By Lisa Sugarman, Founder of The HelpHUB™

Today is the 33-year yahrzeit for my Grandma Lil — the anniversary of her death, a day in the Jewish tradition when we honor someone’s memory and say their name out loud.

For some strange reason, I don’t write about her often — if ever — but her presence was one of the most powerful in my life. She was my mother’s mother, and she was my first best friend.

Only two years after my father died, when I was 12, we brought her to live with us. Three generations under the same roof and only a single wall separating our bedrooms. And it was one of the most profound times of my life.

Living together for that many years, during such a formative time in my life, gave me perspectives on life and family and priorities that you can’t get anywhere else. By watching my mother, I learned life lessons on how to be a caregiver that can only be taught and understood by living them. And it was during those years, watching my mother care for her own mother with so much tenderness and patience, that I learned how to do the same.

Those years together were a gift to me. And so was my grandmother.

Every day, I got to hear stories from the archives of my grandmother’s heart about my mother as a girl, about my aunts and uncles, and about their life when they were a family of six. I drank every drop of her wisdom, tried desperately to remember every word, and learned how it felt to be unconditionally loved.
My grandmother and, of course, my mother, taught me that the love of your family and friends is a privilege, not a guarantee and something you earn by how you show up. Living together taught me that wealth isn’t measured in possessions, but in the quality of our relationships and bonds. And that time is our most precious commodity and to value it above everything.

Although I’ve had a lifelong relationship with death — losing multiple close family members before I was even a teenager — my grandmother’s death was one of the first times I watched someone I loved die slowly and under the same roof.

Toward the end of her days, her bedroom became my bedroom as I spent more and more time with her, trying to capture every moment before she would inevitably be gone. And I remember those last nights, sleeping on the floor beneath her bed, holding her hand as it draped over the side. And I remember her last day, November 17th, 1992 — my mother and I on either side of her, holding her hands and telling her it was okay to go.

That day, 33 years ago, her small bedroom (my father’s old office) was filled with my aunts and uncles, and some of my friends who knew her best and considered her their grandmother too. I remember my grandmother waiting until my uncle arrived from Georgia before she breathed her last breath. And then she was gone.

We were all there, being loved from all sides. And my God, was she loved. She was the richest woman I knew if you measured your wealth in love the way she did.

I’m really not sure why I don’t write more about her. Maybe it’s because my memories of her and our time together are just so sacred that I’ve wanted to keep them close. But today feels like the right day to breathe her back into the world so that the people who still remember her can feel her with me today. And the people who don’t will learn about a remarkable woman named Lillian Steinberg who played a huge role in helping me become the woman I am today.

Because my Grandma Lil wasn’t just part of my story, she’s woven into the person I became. So on her 33rd yahrzeit, it feels right to let her presence fill the room again.

May her memory be a blessing. And may that blessing keep rippling.

Lisa Sugarman is an author, a nationally syndicated columnist, a 3x survivor of suicide loss, a storyteller with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), a crisis counselor with The Trevor Project, and a mental health advocate. She’s also the Founder of The HelpHUB™, the most inclusive and comprehensive free online destination for mental health resources, tools, crisis hotlines & content. Lisa is also the cohost of The Survivors Podcast and a facilitator for Safe Place, the virtual support group for survivors of suicide loss at Samaritans Southcoast in Boston and the author of Surviving: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss, How To Raise Perfectly Imperfect Kids And Be Ok With It, Untying Parent Anxiety, and LIFE: It Is What It Is. She’s also a contributor on the Mental Health Television Network (MHTN) and her work has appeared on Calmerry, Healthline Parenthood, GrownAndFlown, TODAY Parents, Thrive Global, LittleThings, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. Lisa lives and writes just north of Boston.