I've been realizing over the past 2 months, ever since my mother (of blessed memory) passed away, how much about life I learned from her. She spent her whole life, or at least that part I've known her, fighting diabetes and mental illness. Yet she never complained and only kept working on trying to be happy and make others happy.
Mom has been one of my main focuses while studying here in Yeshiva. Because while studying, I learned things with which, together, we tried to understand her place in the world and why these things were happening to her. Her medications and diseases made it difficult to understand some concepts, but we would work, over and over, trying to understand. I would explain and she would try to understand. Eventually, in a moment of clarity, or divine inspiration, she would grasp what I was trying to explain.
These moments of clarity were tremendous and I felt like we had set in place another huge building stone on the foundation of the next Beit HaMikdash. Mom's persistence in trying to connect to Judaism was amazing. She was trying to connect to what I was learning and teaching her; she was trying to connect spiritually, she was starting to connect to Eretz Yisrael through my emails and pictures and stories.
Much of my learning has focused on how to help Mom, or has been simply for her merit. So much so, that when Mom passed, I had a very difficult time understanding why should I keep learning in Yeshivah? What's the point of it now? Yet even with these questions, when I returned to the States for "shiva", I still davened three times a day. I still kept kosher. For all my questions, Hashem was with me, and I felt, with Mom. We, the three of us were working through this tough time.
One of Mom's biggest dreams was to play with her grandchildren. Unfortunately, she won't get that opportunity in this world. But, because of her strong desire for family and continuation, I found a new reason to continue my studies, so that her grandchildren, will merit, like her, to be in both this world and the world to come, and to see their Savta.
I don't have children yet; I'm not even married, but I know, especially now, that Mom is watching over me, and that we'll find the right woman, and we'll have those children Mom dreamed about.