When Opa Met Omi

The wrinkled paper is yellow with age, like some ancient parchment. The letterhead is partly torn off. The text--scribbled with an old-style fountain pen so that the end of each sentence is much fainter than its beginning--is hard to make out. The date reads September 9, 1924.

It looks as if someone took this page, crumpled it up, and threw it away, and as if someone else took it out of the garbage and smoothed it out--which is exactly what happened.

There is a love story behind this timeworn document--a story of devotion, commitment and family. Drafted by my grandfather nearly seven decades ago, the letter asked his future father-in-law for my grandmother's hand in marriage.

My grandparents had been courting for several months, and my grandfather thought the time was right. He showed my grandmother what he had written.

She laughed. Then she crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage.

"I didn't want to marry him," she used to say. "I thought he was ugly."

"But he wouldn't leave me alone."

Then she would smile and take his hand, and he would smile back.

"He's gotten handsomer over the years, don't you think?" she would ask.

And so it was that my Opa and Omi were married. She was 19, just out of school. He was 29, just starting up a medical practice.

I have a picture of them standing side by side on their wedding day, Opa in his tux, Omi in her flowing white gown.

And I have a picture of them taken just a few years ago, shortly before Opa died. They are standing side by side, smiling, the way I will always think of them.

For the 66 years of their marriage, they were always side by side. When Omi would disappear somewhere for just a minute, Opa would wonder where she was.

I have a distant cousin who was married for 24 hours. For my grandparents, 24 hours was about as long as they were ever apart.

In an age when marriages are often shorter than the divorce proceedings that follow, their devotion to each other was remarkable.

Side by side, they survived hardships that tore apart nations.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and my grandparents had to leave behind friends, family, a home and a career. They escaped to British-occupied Palestine.

In 1948 came the Israeli War for Independence, and the life they had rebuilt was threatened once more by bloodshed and instability.

When they returned to Germany to try to restore what they had been forced to abandon 23 years earlier, they had to start from scratch all over again.

My grandparents' challenges were not confined to the effects of international politics. At the age of 56, my grandmother decided to attend medical school, and my grandfather taught her the calculus she needed to pass the entrance exams. She graduated at the same time as my mother.

Standing by their family was just as important as standing by each other. In 1970, they made a third international relocation--to the United States, where they could be nearer to their two children.

My grandmother was there for my mother when I was born in 1973; she gave up practicing medicine to take care of me during the day, so that my mother could continue to work fulltime.

When a blow from a tire swing knocked me flat on my back and nearly caused me to lose four teeth in the fifth grade, Omi was my personal nurse. Each day for several weeks, she came to school at noon to bring me the liquefied lunch that was all I could eat.

And Opa came along when I needed someone to go down into the basement with me because I was scared to go alone. Several years later, when In had frequent trouble with my Latin homework, Opa helped me, although he was blind and had studied Latin more than 70 years earlier.

As role models and as friends, my grandparents stood by me much as they stood by each other for fifty years before I was born.

So when my grandfather lay ill in a sterile hospital room a little over a year ago, I tried to be there for him, standing by the side of his bed for hours and days on end. It was only then that the depth of my grandparents' devotion to each other truly became clear to me.

Often, during those last few weeks of his life, Opa would call out for Omi.

She would be there, holding his hand.

And he would smile.