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Miriam Rosen

Miriam “Miri” Rosen (née Goldfarb, her adoptive family’s surname) was a Deaf Polish Ashkenazi Jewish Holocaust child survivor, seamstress, and longtime member of Baltimore’s Jewish Deaf community. Born while her family was in hiding in Warsaw in 1944, she reached the United States through a postwar rescue route and was adopted by a Deaf Jewish family in Boston. American Sign Language became her first full language in early childhood. She later attended the New York School for the Deaf, where she met Saul Rosen, and they built a seventy-nine-year marriage and an ASL-using Jewish household in Baltimore.

Early Life and Background

Warsaw and Rescue

Miri was born in the spring of 1944 while her Jewish family was in hiding in occupied Warsaw, approximately six months before Saul. Her exact birth date was lost in the imprecise rescue records. She was not born inside the Warsaw Ghetto, which had been destroyed the previous year. The names of her biological parents were not recovered, and they did not survive the Holocaust.

The surviving family account traced Miri’s rescue through the Polish Council to Aid Jews, commonly known as Żegota. A Polish-Catholic caregiver who briefly fostered her recorded that the baby “did not respond to sounds but seemed otherwise well.” After Warsaw, she passed through a chain of caregivers and postwar Jewish relief contacts that included Łódź and a Bricha-adjacent refugee route. She arrived in Boston in late 1946 at approximately two and a half years old.

Miri had no conscious memory of the rescue, her birth mother’s face, or the people who carried her between placements. She nevertheless carried survivor’s guilt throughout her life, asking why she had been spared when her birth parents had not. Her understanding of her mother’s love rested on having been carried, kept alive, and let go so that she could survive. She did not need to recover every missing detail for that knowledge to matter to her. She understood her own life as an obligation to care for others, although survival had not been something she could earn or deserve.

Boston and the Goldfarb Household

Miri was adopted by Hannah and Ira Goldfarb, a Deaf Jewish couple in Dorchester whose families came from Polish Ashkenazi communities. Both were second-generation Americans. They had met as children at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, married young, and been unable to have biological children. They specifically requested a Deaf Jewish child survivor because they knew hearing placements could leave those children without accessible language or Deaf cultural life. Their application stated, “We want the Deaf ones. Send us the Deaf ones.”

Miri arrived severely underweight, without a full signed or spoken language, and struggling after repeated changes of caregiver. During her first three months in Boston, Hannah settled her to sleep on her own chest, signed to her, fed her, and avoided leaving her alone for more than a few minutes. Ira built her a cradle and signed songs to her. The Goldfarbs’ continuous signing and stable care gave her a full language, secure attachment, and reliable food. ASL became her first full language in their household; she was fluent by approximately three and a half, rather than having acquired it from infancy.

Hannah and Ira were joyful parents within a close Boston Jewish Deaf community. They had not lived through the Holocaust in Europe themselves, but their families had lost relatives and friends in Poland. Miri grew up with signed Yiddishisms, ASL Shabbat observance, and collective mourning alongside the affection of a household in which she remained their cherished child. Deafness belonged to their shared language and culture rather than separating her from her parents.

Ira died in 1987 and Hannah in 1994. Miri regarded the childhood language access they had given her as grace, particularly beside Saul’s later access to ASL in a hearing adoptive family. The contrast did not resolve her questions about why she had received so much when others had received so little. Feeding people became her continuing response to that unfairness.

Education

Miri attended the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston before transferring to the New York School for the Deaf in fall 1958 at fourteen. Her parents wanted her to join the broader Deaf community at Fanwood, although residential schooling meant missing their daughter at home. Miri later agreed with their choice. She arrived with fluent ASL, strong writing skills, and an established expectation of loving attention. At school, she was quiet and watchful, noticed when another child was upset, and shared food from her own lunch. Teachers valued her academic strength and precocious writing; she did not seek attention for either.

She met Saul during the 1958–1959 school year, when both were fourteen. He passed her a note mixing written English with ASL glosses, asking to walk her to the dining hall. His humor attracted her, but she also recognized loneliness behind the jokes that had helped him feel safe. Their accounts of her pause before answering differed: Saul described agonizing anticipation, while Miri said she was finishing a math problem. During their walk, his jokes made the dining-hall matron forget to reprimand him for being late. Miri privately began to imagine accompanying him for the rest of her life, although she did not put that thought into words for another year.

Miri graduated in 1962. She did not attend college because her family could not afford it and because she preferred to work near Saul while he completed his printing apprenticeship. She trained informally as a seamstress with a Jewish tailor in lower Manhattan from 1962 to 1966.

Career

After moving to Baltimore with Saul in 1966, Miri worked at a Jewish tailor shop specializing in suits and custom menswear. She worked full-time until 1985, then part-time until about sixty, when progressive retinitis pigmentosa made the fine needlework unsafe. She took pleasure in the rhythm and precision of sewing, the texture of fabric in her hands, and the accuracy of a well-fitted garment. Work she experienced in silence was rich in tactile detail. She remembered her working years with warmth and professional pride.

The shop’s Ukrainian Jewish tailor learned basic ASL during her first year there. At her retirement, he told her he had never had a better seamstress and contrasted her attentive work with the carelessness of hearing employees he had previously hired. Miri kept his handwritten farewell note in her sewing basket for the rest of her life.

Personality

Miri’s steadiness was sometimes mistaken for softness or uncertainty. Her small, unhurried signs were considered and firm; she rarely signed something she had not thought through. When someone said something at a meal that needed reconsideration, she could fall quiet and let the family recognize the problem. Her patience usually outlasted Saul’s attempts to joke past a disagreement. A direct request from her carried weight because she meant what she signed.

She differed from Saul’s expansive performance. Miri signed compactly, used her face for emphasis, and offered a slow smile that her family noticed. She disliked being the center of attention and preferred serving coffee from the kitchen to sitting among the guests in the living room. Her dry humor could be devastatingly brief: a single pointed sign after several minutes of silence could make the whole room laugh. With Annie, one raised eyebrow could acknowledge a joke without alerting Saul that they had shared it.

Her strongest motivations were her family and community. Abandonment, loss, and the erasure of the birth-family names she had never learned remained private fears. She worked through fear, grief, anger, and joy in the kitchen, treating domestic labor as a form of prayer. Challah, soup for sick neighbors, sandwiches for children passing the stoop, and chocolate chip cookies were ordinary expressions of that belief. She privately imagined that her birth mother had once made something for her, too; giving a cookie to an unfamiliar child became a gesture of thanks to the woman whose name she would never know.

Miri paid close attention to children and knew the children on her block by name. As her visual field narrowed, she learned to recognize familiar children from the silhouettes that entered the part of the scene she could still see. She apologized infrequently but gave frequent, deliberate thanks, naming the particular kindness she had received rather than offering a general courtesy.

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Miri’s Polish Ashkenazi heritage, Deaf upbringing in Boston, and adult life in Baltimore remained distinct parts of her identity. She practiced Reform Judaism, as Saul did, and expressed her faith principally through household observance. Where Saul performed the blessings, Miri prepared Friday dinner, lit the candles, and baked challah from Hannah’s Dorchester recipe. By the end of her life, she had maintained the Friday baking tradition for eighty-two years.

She kept her family’s Polish Jewish recipes with particular fidelity. Her borscht came from her adoptive grandmother, who died when Miri was eight; Miri had learned by standing on a stool beside the stove and watching her cook. Her kugel and challah came from Hannah. Her chicken soup used a particular amount of dill that other Society cooks never quite reproduced. Her family learned that unusually abundant cooking often accompanied a change in her emotional life, whether grief, loneliness, anger, or joy.

Miri attended shul on the High Holidays and lit yahrzeit candles for each of her adoptive parents. She also marked the approximate anniversary of her rescue with a candle, alongside Saul’s remembrance of his own rescue. They spent that evening at the kitchen table in signed silence, each remembering a birth mother whose face they could not recall.

During Saul’s 1992 trip, Miri stayed in touch by TTY-relay calls. Annie signed and voiced with Saul in Poland, while Miri typed and read the relayed conversation at home in Baltimore.

Miri declined repeated invitations to return to Poland. In her seventies, she explained to Annie that she preferred the places where her life had begun again to the place where her birth family had been destroyed: her kitchen, her grandchildren, and the cookie tin on her counter.

Speech and Communication Patterns

Miri used ASL as her first full language from early childhood. Her youthful signing carried the Boston regional forms she learned from her parents and Deaf community; decades in Baltimore added local usage and the Goldfarb-Rosen family’s private signs. She had no functional speech. She read and wrote English fluently and had a careful, old-fashioned handwriting style. She also retained fragments of Yiddish and Polish from Hannah’s household.

Her signing was compact, measured, and precise, close to her body rather than occupying Saul’s broad, theatrical space. She used economical facial grammar, with a single eyebrow raise carrying an emphasis another signer might express more expansively. She rarely repeated herself. Her grandchildren experienced her signing as quiet and warm, like being read to in a language particular to her. They retained her sign for sweetheart, her compressed version of “everything will be fine,” and a palm-forward gesture meaning “sit and I will tell you something” in their adult signing.

When hearing adults asked Annie when her parents had become Deaf, Annie signed the question to Miri and let her answer for herself. Miri’s response, delivered with quiet amusement, was “before I was born.”

Miri began learning Protactile after RJ’s diagnosis in 2012. She adopted it earlier and with less resistance to the learning curve than Saul, using it increasingly as her vision narrowed and as a primary communication method by her late eighties. Her family recognized a particular slow tapping pattern on a conversation partner’s arm as her back-channel expression of listening, encouragement to continue, and presence.

Health and Disabilities

Conditions and Diagnoses

Miri was profoundly Deaf from birth. Her Usher syndrome type I also involved mild lifelong vestibular dysfunction, less pronounced than Saul’s, and progressive retinitis pigmentosa. She had always been a careful walker and preferred flat shoes. Night blindness began in her late twenties, significant peripheral-vision loss developed by her forties, and her visual field was severely restricted by her seventies. She noticed retinal changes slightly earlier than Saul, although his field narrowed faster through their fifties and sixties and hers caught up later.

For decades, clinicians treated Miri’s retinal disease and congenital Deafness as unrelated. After RJ’s USH1F-linked Usher diagnosis in 2012, genetic testing confirmed that Miri also had Usher syndrome type I, caused by a different Usher-related gene. She did not carry the USH1F variant that passed from Saul through Annie to RJ. On the evening of her own confirmation, she signed to Annie, “It has a name now. It had one all along. I just didn’t know.” By her late nineties, Miri was clinically deafblind, although she continued to identify herself as Deaf rather than adopting the deafblind label.

Daily Management and Equipment

Miri learned braille in her fifties in preparation for further vision loss and began using a refreshable braille display for sustained reading in her seventies. The change mattered deeply to her as a lifelong reader; preparation made the transition manageable without making it emotionally unimportant. She used a white cane outdoors from her sixties and adapted more readily than Saul to changes in access.

When RJ was twelve, he made tactile labels for her kitchen containers. Miri cried briefly and privately when he gave them to her. She kept the rowhouse and later the suite at Annie’s house precisely organized as her visual field narrowed. By her final years, she could locate everything in her own kitchen by touch.

Miri and Saul remained each other’s principal source of practical support and regulation. They arranged their lives around being available to one another, shared a bed and meals, and signed together throughout the day. As visual communication became less reliable, touch maintained that immediate contact. Moving into Annie and Robbie’s household in 2042 widened their family support without displacing their care for each other.

Medical History and Crises

Miri developed gestational diabetes during her 1978 pregnancy with Annie and preeclampsia late in the pregnancy. Physicians advised against further pregnancies. She came to peace with that advice more readily than Saul, although they both grieved the loss of the larger family they had hoped for. Their daughter remained their only child.

She underwent a hysterectomy for fibroids in 1991 and recovered without complications. Mild cardiac arrhythmia began in her sixties and was managed conservatively. Cataract surgery in 2018 was successful within the visual limits imposed by her advanced retinitis pigmentosa.

Relationship to Her Body

Miri regarded her body with steady equanimity. She neither romanticized Deafness nor treated it as a defect. Progressive vision loss brought grief, but she adapted without denying what was changing or treating each new access method as a defeat. She seldom grieved openly. Cooking, feeding children, and keeping room for another person at her table remained ways of working through the changes in her body as well as other sorrows.

RJ’s diagnosis brought a particular private sorrow that she shared with Saul. Before she understood the different genetic causes of their Usher syndromes, she believed that her own undiagnosed condition had passed through Annie to him. Testing distinguished their genes, but her concern for a grandson facing experiences she knew remained. She rejected the performance of guilt and concentrated on being present for him. As they developed tactile communication, she repeatedly told him, “You are loved. You are loved. You are loved. You are loved.” He carried that reassurance into his adult life.

Physical Characteristics

Miri stood five feet two inches at her tallest and had a small-framed, round, soft body. By her nineties, she was slightly stooped. Her skin was warm olive, a coloring she shared with Annie. Her dark brown hair began to silver in her forties and was fully silver-white by her seventies. She kept it long, usually in a braid down her back or pinned into a low bun at the nape of her neck. At home with Saul, she let it down. He often signed, “Your best performance of the day is this part. Nobody else gets to see it. I’m the luckiest man in Baltimore.”

Her face was round, with a prominent nose, dark brown eyes that caught amber and green in sunlight, and laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Her features softened with age, and Annie resembled her closely. Miri had adapted so thoroughly to her restricted visual field that other people sometimes failed to notice the extent of her vision loss until they tried to meet her gaze from outside it.

Her hands were small, quick, and precise, in contrast with Saul’s broad hands. Their dexterity served her sewing, baking, and compact signing. A small white scar crossed the pad of her left index finger from a sewing accident in 1974; Saul continued teasing her about it intermittently for the next seventy years.

Items and Personal Effects

Miri’s cream-colored ceramic mixing bowl had one chip at the rim and had belonged to Hannah. It traveled with her from Boston to New York to Baltimore, then from the rowhouse to Annie’s home in 2042. She used it for Friday challah for seventy-five years. After Miri’s death, it passed to Annie; after Annie’s death, it passed to Lindsay, and the family continued using it to bake challah.

Ira’s silver kiddush cup remained part of the household’s Friday ritual for eighty years. Before wine was poured into it, Miri signed, “I remember.” When her young grandchildren asked whom she meant, she answered, “everyone who isn’t here to drink.”

Miri sewed a small, poorly made linen doll for Annie when Annie was three. She kept it after Annie outgrew it, and mother and daughter passed it back and forth several times over the following decades. Annie eventually kept it among the clinical books on her office bookshelf throughout her therapy career. Miri continued asking after it, and Annie assured her that it was safe.

Beside Miri’s bed stood a small glass frame containing a pressed lily of the valley. Saul had picked the flower in a Manhattan park and given it to her for their first wedding anniversary in 1966. She kept it on her bedside table for the remaining seventy-eight years of her life.

Personal Style and Presentation

Miri dressed modestly and practically. While her vision allowed, she sewed most of her own cotton house dresses from three or four basic patterns. For Shabbat and the High Holidays, she wore a more formal dress, usually navy or wine-colored, with long sleeves and a modest neckline. Her shoes were sensible leather flats or low heels. She was often slightly cold and kept a knit cardigan on the back of each chair she regularly used.

She wore a thin gold chain with a small gold Star of David that Hannah had given her at her bat mitzvah. Her wedding band was simple, thin, and gold, matching Saul’s, and she wore it on her left ring finger. She wore no other rings, bracelets, or makeup. The faint vanilla smell of her baking and the same unscented hand cream she used for fifty years were familiar parts of her presence. When her grandchildren answered school questions about their futures by saying they wanted to be like their Bubbe, Miri was both mildly scandalized and deeply pleased.

Tastes and Preferences

Miri preferred her own cooking to most other people’s and Hannah’s recipes to her own experiments. Her regular dishes included chicken soup with dill, cabbage rolls filled with ground beef and rice, sweet and savory kugel, challah, and chocolate chip cookies. She kept a reliably stocked pantry with particularly generous reserves of flour and sugar.

She read fiction throughout her life, in print through her sixties and later on her refreshable braille display. Nineteenth-century Russian novels in English translation were particular favorites; she associated them with the broader region from which her family had come. She read Anna Karenina five times and loved the quietness of Willa Cather’s novels. She refused crime fiction because she felt life had already contained enough of it.

Miri enjoyed captioned M*A*S*H, Cheers, and The Golden Girls, the last of which Saul introduced to her. She disliked action films. She loved snow, a preference that dated to her Boston childhood, and liked her tea strong, with milk and no sugar. She did not drink coffee. She preferred spending time with women she had known for decades to meeting new people. For forty years, she gardened behind the rowhouse, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and dill.

Saul’s filthy jokes were a lifelong pleasure. She would not have admitted that preference to him directly, but he knew it from the seventy-nine years she spent laughing at them.

Habits, Routines, and Daily Life

Miri rose at six with Saul, made his hot lemon drink, and attended to her own morning routine while he completed his vestibular sequence. Their week had a familiar order: Monday laundry, Tuesday groceries, Wednesday correspondence and Society volunteering, Thursday cleaning, and Friday challah and Shabbat preparation. Observance extended through Saturday sundown. Sundays were less structured and often involved a visiting grandchild and a batch of cookies.

She began Friday challah dough at one in the afternoon. For her own candle-lighting practice, she used the precise sundown time from a paper almanac kept in a drawer. Saturday began with a slow breakfast with Saul and reading in the sitting room; she napped at two. Their private evening conversation lasted twenty minutes, from 10:15 to 10:35, using close visual signing in low light and, increasingly, tactile communication. The familiar schedule gave her ways to deliver care without making her controlling about it. She accommodated disruptions gracefully.

Personal Philosophy or Beliefs

Miri believed that being saved carried an obligation to feed others. The Shabbat table, repeated family rituals, a warm kitchen, and remembrance of absent family members mattered more to her than theological argument. She passed on the practices Hannah and Ira had taught her without needing to resolve every question about their religious meaning. In her eighties, she told Annie, “I don’t know what I believe. I know what I do. It seems to be enough.”

Family and Core Relationships

Main article: Annie Whitaker and Her Parents

Annie Whitaker

Miri and Saul’s only daughter, Annette Miriam, was born in March 1978. Saul insisted on Miriam as her middle name. Miri initially hesitated because she did not want the name to become a burden, but Annie carried it as a private connection to her mother. Their close relationship gave Annie her earliest experience of sustained, attentive witnessing, which later informed her work as a therapist. ASL, Jewish and Deaf cultural life, and trust between mother and daughter were central to her CODA childhood, alongside the demands of interpreting in hearing institutions.

In 1991, when Annie was thirteen, Miri told her the history of her rescue over three hours one Saturday. Annie cried for an hour afterward, and Miri held her. Saul returned to find them together and made scrambled eggs while using jokes to help them through the evening. During Annie’s university years from 1996 to 2000, Miri sent foil-wrapped challah, cookies, and handwritten letters.

After Annie’s 2033 stroke, Miri communicated through her hands while Annie was intubated and only partly conscious. Annie recognized her mother’s touch and familiar language. Miri continued caring for her during recovery with soup and casseroles. Annie later kept the linen doll Miri had made her and wore the gold Star of David that had passed from Hannah to Miri to her. Losing Miri in 2044 was no easier for Annie because she had anticipated the grief or had years of therapeutic experience.

Lindsay Whitaker and Leslie Whitaker

Miri could distinguish the twins from infancy and came to know their individual signing rhythms as they grew. Each had her own relationship with their Bubbe. Lindsay particularly received Miri’s stories, while Leslie became the principal keeper of her recipes and reproduced her challah most faithfully. Both learned to bake at her side, grew up with Friday challah, and retained the compact family sign for “I love you” that Miri had created.

After Miri’s death, Leslie took over the candle-lighting role by family agreement. Lindsay eventually inherited the chipped mixing bowl after Annie. The twins continued signing “make challah” to each other on difficult days, taking the phrase from Miri’s final message to them.

RJ Whitaker

Miri’s bond with RJ carried the intensity of a shared embodied experience without meaning that she loved him more than the twins. She understood the prospect of combined hearing and vision loss from her own life. On the day of his infant diagnosis in 2012, she held him for four hours, making gentle contact with his hand as she signed, “You are not alone. You are not alone. I know this road. I will walk it with you.” She cried for forty minutes before resuming her reassurance. Annie watched and understood more of what her mother had carried privately.

Miri began learning Protactile in response to his diagnosis and developed tactile communication with him as he grew. Their shared condition had different genetic causes, but her knowledge of access, adaptation, and sustained family contact helped him build an adult life without accepting isolation as inevitable. His tactile kitchen labels for her at twelve were part of their reciprocal care.

Robbie Whitaker

Miri liked Robbie from the first time Annie brought him home in 2000. Within twenty minutes she had baked him cookies, then watched with amusement while Saul questioned him for two hours. After Saul welcomed him to the table, Miri signed, “He’s a good one. Keep him.” She continued approving of him through more than forty years as her son-in-law and eventually shared his and Annie’s home.

Romantic and Significant Relationships

Main article: Saul and Miri Rosen

Miri and Saul’s courtship began at Fanwood and continued through their early working lives in New York. Their parents met in 1963, and Saul proposed in Washington Square Park in June 1965. They married in Brooklyn that October with about sixty guests, then moved to Baltimore in 1966. Their seventy-nine-year marriage combined his broad mischief and theatrical expression with her quiet steadiness. With her, he did not have to hide his loneliness behind a joke. He treated their bond seriously even while teasing her about small things; he was the person to whom she told the whole truth.

Their marriage required direct negotiation as well as affection. In 1979, Miri became exhausted and isolated while caring for the baby as Saul continued his evening Society meetings. After two months, she told him, “I need you here at night. I don’t need you to do anything. I just need you here.” Saul stayed home for the next two months and resumed meetings with her agreement. The experience taught her that she could ask directly and him that continued activity outside the house did not mean she was managing comfortably within it.

After Saul’s 1998 cardiac crisis, Miri was initially afraid to touch him. He reassured her, “I am your husband. I am not glass. Come here.” She later helped him through the consequences of his 2018 hip injury while managing her own progressive vision loss. She was ready to leave the rowhouse for Annie’s accessible suite before he was; their move in 2042 preserved their closeness while bringing more family support into daily reach. They continued their private nightly conversation and used the phrase “We walked to the dining hall” for the life that had followed their first walk together.

Personal Life

Residences

Miri and Saul lived in the same Mt. Washington rowhouse from 1966 to 2042. Its kitchen was the part of the house her family remembered most vividly. They then moved into the accessible first-floor suite at the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home, where they remained until their deaths in 2044. Annie inherited the rowhouse and could not bear to sell it. She later made it available to Society visitors who needed short-term accessible housing and kept Miri’s kitchen intact.

Social Life and Community

Miri participated in Baltimore’s Jewish Deaf community from 1966 and became a central organizer of the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore after its 1974 founding. She coordinated the women’s social group, weekly challah rotation, holiday food drives, visits to sick members, and cookies for community events. Members informally called her “the one who keeps us together.” After her death, the Society hired a part-time coordinator to take on work she had done for decades; even after two years, the coordinator was still learning parts of it.

For fifty years, Miri belonged to an informal group of grandmothers on her block who coordinated cookies, school drop-offs, and the neighborhood watch. Children who did not know her name remembered “the sweet deaf lady” who fed them.

Death

Saul died at home on a Tuesday morning in October 2044, hours after he and Miri laughed at one of his filthy jokes. Miri kept her hand on his chest for a long time afterward and told the home-aide nurse through tactile signing, “He is finished. I am ready.” She spent approximately thirty-six more hours with Annie and her grandchildren, giving them messages of love, gratitude, and reassurance.

Annie placed Saul’s pocket watch beside her mother the following morning. Miri smiled, signed her thanks, and kept the watch clasped in her hand during her final sleep. She died on Wednesday evening at the Whitaker-Rosen home. A physician recorded acute grief-related cardiac failure, with takotsubo cardiomyopathy treated as the presumed mechanism rather than a diagnosis proven through hospitalization or autopsy.

The Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore held a joint memorial for Saul and Miri. Approximately three hundred people attended, and the eulogies lasted three hours.

Legacy and Memory

Miri’s recipes continued through Annie and both twins, along with the particular gestures and family signs she had used while teaching them. Her attention to other people’s experience remained part of Annie’s clinical practice. RJ carried her repeated reassurance and example of maintaining contact as his own access needs changed. Children throughout the neighborhood remembered receiving food from her hands.

The Society continued the food-sharing and visiting routines she had organized. Photographs of Miri and Saul hung together in its community room above a brass plaque reading, “We walked to the dining hall.” The family kept the Friday challah tradition without interruption through subsequent decades, using her recipes and the chipped bowl that eventually belonged to Lindsay.

Memorable Quotes

“It has a name now. It had one all along. I just didn’t know.”

Miri signed this to Annie on the evening her Usher diagnosis was confirmed. Annie quoted the statement in her own therapy for years afterward.

“You are not alone. I know this road. I will walk it with you.”

Miri signed this on RJ’s hand after his infant Usher diagnosis.

“I’m not sad. I’m just finished. Tell them I was grateful. Tell them I loved them.”

Miri signed this to Annie on the afternoon before her death. Annie passed her message of love and gratitude on to the family.

“I got a hundred years. Don’t cry too much. Make challah.”

Miri signed this to her grandchildren on her final afternoon. Lindsay and Leslie used its last three words as a greeting to each other on hard days throughout their lives.

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