Gauging the light on Sunset Avenue

The following first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

The Rones of Pittsfield — a retired rabbi and his wife — drove to Niagara Falls on a Monday six weeks ago and returned back to town five days later in an ambulance. They left fully functioning. They returned at precisely three-quarters capacity.

Here's what else has changed. That framed collection of family photos through the years — their wedding day 35 years ago, the kids, the smiles, the formal stiff portraits and bad haircuts — no longer hangs on the wall of their condo on Lakecrest Drive. It hangs in room W59 at Kimball Farms Nursing Care Center on Sunset Avenue in Lenox.

Of all street names, why does it have to be called Sunset?

In any case, it's overcast. It's Thursday morning, and Rabbi Yaacov Rone — having climbed out of bed in a house that feels suddenly so empty, having had his breakfast alone, showered, shaved, dressed in slacks and a pink polo and donned his yarmulke — steers his car onto Sunset Avenue as he does every day now in order to be with his beloved spouse, his Nina, who reaches out for him with her one good arm.

If he seems to walk with a degree of authority through these halls — adeptly dodging slant-ward advancing wheelchairs and hummingbird-swift nurses aides without breaking stride — it's because he's walked hundreds of hallways like this from coast to coast for decades. Retired president of the National Association of Jewish Chaplains, Rabbi Rone knows hospitals, knows nursing homes.

He knows these polished halls, this beeping machinery, the TVs blaring in blinkered delirium. He knows the nightmares and miracles, the families with blood-shot eyes huddled like war-weary generals mapping out strategy. He knows the white-knuckled nights of ICUs, when medicine and faith reach for the same prayer shawl.

Still, nearly six weeks into a new normal, this rabbi, this hospital chaplain, hasn't fully accustomed himself to rounding the corner, entering a room and seeing his Nina, her body broken. 

Every year they drive to Niagara-on-the-Lake for a reunion with friends. Upon arrival on Aug. 7, Nina started to feel wobbly, like she was on a ship in rough seas. At the restaurant that evening, she struggled to follow the conversations. She remembered reading about stroke indications — that if you couldn't touch your hand to your face then it was time to call an ambulance. 

 

It was time to call an ambulance. 

At 2 a.m., she awoke at a local hospital in terror, paralyzed down her entire right side. She was transferred to a stroke center in nearby Buffalo, then three days later to Berkshire Medical Center.

In those early first days, unable to bear the thought of being trapped inside a body that won't do what it's told, the famously upbeat Nina briefly harbored a dark thought: Is there a way I could starve myself? But at BMC, her condition quickly improved. Her speech returned.

"To 99 percent," says Rabbi Rone. 

"Ninety-five percent," Nina says, smiling.

And she's since regained some control in her right side.

She can now stand. She can move herself from her wheelchair to her bed. She can shrug her shoulder. The arm and hand have a long way to go — her "chopping hand," the one that cuts the vegetables for Sabbath evening soups. 

The doctors are making no predictions.

She's in her wheelchair in room W59. A cold beverage in a Styrofoam cup is set before her, its lid on snug, a bendable straw goose-necking in the direction of her lips. Rabbi Rone takes position in a nearby chair and scooches closer.

"What a fabulous team there at BMC," he says. "Dr. Julie Flores."

"Floyd," Nina corrects him.

"Julie Floyd," he repeats. "Why do I say Flores?"

"You always say Flores."

"Floyd," he says.

And there was that nursing assistant — what was her name? After clocking out for the day, she doubled back to Nina's room to wash her feet — "because it hadn't been done, and she wanted to make sure it was done," says Rabbi Rone. "And this place, too," he says of Kimball Farms.

Rabbi Rone, the hospital chaplain, is speaking as Rabbi Rone, the husband, grateful to the point of giddy that a cavalry of caregivers comprehends what's at stake: that the world would be far less lovely without his Nina in it.

They first met in 1977 in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was interviewing for the rabbi position at her congregation. She was on the interviewing committee. Both were coming off failed marriages. Each had three young children.

"I thought he was nice," Nina blushes. "He had a sweetness that I thought we needed in the congregation, a sweetness and a wisdom."

Like the way he spoke of marriage, which in Hebrew means holiness. Like the way he spoke of home, which has nothing to do with houses. Home is wherever couples in love find themselves at any given moment together, like, for instance, in a rehabilitation nursing care facility. 

A year into his tenure at the congregation, they went on their first date. Two years after that, he proposed to her. 

"You said, `Whatever time the good Lord has for us, I want us to spend it together,' " Nina recalls, wiping tears from her eyes with her left sleeve.

They share matching wedding bands that spell out in Hebrew the words "I found the one who loves my soul."

"We had a joke," Nina says. "He said he wanted us to grow old together, but who knew it was going to come so quickly?"

"We wanted to grow old together," he said.

"And now," she says, looking at her husband, "we've succeeded."

Nina, 78, says she will someday walk out of this place and resume the life they led together, enjoying concerts, theater, book club, and being with friends. Her husband, the hospital chaplain, has witnessed patients like her before. Countless times. 

This patient on Sunset Avenue is not ready to call it a day.