WolfWeave

It is no longer summer and the weather is chilly, the skies grey and dismal in more ways than one. My father passed away last night at the age of 83, from prostate cancer. He was a good man, and we shall miss him more than we can imagine.

8/7/2005

10/25/2007

It is over… A few long-drawn breaths and then confusion: Is he dead? Is he not? Is he gone? He can’t be! Please god make him alive again! Please turn back time and make it a minute, an hour, a day ago. Please bring him back for just an instant, just a second to hold his hand. We hold his lifeless hands, kiss his chilling lips, close his eyes. Our tears fall onto his face, onto the pillow. We try to hold him, to hug once more, but already he is cold and stiffening, unresponsive. Where has he gone? Where can he be? How did it go by so quickly? An instant this life; a flash and it is over. From birth to death; from ashes to ashes; We are as nothing.

One’s life is summed up into so few words…at the end we are but a paragraph in the newspaper, a summary of our degrees, our greatest accomplishments:

Mr. Wolf was a loving husband of 61 years….a devoted grandfather….a combat WWII veteran who received a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was a founding member and Past President of Congregation Solel. He was a founder and board member of the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation, participating in worldwide anti-nuclear projects and managing the Arid Lands Development Project between Egypt and Israel. Mr. Wolf was an accomplished tax attorney and C.P.A., practicing both in Illinois and Florida. He had received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and his J.D. from DePaul University. For the past 20 years he had served as an arbitration judge in Cook County.

But how little it really says about who he was and what he stood for and what his life was like from day to day. It says nothing about how much he is missed, how large a void his death has left in the lives of those who knew him. An instant this life; a flash and it is over. From birth to death; from ashes to ashes; we are as nothing without him.