Amazing, here I am, approaching 81 years of age. Another month and that respectable age will have been reached. And how fortunate I have been. Sheltered from the kind of world I might have inhabited by virtue of the fact that I was not born in Europe. My parents were. My good fortune was that they emigrated from Poland and the Pale of Russia, from the small villages that were once a foothold for Jewish existence in the great diaspora, to arrive in North America.

My father, through the philanthropic venture of Warsaw Jews scooping up orphans off the street and booking passage for them as indentured servants in Canada where the youngsters paid off their passage through hard farm work and then were freed to find a new life for themselves in this country that would give them haven as they matured and became witness to the Holocaust from afar.

My mother, in the wake of her family home having been bombed by White Russian forces, killing her father, older brother, injuring her older sister with shrapnel and herself receiving a lighter shrapnel wound affecting one eye. 

I recognized my husband, when we first met at age 14. I had seen him before, in my dreams. I'm not a mystic. I don't subscribe to any belief in what is called the para-normal, and my husband scoffs at the very idea of my having somehow become aware of his existence through dreams. But when we met neither of us could have known that another kind of dream would be fulfilled. That of lifelong companionship, a deep love and dependency on one another's very existence.

There is nothing we haven't shared in life's experiences, some of it painful most of it wonderful and all of it a necessary exposure to human existence. Without him, I feel in the very core of my existence, I am nothing. It is not simply that my life has been enriched with him, but that my life has meaning, substance and value alongside his.

I will never cease being impressed at the wide scope of his mind, his imagination, his capability, his understanding, his kindness, his humour. When we were children together we were inseparable. When we became adults together we knew of a certainty that our bond, both psychological and physical would know no limits.