× Alice Horowitz

Harold, Sandy?s dad. Well, he was pretty much like my father as well for about 35 years because I was not close with my dad and Sandy and I have been together all these years and his dad was such a huge part of our lives and I loved him, loved him, loved him! I was terribly sad, the Alzheimer?s was horrible but there were beautiful moment with it too and especially like when we moved him down here it was only 40 days before he died and I really had the opportunity to nurse him and mother him and baby him in ways that I never could have in other points of our lives. I felt like part of my purpose with him was to midwife him through his death and like?he wouldn?t know other people?s names, I would walk into the room he?d say, ?Hi Alice, how are you today?? He knew me. We just had an incredible connection all our lives but really those last 40 days, and 40 days is a very significant number, like in the Bible Moses goes off for 40 days, and Jesus?40 days is a really important kind of thing so for us it was very significant. He came, he was faltering, he had Alzheimer?s for 40 years, he was getting kicked out of his residential care where he was living, so we brought him, we put him into a 6 bed facility, very nice facility, and my husband and my son, they went to Boston to go look at colleges and Harold fell and he hit his head, so they called me up to go to the emergency room, so I went to the emergency room and I hung out with him through the night for like 6 hours, and all night long, I rubbed his chest, I held his had, I looked in his eyes and I said, ?You know what? You can go. You?re done. You?ve done a great job. Everyone is good? and I would name everybody, ?Your granddaughter is doing this, and you can go. It?s ok. You have permission.? And you know, within a week, he really started to falter and I told Sandy, ?You have to go over and release your dad.? So he did that too, and we put him. He came here, he wasn?t, like, dying. A couple of weeks into it, he went onto hospice, one day, the next day they said, ?He?s not in an active dying phase.? The next day he was dead. He died in our arms. He died within 12 hours to the day, 11 years, of his mother?s anniversary. It was all synchronized, it was something that was really making that happen. With the music, on his deathbed, this is an hour or two before he died, I?m laying in bed with him, I?m holding his hand, and we put on ?Fiddler on the Roof ? Sunrise, Sunset? and he?s trying to hum along, like he knew that. It was so beautiful. We held him and we released him. It was gorgeous. It was so incredibly beautiful. We just held him and when he was leaving we were just like, ?Go Harold, go, you go!? It was just incredible. The music was very important because that was a way to communicate with him. We?d turn on his favorite showtunes and stuff, or you?d sing a song like ?Take Me Out to the Ballgame? and all of a sudden he knew all the words and then the veil would come back down. I felt like my role in his last days was just, somehow or other, I was a conduit to him into another space that was peaceful and comfortable.