My Daughter, Simone 1973 - 2008

Monday, January 14, 2008, saw the end of a long battle fought by a courageous soul against a merciless scourge. On that day my daughter, Simone, succumbed at the age of 35 and five days to cancer, an affliction that first hit her some eight years earlier. Of her fifteen adult years, from the age of twenty, more than half had been spent with the spectre of cancer hovering malevolently over her and those who loved her.

Simone’s greatest legacy to this world will be her own daughter, Meital, a girl of boundless energy, insight, humor and sagacity way beyond her eleven years. But Simone left other legacies too. A collective memory of her as a brilliant and diligent English teacher in Raanana, an enterprise conceived by her and executed by us both, first from a distance whilst I was still in London and for which she moved to Raanana, and then hand-in-glove together. Together, we went to places as varied as Arab schools and IBM, her self-confidence both radiant and enticing. A collective memory too of a quiet girl able to overcome her shyness, borne out of modesty, and to shine and glow – sometimes to flare, feistily – confident in her unusual range of gifts and graces.

Before that, for four years, Simone and I had worked together, cheek-by-jowl, as lawyers. At first Simone had to find her feet but, before long, she had become a brilliant paralegal interested only in forensically analysing every set of circumstances until, as she put it describing the fun we had together in a speech at a family simcha, she found the silver bullet that would be the key to success. This work she continued at her own initiative from a distance of two thousand miles after she returned to Israel – just as effectively, and just as closely, as if we were still in adjoining rooms.

Simone, according to the orthodox view of life and death, has moved on to a better place but, to me and to many others, her spirit will always be sensed here amongst us, in the temporal world, as the finest and most inspiring example of a brave fighter against the worst that life can throw against us, and one whose message to us will enduringly be: “Dignity. Dignity. Always with dignity.”