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Annie Whitaker and Her Parents

Annie Whitaker was the only child of Saul Rosen and Miri Rosen. She was hearing and grew up in a household where American Sign Language was the first language, the inheritance of two Polish Jewish Holocaust child survivors shaped family life, and daily signing across the kitchen table carried much of their affection. Her relationship with Saul and Miri developed her capacity for sustained witness, taught her that a family builds language together, and influenced the clinical vocation that defined her adulthood. Their bond was loving and steady, with the weight of earlier generations behind it; their deaths in October 2044 were among the greatest losses of Annie’s life.

Overview

Annie grew up as a CODA, bilingual in American Sign Language and English from infancy. Her native ASL fluency came from the primary household language, while she acquired spoken English from hearing neighbors, preschool, and the broader hearing world. Her childhood moved between the compact, rhythmic signed register of home and the spoken register in which she sometimes interpreted for her parents in medical and institutional settings.

Saul and Miri’s shared history as child survivors of the Holocaust shaped their relationship with Annie before she had words for it. She understood, without being told, that most of their people had not survived and that the extended family she might have known was absent because of events before her birth. When Miri told her own rescue story at thirteen, Annie learned its details and could finally put language to a history whose effects she had lived with throughout her childhood.

Annie also understood the relationship as a vocational inheritance. She explicitly understood her clinical career as a trauma therapist as a continuation of her mother’s attentiveness at the kitchen table and her father’s refusal to treat survival as a tragedy. Her adulthood rested on what her parents had taught her. In her own therapy over decades, she worked to distinguish the gifts she had received from the burdens she needed to put down rather than pass on.

Origins

Annie was born in March 1978 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, the only child of Saul, then thirty-three, and Miri, who was approaching or had just reached thirty-four that spring. Miri’s pregnancy had been difficult, with gestational diabetes in the second trimester and late-term preeclampsia, and physicians advised against further pregnancies. The couple grieved that limit privately and absorbed it with characteristic steadiness. Annie therefore received the full measure of their shared parental attention.

Within an hour of Annie’s birth, Saul signed to Miri that their daughter was “the best baby in Baltimore” and that any disagreement was categorically wrong. They named her Annette, for no specific reason either later remembered, and, at Saul’s insistence, gave her Miriam as a middle name. Miri initially demurred, but Saul remained firm. He signed to Miri that their daughter would carry her mother’s name privately throughout her life: it would appear on her driver’s license and in formal contexts but otherwise sit quietly within her. Miri cried, and Saul kissed the top of her head. They kept the name.

Annie went home from Sinai to the rowhouse in Mt. Washington, Baltimore where her parents had lived since 1966. They signed to her 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 (1978–1985)

Annie’s earliest years centered on the three blocks around her parents’ Mt. Washington rowhouse. The Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore community room was a two-minute walk away; Saul worked at a Baltimore print shop, and Miri’s tailor-shop job was within a short drive. Annie grew up among Deaf Jewish adults who had known her since infancy and signed to her with the affectionate rigor of a small community that considered her one of its own. In effect, she had approximately thirty Deaf aunts and uncles in addition to her parents.

The household’s division of parenting labor reflected both the parents’ generation and their temperaments. Miri handled most daily care during Annie’s early childhood, including cooking, baths, bedtime, clothing, and household logistics. Saul was her principal play companion and nightly reader through signed storytelling. Both handled discipline, which was rarely needed because Annie responded to their consistent structure.

Saul’s bedtime stories in ASL remained among Annie’s strongest childhood memories. He made up stories, retold Jewish folktales, signed occasional American children’s books in his own way, and wildly embellished accounts of his childhood mischief. Sometimes he signed about his day until she fell asleep. Annie remembered those hours as a particularly clear expression of her father’s love; even in her sixties, she could picture his hands signing in her childhood bedroom’s lamplight.

The CODA Years (Ages 5–12)

By age five, Annie was a fluent informal interpreter. She began at her own pediatrician appointments because the clinic’s promised interpreter was chronically unreliable. She translated between the physician’s questions and Miri’s signed responses without being asked. For the next seven years, she also interpreted at medical appointments, parent-teacher conferences, Social Security visits, bank errands, and landlord conversations her parents needed to navigate.

The interpreting labor of Annie’s CODA childhood helped form her later vocation. Long before she could articulate it, she learned that hearing systems were not built for people she loved and that children of Deaf adults were often made to carry the work of translation. She understood that being the hearing family member gave her a position of access, not superiority. Attending to a person’s specific needs and acting on what she learned was, to Annie, a form of love, labor, and work she could later choose as a vocation.

Alongside the CODA labor, her parents were deliberate about letting her be a kid. She played with neighborhood children. Rachel was 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. 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 rescue from Warsaw when Annie was thirteen. Miri had waited until she believed Annie was old enough to carry it. They spoke at the kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon in 1991. Saul left them alone deliberately, telling Annie that her mother had something to share with her. Before leaving, he signed, ‘’Sit with her. Come find me after. I’m not going far.’‘

Miri signed to Annie for nearly three hours. She recounted everything she knew of her rescue: her birth while the family was hiding in occupied Warsaw; the Żegota network and postwar relief route; her birth parents’ deaths; the Polish-Catholic contact who handed her to a Łódź Jewish relief worker; her transport to America; and Hannah and Ira Goldfarb in Boston, who had asked specifically for a Deaf child survivor. She also told Annie Saul’s parallel story.

Miri described the lifelong weight of having been the baby spared when her bloodline was not. She emphasized that Annie should carry the story as responsibility rather than grief: to live fully, feed people, remember, and refuse to let loss have the last word.

Annie cried for an hour after her mama stopped signing, and Miri held her. Saul came home at dinnertime and, without asking questions, made scrambled eggs—the only thing he could reliably cook—and signed jokes through the meal until Annie laughed despite herself. Once told, the story became a lasting part of how Annie understood herself. It was a turning point in her emerging sense of vocation.

Adolescence and Young Adulthood (1991–2005)

Annie’s adolescence was steady. She was serious but not solemn and had close friends, including Rachel and another childhood friend who was also a CODA. She did well at a Mt. Washington-area public high school. At twelve, she celebrated her bat mitzvah at a small Reform synagogue and a parallel signed bat mitzvah at the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore that same weekend. She remained close to her parents as she began to develop a more independent sense of self. She was learning that they were not her whole world, while also beginning to recognize what was particular and exceptional about them, an understanding that deepened later.

Annie attended University of Maryland, College Park from 1996 to 2000, commuting in her first year and living on campus for the other three. In later years, she described her parents as giving her the right amount of distance: they did not demand daily check-ins, welcomed her when she came home, and allowed independence without withdrawing. Miri sometimes sent care packages containing foil-wrapped challah, cookies, and letters in her old-fashioned handwriting. During video-relay calls, Saul consistently signed that he was proud of Annie and that she should call her mother more often.

Annie met Robbie in spring 2000, her final undergraduate year. Her parents met him formally later that year, when she brought him to Mt. Washington for a weekend. Saul questioned Robbie at the kitchen table for two hours with cheerful ruthlessness, an encounter that became a family legend, while Miri quietly baked cookies and let him continue. Robbie passed Saul’s test and was welcomed. After he left, Miri signed privately to Annie, ‘’He’s a good one. Keep him.’’ Annie did. They became engaged in late 2004 and married in September 2005.

Annie graduated from Loyola College in Maryland with her Psy.D. 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.

Saul and Miri as Grandparents (2007–2044)

The births of the twins, Lindsay and Leslie, in 2007 and RJ in 2012 added a dimension to Annie’s relationship with her parents. Annie could watch Saul and Miri become grandparents, and they could watch her become a mother without changing the bond they already had. That shared experience remained central to their relationship over the following decades.

Saul and Miri were closely involved grandparents. They attended births, pediatric appointments, school performances, birthdays, bat mitzvot, and, eventually, high school graduations. They were the usual babysitters when Annie and Robbie went out on weekends. Miri’s Saturday-afternoon baking with the twins, and later RJ, was a weekly fixture for nearly two decades. Saul taught all three grandchildren dirty jokes in ASL while telling their mother he was teaching them Yiddish.

RJ’s infant diagnosis in 2012 with Type I Usher syndrome caused by USH1F was pivotal for Annie and her parents. Annie and Robbie received the diagnosis at the genetic counselor’s office. RJ’s newborn hearing-screening result and subsequent workup had told them something was different, but the identification of USH1F shocked them. The counselor confirmed that Annie and Robbie were both heterozygous USH1F carriers. Annie went home from the appointment and immediately called her parents.

Over video relay, Annie told her parents in ASL that their grandson had Type I Usher syndrome. She watched her father’s expression change and her mother’s eyes go distant. She signed the specific USH1F variant and explained that it was the Ashkenazi Jewish founder variant. She immediately recognized that RJ’s condition resembled what both parents had lived with; later testing established the genetic distinction between their conditions.

After a long pause, Saul signed back, ‘’I know.’‘

Miri signed nothing for several minutes. When she responded, she used the small, compact sign that meant ‘’so that is what it is’’ in her private grammar. For sixty-eight years, she had lived with an unnamed condition that had progressively limited her peripheral vision, distance reading, ability to drive at night, and ability to see her granddaughters’ faces clearly across a table. Now she had a name for it: the same name given to her grandson’s condition.

Confirmatory testing followed for Saul and Miri. Saul was confirmed to have USH1F; Miri was confirmed to have Type I Usher syndrome caused by a different gene. Annie learned that she carried one variant from each parent. 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 passed USH1F to RJ, 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 drew on their own lifelong experience with Usher syndrome in caring for RJ. They began learning Protactile as his vision narrowed, with Miri adopting it before Saul. For RJ, they were his most important witnesses that his condition could be navigated, that people could build full lives with it, and that he was not alone. Watching them support her son also helped Annie understand the example they had given her throughout her life simply by being themselves.

Annie’s Stroke (2033)

When Annie suffered her hemorrhagic stroke in 2033, her parents were in their late eighties. Both were in adequate health but substantially more fragile than they had been. The stroke was, for them, one of the most difficult events of their long lives.

Saul and Miri reached Johns Hopkins within hours of Annie’s admission. Saul could not enter the ICU during the acute phase, so he sat with Robbie in the waiting room and signed with him about nothing for hours, a coping practice they had developed over the years. Miri was allowed brief visits. While Annie was intubated and only partly conscious, Miri signed on her hand. It was the first time she had used Protactile with Annie: visual signing, their lifelong mode of communication, could not reach her through the sedation. Annie later remembered her mother’s touch from those first acute days. Without being fully awake, she had recognized both Miri’s hand and the language her mother had been learning for RJ. To Annie, that connection across generations was too painful to name at the time.

During the acute phase, Saul managed his fear with characteristic defensive jokes. Several times, he signed a variation of this to Robbie: ‘’If she dies before me I will personally come back and haunt her. I am the one who is supposed to go first.’’ His fear remained present beneath the joke. Each time, Robbie signed back, ‘’She’s not going to die before you.’’ Saul took this as a promise. Robbie could not guarantee it, but he needed to make it; Annie survived her stroke.

Saul and Miri followed Annie’s rehabilitation from a distance because Saul’s mobility made daily hospital visits difficult. They were present when she returned home. During her first months of recovery, Miri brought casseroles and soup the two blocks from the Rosen rowhouse to the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home. Saul sat in Annie’s kitchen and signed jokes to her while she recovered. When she was too tired to laugh, he pretended to be offended and stayed anyway.

The Parents’ Move (2042)

In 2042, Saul and Miri moved from their longtime rowhouse into a custom-built first-floor suite at the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home. Robbie had designed the space in consultation with them, and Annie had advocated decisively for the move over several years. She wanted the grandchildren to see their grandparents more often and wanted to be present for her aging parents as they had been for her. Saul resisted for approximately three years before agreeing; Miri accepted as soon as he did, though she had been ready earlier.

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

The final two years brought both tenderness and work. After her stroke, Annie’s reduced clinical workload gave her time with her parents that she had lacked before it. She spent afternoons with Miri in the suite’s sitting room and held long, slow signed conversations with Saul at the kitchen table. She recognized the painful timing: her stroke had given her time with them just as their own decline accelerated.

The Deaths of Saul and Miri (October 2044)

Saul died at age 100 on a Tuesday morning in October 2044, in the first-floor suite at Annie’s home. Hours earlier, he had signed a filthy joke to Miri that made her cackle. Miri died there in her sleep within thirty-six hours, holding his pocket watch. Her physician presumed acute grief-related cardiac failure consistent with Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy; that diagnosis remained unconfirmed by bedside testing or autopsy. Annie was present through both losses: she sat with Saul in his final hours and remained with Miri through the thirty-six hours that followed.

On the afternoon before she died, Miri slowly signed to Annie, ‘’I’m not sad. I’m just finished. Tell them I was grateful. Tell them I loved them.’’ Annie passed on the message exactly as Miri had asked. She told the grandchildren, Robbie, and the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore community at the joint memorial.

The joint memorial was held in the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore community room. Three hundred people attended, and the eulogies lasted three hours. Near the end, Annie spoke briefly in both ASL and English: ‘’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

After her parents’ deaths, Annie continued baking challah every Friday in her mother’s cream-colored mixing bowl and lighting yahrzeit candles on their death anniversaries. She continued signing with RJ in Protactile, which she had learned with her family and through Miri’s guidance. In her clinical supervision, she drew on principles she had learned at her mother’s kitchen table and from her father’s outlook. She also found herself laughing at his old jokes at unexpected moments.

In the decades after their deaths, Annie understood her developing clinical legacy as a continuation of her mother’s attentiveness at the kitchen table. She told trainees this directly when they asked about the origins of her approach. She named the inheritance from both parents openly: she was Miri’s daughter and Saul’s daughter, and her work developed what they had given her.

Her parents’ deaths within thirty-six hours of one another became the family’s reference point for what a good death could look like. Neither died alone or lingered in isolation. The close of their lives—from Saul’s joke that made Miri cackle to her final signed conversation with Annie—entered the family’s understanding of them for generations.

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