My mom was a holocaust survivor, a renowned artist, and a ray of light for so many. Here are a few of her wisdom-gems that can change the way you think about love, life’s challenges, and spirituality.
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Listen For
- 04:17 – How can art be used to help us see each other?
- 07:22 – How does taking risks make your life wider and bigger?
- 08:59 – Why do we need to appreciate the work?
- 12:04 – Why is it important to choose gratitude every day?
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Life-Changing Stories From A Survivor…My Mom
There are some people whose wisdom touches us so deeply that it changes the course of our lives. My mom, who passed away a few weeks ago, was one of those people for me, and in this episode, I’m going to share some of the stories of moments and experiences that changed my life and other people’s as well. So stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.
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Hello everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating®, and your host here. Today, I’m going to talk about a very wise woman who had some incredible messages that have changed so many people’s lives, and she happened to have been my mom. And she passed away on February 3rd, I am so excited to share some stories with you that I think are pretty life-changing.
But before I get started, I just want to say that in this episode and every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest insights and tools that I know to help you find love, live love, and grow love that you find, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating and the skills of finding love are simply the skills of intimacy, which are the greatest skills in the world for a meaningful, rich life.
And if you want to know more about the Deeper Dating® path to intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. And there, you can sign up for my mailing list and get a free book of my ideas about dating that have gone viral on Psychology Today and find out about my courses and many, many other resources, as well as see transcripts of every single episode, including this one.
She was a street artist, activist, and Holocaust survivor. If any of you live in New York or visit New York, and go to the Second Avenue Deli, the whole place is a celebration of her work. Share on XSo let me get started. So my mom passed away at 96 years old, and she and my dad are Holocaust survivors. Episode 19 was an episode where I talked about my dad’s passing, which was quite an amazing story, and today I’m going to talk about my mom’s passing because she passed, as I said, on February 3rd.
So she was a street artist, activist, Holocaust survivor, and she was filled with hope and goodness and intensity, and she plopped herself down in the streets of the Lower East Side many years ago and spent about half a century doing these huge cityscapes of the Lower East Side and elsewhere. And she’s in books and in museums, and if any of you live in New York or go to New York and visit the Second Avenue Deli, it’s a kind of celebration of her work, the whole Second Avenue Deli. You’ll find her in the New York Times and the BBC, and many other places.
And when she was eight years old, living in Vienna, the Nazis came, and she had to be a hidden child for many months. I tell stories about that and about her escape. And in fact, she and my dad went back to Europe on a thank-you mission to thank the grandchildren of the people that helped and protected them whenever they could find them, so that they knew that their ancestors really did good as well, because these stories of gratitude don’t get passed down.
Art & The Refugee Experience: Using Art For Connection
So when she was eight years old, her good world became a terrible world, and she thought, “If they only knew me, they would never be able to treat me like this.” And she decided to use art as a way for people to see each other, and her belief was that she could save the world through art. And in her late 90s, she said, “Well, that failed.
But she said, “But I did have something else happen, which was I created love and I created community, and that didn’t fail.” She spoke up a lot about ICE and about separating families because she said that for her, at eight years old, her profound terror, the greatest terror that she had, was that she would be separated from her family, which the Trump administration and ICE is doing in the most brutal and unimaginable ways.
And she would go to protests with a sign saying, “96-year-old Holocaust survivor, do not separate families.” She was passionate about this. But I want to share some stories of things that she said that I think will have relevance for you, and I know had so much relevance for me. So when she was about 40 years old, she developed a pretty severe case of lupus. She was in a wheelchair, she couldn’t cut through the skin of an apple, and she decided to go on a journey of self-healing.
After taking the leap, your life will become wider and bigger, and resources will come because your life and your heart will be greater than you could have ever imagined. Share on XAnd the way that she started that, the main place that the lupus began was in her knee, that was kind of where it emanated from, and then you know, became systemic. But she would hold her knee and talk to it and have conversations, and she would say, “What have I done to you? What have I done to you?” And her knee would respond and tell her what it needed, what was missing, what she was doing with her life, her energy, that was not healing her.
Anyway, she went on a huge journey of diet and meditation and healing and everything and actually went into remission until, or pretty close to remission, until the day she died. The doctor who worked with her actually presented a whole paper on her healing. She was quite a remarkable person. So fast forward many, many, many years, when I decided as a single person that I really wanted to become a dad, and I wrestled with this a lot, like, “How am I going to do this? I don’t have the money to do this, I don’t have the emotional resources to be a single dad and handle all of this. What am I even thinking?” So I had lots of fears. And my dad said very wise things, and my mom said one thing that was incredibly powerful.
Taking A Leap Of Faith
I said, “How will I be able to do this?” And she said, “You are thinking of yourself.” And this is for anyone who is thinking of taking a leap or a risk. She said, “You are picturing yourself in the future as the person you are now. But after taking this leap, your life will be wider and bigger, and resources will come because your life and your heart are wider and bigger, that you couldn’t even imagine.” She said there’s a German saying, “A child brings its own luck.”
She said, “Your circle of love will grow in ways you can’t imagine, and your luck will grow in ways you can’t imagine.” And oh my God, did that turn out to be true. So this is a message that I just want to share that she said for all of you, that when you take risks toward love, the circle of your luck grows if you make choices that are really love-based choices.
Fast forward many years after that, she was in New York City, she was really elderly at that point, but she just went places alone and demanded that she could do that. So she went into New York City alone, and she fell, and she broke her hip, and she broke her shoulder, and went through a very intense journey of healing.
And during that time, I visited her at Bellevue in the hospital one day, and she was very excited, and she said, “Ken, I understand something really big. I understand now why I think work matters so much.” And this is something I’ve told a lot of my participants in my intensive because I think it’s such a beautiful story about love and intimacy and life.
She said, “It’s like this. You are given a room, and the room has a pile of crap in it, stuff you do not want to face, you do not want to deal with, you do not want to address and it’s like a mountain. And you say, ‘I don’t want to.’ Work is when you do what’s in front of you.” And she said, “And in my dream, I worked on that mountain of stuff I didn’t want to deal with. And when I had worked it through, the back wall of this room opened up and I could enter into the next room of my life. But I couldn’t enter into that room until I had done the work of this room. And that is why I have such profound respect for work.”
Fast forward even more, but let me just say that you will see in the transcript of this episode, if you go to it, you’ll see some of her amazing artwork and some pictures of her. And she had a saying, and the saying was, “You can’t be a giver…..,” She said, “You can’t be a giver halfway.” She said, “It really, really, really is about love and you can’t be a giver halfway.” And she lived that.
God is something so vast that creates and builds. God created you and me, and we limit each other when we fail to listen to one another. Share on XYou can go to HedyPage.com and see her artwork and see her documentary, and there’s a new documentary of hers that’s coming out. And if you happen to see the blockbuster documentary “Three Identical Strangers”, she is in that, because those triplets who were separated at birth for a nature versus nurture experiment and discovered each other by accident, that’s my family. And she was interviewed, and the interviewer who did many documentaries said that she was the most inspiring person that he ever met.
So fast forward years later, she fell again at a family member’s house, and she grabbed onto something and fell and hurt herself really badly, and was once again hospitalized, once again had to go into rehab. And one terrible night when she was moved from the hospital to the rehab, she was not given her medication. And she spent that night like kind of just holding her hand in her teeth and biting down because of the pain. The next morning, they gave her her medicine, and she said that she had an insight.
Choosing Gratitude
When the pain went away and she could have an insight, and the insight was, she said, “It’s like I have a wardrobe and I go to that wardrobe every day and I get to choose the outfit that I am going to give myself. And I realized,” she said, “that the outfit that I want to wear every day is a cloak of gratitude. Gratitude is the outfit that I want to wear every day.” And she really, really lived that, like to an extreme. Sometimes, if she would say to me and my sister, “Kids, I am so grateful,” we would say, “Oh no, what happened?” because she would find the good in whatever terrible thing had just happened. She was quite amazing in that way.
What’s happening in this country with ICE horrified her in a very profound way. She called ICE the new Gestapo, the Gestapo of today, and it brought back a lot of trauma for her. But she was an activist, and she spoke out again and again about this. And the last thing that I want to share is something that she wrote just a few weeks before she passed, and I’m going to read it to you. My mom never really let herself believe in a higher power or a God because of what she had been through. How could a God allow these things to happen?
But in her last year of life, she let me teach her how to meditate, and that was a revelation to her and she had many conversations with God. She gathered us around her a few times because she had a message for us, and the message was, “I want you all to know that I will still be with you.” She said, “I am 100% clear that I and my spirit will still be here with you.” So she wanted us to know that. But this is something that she wrote. She wrote, “My son taught me how to meditate, and never, never gave me instructions.” That’s a lie, I did give her instructions, she did not follow them.
And she said, “I took the universe and put it in front of me and said, ‘Talk to me. Who are you? Let me understand.'” And the answer was, “I can’t be put into boxes, but I create. I can’t give you a definition of who I am because I can’t be held. I’m not made of something which can be spoken at. You can only feel me.” And then she said, “And I feel that God is something so huge which builds and creates.” And she said, “God created you and me, and we stop each other when we’re not listening to each other. And we make so many errors and we go back and say, ‘How do I fix this?'”
“And we are not yet finished. We go from moment to moment repairing the damage we’ve done and, as we repair, we create. And it is you and me who are the voice, the voice of God. And the voice is just like nature, it makes mistakes, it fixes them, but it never stops creating. You and I together are the creators of the universe. We are the voice of God. We are people and what happens is up to us, step by step, to repair out the damage and create new ways of being. Thank you, God, for creating us.” And thank all of you for letting me share these stories. I hope that some of them inspired you in ways that they have inspired me. And I look forward to connecting on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.
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