“There, I won’t go back there.” I pointed with my other hand toward an imaginary hospital. David understood.
Before we left, I placed a small stone on her grave. From that day on, I never returned to a hospital as a doctor.
I completed the IDF programming course, which distracted me from the agony that filled me during the first months after her death. At the end of the course, I was torn between the sense of failure to save Lily – which darkened my life – and my desire to be a doctor and prove to myself and others that I had overcome my disappointment with the medical system, perhaps even to change something in it, out of the immense grief that engulfed me.
I went to my parents’ home day after day, trying to take comfort among my family. But without realizing it, I had begun to cough obsessively, to such an extent that my mother demanded I seek treatment. My brother, the doctor, and I both knew this was a psychological reaction to the trauma of Lily’s death. We both knew I couldn’t go back to the hospital as a doctor, to deal with medical issues that would forever engrave her death in my soul.
The decision to leave medicine was one of the hardest of my life. In the conversation where I informed the Surgeon General of my decision to retire from medicine, he answered: “You can leave medicine, but medicine will not leave you. Always, always, you will be a doctor. That no one can take from you.”
And he was indeed right. One doesn’t have to stand at a patient’s bedside to use the extraordinary tools gained in medical school – tools of immeasurable worth. For me, a human being will always be a human being, and at every opportunity I have had, I have given of myself unstintingly. My family, myfriends, and many of those I treated can attest to that. I practiced what I learned at the patients’ bedside in my undertakings. I combined the tools I was born with and those I received at medical school, irreplaceable and irrevocable.
And yet, as I searched for a solution day after day, I wandered into other fields as well. In the end, I found myself engaging with therapeutic areas still connected to medicine, but ones in which no fateful decisions of life and death were required. I could always say: I have been there already.
For years, I tried unsuccessfully to reproduce the thud I heard that fatal night – the thud from her fall onto the toilet. That was the last sound Lily ever heard. For her, it was the voice of death.
If anyone had seen me in the bathroom after her death, they would surely have thought me insane. There, behind the door, I got into the crouched position in which I had found her. At first, I shed tears, then the sea of tears dried up.
Forever.
I stopped doing it with the birth of my first daughter, about five years later.
God’s masterpiece, who gave me a “ride for life” years ago, departed from life minutes before reaching the threshold of hope.
A victim of a “preconception”? Perhaps.
I have never been able to free myself from that possibility – or from the command, “Don’t be her doctor, be her husband.” I probably never will.
The doctors had given her two years.
The power of love, and her fierce desire to live, granted her two more vibrant years.
In the end, her death came not from the illness itself, but from a moment’s misjudgment, and a tender defiance of the medical limits imposed upon her.
I can only assume that He, the very One she did not believe in, wanted her by His side. Lily was mine and now she is His!
Epilogue
Several years after her passing, the Eilat Art Workshop was renamed“in memory of Lily.”At the ceremony, the mayor remarked that Eilat had no other institutions named after individuals, but that in Lily’s case, the dedication was more than justified.
Further, the paintings of the disabled and the handicapped patients that were hanged at the Rehovot Museum, were so unique that after Lily’s death, this piece, out of all her works, was chosen by the heads of the College of Art and Design to commemorate her there. A few years later, the work disappeared. Together, Eliot Crane, the head of the College of Art and Design, Saul her brother, and I tried to find it, but we failed. All that remained were the photographs she had taken before we dismantled it in our apartment on the way to Rehovot.
***
On January 17, 2025, my partner and I visited Lily’s brother. We have remained in contact over the years, trying, each in our own way, to commemorate her. Once a year, we gather by her grave. Both Lily’s brother and I own many of her works. I can hardly describe the depth of emotion we all felt, especially my partner and I, standing before the abstract piece that changed Lily’s life: a single olive-green diagonal line, about 15 cm long and 1.5 cm wide, standing before us. The talent Lily carried within her defies description.
If it had been up to us, she would have received a diploma without ever setting foot in the Avni Art Institute or the College of Art and Design.
Finally: Lily’s illness was kept from my parents until her very last day, just as it was concealed throughout her time in Eilat, later in Tel-Aviv, and then at the seminary. In this way, we managed to live a life that was almost normal. Keeping them unaware spared me many questions I didn’t always have good answers for. I never lied to them – there was no need. It was enough simply not to tell them the whole story. My sister, my brother, and my closest friends knew and supported this choice, and I am grateful to them for that.
Lily’s life and death opened my eyes to many different worlds. Most of them were extraordinary, bound up with our way of life, in which Lily – despite her illness – refused to give in, and managed to live as fully as possible. I had the great privilege of accompanying her as her husband, and of witnessing the strength she showed before so many institutions, never yielding in the smallest detail. I am certain that my decision not to continue practicing medicine was deeply tied to my sense that the medical system had failed in its treatment of Lily – a feeling that stayed with me for many years.
May her memory be blessed.
