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Annie Whitaker and Her Parents - Relationship

Annie Whitaker was the only child of Saul Rosen and Miri Rosen, and the hearing daughter in a household where American Sign Language was the first language, Polish Jewish Holocaust-child-survivor inheritance was the foundational texture, and love was delivered in signed fragments across a kitchen table every day for sixty-six years. Her parent-child relationship with Saul and Miri is the foundational relationship of her life—the one that trained her capacity for sustained witness, taught her that language is something you build for the people you love, and gave her the clinical vocation that defined her adulthood. The relationship was, by every available measure, loving, steady, and generationally weighted, and the parents’ simultaneous death in October 2044 would be one of the two largest losses of Annie’s life (alongside the eventual losses of her husband and her son).

Overview

The Annie-Saul-Miri relationship was a CODA architecture writ large and specifically textured. Annie grew up bilingual in American Sign Language and English from infancy, with native ASL fluency rooted in the primary household language and spoken English acquired alongside it from hearing neighbors, preschool, and the broader hearing world her parents did not occupy. Her childhood was conducted simultaneously in two linguistic registers: the household register (signed, compact, rhythmic, wordless emotional grammar conducted by eyebrow and handshape) and the world register (spoken English, the interpreting she did for her parents in medical and institutional contexts, the specific texture of being the hearing bridge for people she loved).

The relationship carried the weight of Saul and Miri’s shared Holocaust-child-survivor history from before Annie had language for it. She knew, without having been told, that her parents had come from a place where most of their people had not survived. She knew, without having been told, that the extended family she might have had was not there because of something enormous that had happened before she was born. When Miri formally told her the smuggling-out story at age thirteen, the information was new in the sense that it became linguistically available; it was not new in the sense that Annie had already been living inside the atmosphere of it her entire life.

The relationship was also, uniquely among Faultlines parent-child relationships, a relationship Annie carried as vocational inheritance. Her entire clinical career as a trauma therapist was, in her own explicit self-understanding, a continuation of her mother’s kitchen-table witness and her father’s philosophical stance of refusing to be tragic about being alive. She had built her adulthood on the architecture her parents had given her, and she had worked—in her own therapy, across decades—to understand what had been gift, what had been inheritance, and what had been load she needed to lay down rather than pass forward.

Origins

Annie was born in March 1978 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore to Saul (age 34) and Miri (age 34), the couple’s only child. Miri’s pregnancy had been difficult (gestational diabetes in the second trimester, late-term pre-eclampsia) and the family had been advised against further pregnancies. The couple had grieved the limitation privately and had absorbed it with characteristic steadiness. Annie, in consequence, was the total recipient of her parents’ joint parental attention.

Saul had signed to Miri within an hour of Annie’s birth that Annie was “the best baby in Baltimore” and that any disagreement was categorically wrong. The two had named her Annette (for no specific reason either remembered later) and, at Saul’s insistence, Miriam in the middle position. Miri had demurred; Saul had been immovable. Miriam, he signed to Miri, was the name their daughter would carry as a private companion through her life—a name that would appear on her driver’s license and in formal contexts and would otherwise sit quietly inside her, the name of her mother carried in her. Miri had cried. Saul had kissed the top of her head. The name was decided.

Annie went home from Sinai to the rowhouse in Mt. Washington, Baltimore her parents had lived in since 1966. She was signed to constantly from the day she came home. Her first word, in ASL, was MAMA (to Miri) at approximately eight months. Her first spoken word—dada, picked up from hearing children in preschool—came later, around thirteen months. She was fluently bilingual by age four.

Early Childhood Architecture (1978-1985)

Annie’s earliest years were structured around the three-block radius of her parents’ rowhouse in Mt. Washington. The Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association community room was a two-minute walk; Saul’s print-shop employment kept him in Baltimore; Miri’s tailor-shop job was within a short drive. Annie grew up inside a dense network of Deaf Jewish adults who had known her since infancy and who signed to her with the specific affectionate rigor of a small community that had collectively decided this hearing child belonged to all of them. She had, in effect, approximately thirty Deaf aunts and uncles in addition to her own parents.

The parenting division of labor within the household was characteristic of her parents’ generation but modulated by their specific temperaments: Miri was the primary daily caregiver through Annie’s early childhood (cooking, bath time, bedtime, clothing, most domestic logistics); Saul was the primary play parent and nightly reader via signed storytelling. Both handled discipline, which was rare—Annie was a well-regulated child who responded to their consistent structure.

Saul’s ASL reading to Annie before bed became one of the most formative textures of her childhood. He made up stories in ASL, told existing stories in ASL (Jewish folktales; the occasional American children’s book reframed in signs; wildly embellished versions of his own childhood mischief), and sometimes simply signed to her about his day until she fell asleep. She remembered those hours as the most specific texture of her father’s love. She could, in her sixties, close her eyes and see his hands signing in the lamplight of her childhood bedroom.

The CODA Years (Ages 5-12)

By age five Annie was a fluent informal interpreter. The role began at her own pediatrician appointments, where the clinic’s promised interpreter was chronically unreliable and Annie at five could fluidly translate between the physician’s questions and her mother’s signed responses. She did it without being asked. She continued to do it for the next seven years at every medical appointment, every parent-teacher conference, every Social Security visit, every bank errand, every landlord conversation her parents needed handled.

The CODA labor of her childhood was the seed-bed of her entire vocation. She was learning, long before she had the vocabulary for it, several things: that hearing systems were not built for people she loved; that the labor of translation fell disproportionately on the children of Deaf adults; that being the hearing one did not mean being better, only being positioned; and that paying attention to someone’s specific needs and then acting on what that attention revealed was a form of love, and also a form of labor, and also a form of work she could choose to do as vocation.

Her parents were, in the meta-level beneath the CODA labor, deliberate about letting her be a kid. She played with neighborhood children. She had Rachel [TBD] as her best friend from second grade onward. She went to birthday parties and summer camps. She was not parentified in the exhausting sense; the interpreting was woven through an otherwise stable, affectionate, age-appropriate childhood. But she was, nonetheless, a CODA: a child whose capacity for translation between worlds was developed in the service of her parents’ access to systems that otherwise would not have accommodated them.

The Smuggling-Out Disclosure (Age 13)

Miri told Annie the full story of her own smuggling-out from Warsaw when Annie was thirteen. It was a deliberate disclosure; Miri had waited until Annie was old enough to carry it. The conversation took place at the kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon in 1991. Saul had absented himself deliberately, telling Annie that her mother had something she wanted to tell her alone. Saul had signed to Annie, before leaving: Sit with her. Come find me after. I’m not going far.

Miri had signed to Annie for nearly three hours. She told Annie everything she knew about her own rescue—the Żegota network, the Warsaw Ghetto, the birth parents who had died, the Polish-Catholic contact who had handed her to a Łódź Jewish relief worker, the transport to America, the Goldfarb [TBD] adoptive parents in Boston who had asked specifically for a Deaf child survivor. She told Annie about Saul’s parallel story. She told Annie that she had lived her whole life carrying the weight of having been the baby who was spared when her bloodline was not. She told Annie, with specific emphasis, that she did not want Annie to carry this as grief but as responsibility: to live fully, to feed people, to remember, and to refuse to let loss have the last word.

Annie had cried for an hour after her mama stopped signing. Miri had held her. Saul had come home at dinnertime and, without asking any questions, made them scrambled eggs (the only thing he could reliably cook) and signed jokes through the meal until Annie laughed despite herself. The story, once told, became part of Annie’s cellular architecture. It was the inflection point around which her emerging sense of vocation would organize.

Adolescence and Young Adulthood (1991-2005)

Annie’s adolescence was steady. She was a serious but not solemn teenager; she had close friends including Rachel [TBD] and her childhood CODA friend [TBD]; she did well academically at a Mt. Washington-area public high school; she bat-mitzvahed at twelve at a small Reform synagogue and had a parallel signed bat mitzvah at the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association the same weekend. Her relationship with her parents through these years was characterized by continued closeness and the early beginnings of her own individuation. She was starting to understand that her parents were not the entirety of the world; she was also starting to understand that her parents were specifically, exceptionally her parents in a way she would not fully appreciate until later.

She went to University of Maryland, College Park for her undergraduate degree (1996-2000), commuting for her first year and then living on campus for her remaining three. Her parents were, by her account in later years, the perfect distance-parents for that phase—they did not press for daily check-ins, they were welcoming when she came home, they gave her independence without withdrawing. Miri sent her occasional care packages (challah wrapped in foil, cookies, letters in Miri’s beautiful old-fashioned handwriting). Saul signed at her over video relay when she called home and told her uniformly that he was proud of her and that she should call her mother more often.

She met Robbie in her junior year of undergraduate. Her parents met him formally in her senior year, when she brought him to Mt. Washington for a weekend visit. Saul’s two-hour interrogation of Robbie at the kitchen table (which became family legend) was conducted with cheerful ruthlessness while Miri quietly baked cookies in the background and let Saul do his work. Robbie passed. Saul welcomed him. Miri signed to Annie privately after Robbie left: He’s a good one. Keep him. Annie had. The engagement came the following year.

Annie graduated from Johns Hopkins with her PsyD in 2006. Her parents attended the doctoral hooding ceremony. Saul signed throughout the ceremony—signed interpretations of the other students’ introductory remarks, signed mocking commentary about the academic robes, signed quiet pride at Annie’s moment at the podium. Miri cried. They took her out for dinner afterward at a Baltimore restaurant where the waiter had to come to the table three times before anyone was ready to order because the family was too busy signing about the ceremony to engage with the menu.

Parenthood of Grandchildren (2007-2044)

The arrival of the twins (Lindsay and Leslie) in 2007 and RJ in 2012 transformed Annie’s parents’ relationship with her in the specific way grandchildren transform adult child-parent relationships: the core bond remained, but a new dimension opened in which Annie could watch her parents be grandparents, and her parents could watch her be a mother. This was, across the subsequent decades, one of the central textures of the Annie-Saul-Miri relationship.

Saul and Miri were fiercely present grandparents. They showed up at every major event (births, pediatric appointments, school performances, birthdays, bat mitzvot, eventual high school graduations). They were the default babysitters on the many weekends Annie and Robbie needed a night out. Miri’s Saturday-afternoon baking sessions with the twins (and later RJ) were a weekly fixture for nearly two decades. Saul taught all three grandchildren to sign dirty jokes in ASL, telling their mother he was teaching them Yiddish.

The 2012 diagnostic moment—RJ’s infant diagnosis with Usher Syndrome Type I via USH1F—was a pivotal moment in the Annie-Saul-Miri relationship. Annie and Robbie received the diagnosis at the genetic counselor’s office; they had known something was wrong from RJ’s newborn hearing screening failure and the subsequent workup, but the specific USH1F identification was the shocking piece. The counselor had also confirmed that Annie and Robbie were both heterozygous carriers. Annie had gone home from that appointment and immediately called her parents.

She had told them, in ASL over video relay, that their grandson had Usher Type I. She had watched her father’s face rearrange in real time and her mother’s eyes go distant. She had signed to them the specific USH1F variant and explained that this was the Ashkenazi Jewish founder mutation. She had said, in signs: I think this is yours. I think this is what you have too.

Saul had signed back, after a long pause: I know.

Miri had not signed anything for several minutes. When she did, it was the specific small compact sign that in her private grammar meant so that is what it is. She had lived for sixty-eight years with an unnamed condition that had progressively taken her peripheral vision, her distance reading, her ability to drive at night, her ability to see her granddaughters’ faces clearly across a table. She now had a name for it. The name was her grandson’s name.

Confirmatory testing followed for Saul and Miri. Both received formal Usher Type I diagnoses in their late sixties. The naming was a reframing rather than a revelation. Annie, in her own therapy with Dr. Beverly Klein during these months, processed her retrospective grief for her parents’ unnamed decades, her complicated guilt about having been a carrier who had passed the condition forward, and her fear about RJ’s future. Her parents, in their own way, processed their own versions. The family’s shared emotional work around the naming was one of the central relational events of their middle period.

From 2012 onward, Saul and Miri were active grandparenting presences for RJ specifically in ways that drew on their own lifelong experience with Usher. They began learning Pro-Tactile ASL alongside RJ as his vision narrowed (Miri ahead of Saul in adoption). They were, for RJ, the most important witnesses he had that the condition he lived with was navigable, that full lives were built on it, that he was not alone. Annie watched them be this for her son and understood something enormous about what her parents had been doing her whole life by being themselves.

Annie’s Stroke (2026-2028)

When Annie suffered her hemorrhagic stroke in 2026-2028, her parents were in their early eighties. Both were in adequate health but both were also substantially more fragile than they had been. The stroke was, for them, one of the most difficult events of their long lives.

They came to the hospital within hours of Annie’s admission to Johns Hopkins. Saul was not allowed in the ICU during the acute phase; he sat in the waiting room with Robbie and signed to him about nothing for hours, a coping mechanism both of them had developed across years. Miri did get into the ICU room for brief visits. She signed to Annie on Annie’s hand while Annie was intubated and semi-conscious—the first time Miri had used Pro-Tactile with her daughter, because the visual signing Miri had used her whole life with Annie was not reaching through Annie’s sedation. Miri’s Pro-Tactile with Annie in those weeks was, afterward, one of the images Annie most clearly remembered from her acute phase. She had not been fully conscious. She had registered her mother’s hand. She had recognized, without being fully awake for it, that her mother was signing to her in the language her mother had been transitioning into for her son. The generational circuit had completed in a way that was too devastating to name at the time.

During the acute phase Saul processed his own fear through his characteristic defensive joking. He told Robbie, in ASL, multiple times, variations of: If she dies before me I will personally come back and haunt her. I am the one who is supposed to go first. He was joking. He was also not joking. Robbie had signed back, each time: She’s not going to die before you. Saul had accepted this as a promise, which Robbie had had no right to make but which Robbie had needed to make anyway. The promise, as it happened, was kept. Annie survived her stroke.

Saul and Miri attended Annie’s rehabilitation process from a distance (Saul’s mobility by that age made daily visits to Johns Hopkins difficult). They were present at her transition home. Miri cooked for Annie through the first months of her home recovery, bringing casseroles and soup two blocks from the Rosen rowhouse to the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home. Saul sat in Annie’s kitchen and signed at her while she recovered, telling her jokes she was too tired to laugh at, pretending to be offended when she did not laugh, staying anyway.

The Parents’ Move (2042)

In 2042, Saul and Miri moved from their longtime rowhouse into the custom-built first-floor suite at the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home. The decision had been years in the making. Robbie had designed the space in consultation with his in-laws; Annie had been the decisive advocate for the move, making the case that it would let the grandchildren see their grandparents more often and that it would let Annie be present for her parents in their final years as they had been present for her in hers. Saul had resisted the move for approximately three years before agreeing. Miri had agreed immediately once Saul had agreed; she had been ready earlier.

The move marked the final phase of the Annie-Saul-Miri relationship. The parents lived in the suite for the last two years of their lives. The two-block walk that had separated them from Annie for decades was replaced by a doorway. Annie saw them every day. The grandchildren saw them every day. The Friday shabbat dinners, which had been a weekly ritual for seventy-five years, continued without interruption, now in Annie’s larger kitchen that could accommodate everyone at one table.

The final two years carried specific tenderness and specific labor. Annie, post-stroke and at reduced clinical capacity, had capacity for presence she had not had pre-stroke. She sat with her mother in the suite’s sitting room in the afternoons. She signed with her father at the kitchen table for long slow conversations that would have been unimaginable during her overcommitted pre-stroke years. She understood, in a way she had not understood before, that the stroke had paradoxically given her back to her parents just as her parents’ own decline was accelerating.

The Simultaneous Deaths (October 2044)

Saul died on a Tuesday morning in October 2044 in the first-floor suite at Annie’s home, age 100, hours after signing a filthy joke to Miri that had made her cackle. Miri followed him within thirty-six hours, on Wednesday evening, of Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy. Annie was present for both deaths. She had sat with her father in his final hours (she had known, she signed to Robbie later, the moment she had walked into the suite that morning and seen her father’s face that something was ending). She had sat with her mother through the thirty-six hours that followed.

Miri had told Annie, in the afternoon before she died, signed slowly: I’m not sad. I’m just finished. Tell them I was grateful. Tell them I loved them. Annie had told them. She had told the grandchildren. She had told Robbie. She had told the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association community at the joint memorial. She had carried her mother’s message forward exactly as Miri had asked her to.

The joint memorial was held at the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association community room. Three hundred people attended. The eulogies ran three hours. Annie spoke briefly, in both ASL and English, near the end of the service. She said: My parents lived. That is the whole thing. They should not have lived; most of their people did not. They lived. They made me. They made everything I know about what love is. There is nothing more I can say.

She signed the ASL translation of her own words slightly after the spoken English. She signed with her father’s hands. She wept. She continued.

Legacy and Ongoing Impact

Annie carried her parents’ inheritance forward in specific and concrete ways after their death. She continued to bake challah every Friday, using her mother’s cream-colored mixing bowl. She continued to light yahrzeit candles on the anniversaries of their deaths. She continued to sign to her son RJ in Pro-Tactile ASL, as she had learned from her mother. She continued, in her supervisory teaching, to reference principles she had learned from her mother’s kitchen and her father’s philosophical stance. She continued to laugh at her father’s old jokes in her head at random moments.

Her clinical legacy, which matured significantly in the post-parents-death decades, was understood by her explicitly as continuation of her mother’s kitchen-level witness. She said this directly to trainees who asked her about the origins of her clinical stance. She did not hide the inheritance. She named it. She was her mother’s daughter. She was her father’s daughter. Her work was an elaboration of what they had given her.

Her parents’ simultaneous death also became the family’s reference point for what a good death looked like. Neither had died alone. Neither had lingered in isolation. Their cleanness of ending—the thirty-six-hour arc from Saul’s cackle to Miri’s final afternoon signed to Annie—became part of the family’s myth-making about them for generations.

Relationships Family Relationships Parent-Child Relationships CODA Relationships Annie Whitaker Saul Rosen Miriam Rosen