and for every parent not a moment of life  is  spent without revisiting the shards of the tablets (the “shivrei luchos) of the shattered hearts we as parents of lost children are left with.

 

So, what is the answer? There really is no answer, but we try to go on and  continue living–what else can we do? For us, going on living means trying to attach ourselves to that which was important in our daughter’s  all too brief life. It means trying to be as close to her children as  loving grandparents can be, because that is what she would
be doing  as their Mother.

 

And it also means identifying and attaching to that which was important to her, and trying to continue and complete that which she wanted to accomplish. We are told that a good deed is only credited to the person completing that good deed. So how can we make sure that the good deeds that this fund will accomplish accrue to her? There is another concept we are taught: That an agent of as person is the same as that person. If person A sends person B to accomplish something good, it  is as if person A had done the deed.

 

We truly feel that we are acting as Lois’ agents, and every project we bring to a successful conclusion, every distressed person’s suffering that we help alleviate, it will be as if Lois herself had done these benevolent acts. She has sent us. We, and all of you who help us with your time, your efforts, your funds, are also her agents, and it will be as if she were still here, doing these wonderful deeds for the needy, herself.

 

Finally, we are taught that when good works are accomplished, the soul of the person on whose behalf it is done–in this case, Lois Lupin Salzman, will rise higher and higher in the heavenly spheres above, until her soul completes its present assignment: to accomplish so much good in this world that IT–her beautiful, kind and boundless soul, will indeed stretch itself and reach all the way to the throne of the A-lmighty , who created her and allowed us so brief an exposure to  her lofty Neshama Tehora.

 

Sincerely,

The Parents of Leeba Gavriella