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By Rabbi Yitzchok Wagner

I woke up this morning (Monday) and turned on my phone, looking for something to take my mind off the pain. I did something I never like doing: I started scrolling through Facebook. Post after post was of my father’s former students, some much older than me and some younger, writing about how my father treated them like a son.

I don’t think Facebook has enough server space to cover the impact my father had on this world. As one student put it, “On Lag B’Omer, Rabbi Akiva lost 24,000 students and today 24,000 students lost Rabbi Akiva.”

But as everyone writes about my father’s greatness as a leader and role model, I want to share two things that bring out how he was as a father.

In the last few weeks of my father’s life, he was mostly immobile and struggled to get out of bed or even talk. He could not focus on anything and having a conversation of more than two sentences was difficult. Just under two weeks before his passing, all my siblings flew in to New York to spend two days with him. At the end of the two days, we were all sitting around when my sister pointed out that over those few days, my father had deliberately gone through every one of his kids and asked them to do things to care for him. He made sure we all had an opportunity to feel good that we were able to help and connect to our father. Despite him not being able to focus on almost anything else, the only thing on his mind was that all his children felt good.

Another example of this was on Sunday, the day before my father passed away. We all came in for his birthday to spend some time with him. This was when he had already stopped eating for a few days and was not in the mood for anything. We were all sitting around depressed, trying to figure out what we could do for his birthday.

When he calls over one of my brothers and says, “Nu, what are we doing tonight?” He then said to make some food and he will try and have something for it to celebrate the birthday, we were all shocked since he was not in the mood for anything. This was something he did only for us, having us all crowd in his room and him putting the effort to smile for all of us must have been tough, but all he thought about in the little energy he had left was about my mother and us to make sure we could feel good about making him a birthday party.

TATTY WE MISS YOU!!! PLEASE DEMAND FROM HASHEM TO BRING AN END TO ALL THE SUFFERING IN THIS WORLD AND TO BRING MOSHIACH NOW!!

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