I have always had tremendous bitachon, but my bitachon was strengthened when my father passed away suddenly (follwoed five months later by my mom). I may have posted this already once, I have told this story over so often, I no longer remember who has read it, but here it is: The night my father had a fatal sroke, he and my mom were going to a Bar-Mitzvah seuda in Brooklyn. They had a wonderful time, and left the simcha at around 11 PM. After a couple of minutes ( as per my mom’s recounting of the events), my dad began driving very slowly. He seemed to not be so familiar with the road he was travelling, but continued to drive. The trip to Brooklyn and back to their home was one which he did every single day Sunday through Thursday, for all the years of their marriage, and he knew the road like the back of his hand. He continued to drive and wouldn’t respond to my mom’s question as to why he was driving so slowly. She didn’t question his silence, really, because when he drove at night, he often preferred to solely concentrate on the road and only spoke when he had to. It was almost 1 AM, when he pulled up in front of Beth David Cemetery in Long Island, where his family is buried. My mom, recognizing the location, asked him why he drove all the way to Elmont, that he must have missed the turn to their own neighborhood and continued to drive. She told him to turn the car around and go back int he right direction towards their home. Wordlessly, he did exactly as she said, and drove the car stopping at every red light and stop sign, (still very slowly) to their home, where he pulled into the driveway up to the area where he normally dropped her off before continuing to the back of the house to park. My mom tried to get my dad’s attention, but she realized that this was not his typical late night driving silence. She suddenly knew something was really, really wrong with him. It wasn’t that he simply was NOT speaking, he COULD not speak. He was paralyzed. His feet were not on either the gas pedal or the brake, but the car was not moving. She couldn’t even shut the engine of the car, because she didn’t drive.
She ran out of the car at 1:15 AM, pounded on her neighbor’s door, who came out took one look at my dad and called Hatzalah (this was 15 years ago, no one had cell phones). My mom called me also, and I got there at the same time as Hatzalah. Without going into many more details, the doctors told us later that my dad had such a massive cerebral accident (code for stroke), that they could not even measure his blood pressure – it was off the charts. Once the first blood vessel broke in his brain, they all went instantaneously, like dominoes. The stroke was over in a matter of seconds. They wanted to know how my mom got him home, because he could not possibly have been driving the car. They said that the stroke had started a couple of hours before, and once it started there was no stopping it. My mom explained that he DID drive the car, because she cannot drive, and they didn’t believe her. Kept saying it was physiologically impossible, based on the damage they had assessed that he could have been driving for at least the last hour of that two hour drive, that she must have subconsciously taken the wheel. Not having seen the car, the docs could not have known that this, too, would have been impossible, even had she wanted to do so and had known how to drive. Let them think what they wanted to think, my dad was niftar exactly 36 hours to the minute from the time I saw him in the car, clearly paralyzed. We know how they got home. It could only have been hashgocha protis, and Hashem sent a malach to take control of the wheel, or gave my wonderful father O”H the ability to drive, while brain dead. B”H, we did not lose BOTH parents that night. It was hard enough coming to the realization that he would not be getting better. Anyway, this is how Hashem gave me chizuk during the lowest point of my life, by showing me that HE absolutely is in control of everything in a way that none of us could ever deny.