One night last month, Simi Polonsky let her seven-year-old daughter stay up late. As the young girl’s bedtime passed, she began to tire. The tears started, then the tantrum. In gasps, she sobbed, exposing what lay beneath it all.
“I miss Daddy.”
Her father, Yeshua Polonsky – Shua, to those close to him – died on November 9, 2017, when a rare virus attacked his heart.
Speaking to Mamamia‘s No Filter podcast, Brooklyn-based fashion designer Simi said her husband had been an incredibly fit and healthy man, the kind who ran marathons. But in October that year he was admitted to a New York hospital with flu-like symptoms. For the following three weeks the mother of two, who was three months pregnant at the time, leaned on her Orthodox Jewish faith; “We became so obsessed with prayer and spirituality and connecting and hope and faith, that we clung to it like little children holding on to their mums,” she said.
But Shua never came home.
Listen to Simi Polonsky’s interview with Mia Freedman on No Filter. Post continues after audio.
“I felt like I was talking to an adult in an child’s body, because she cried so hard for like an hour on me and she said to me a few hours later, ‘Mummy, I love HaShem [God], but I hate him for taking Daddy.'”
That night was the first of many conversations Simi has had with her girls about faith and death and grief; she decided there should be nothing off-limits.
“We talk about it a lot,” Simi said. “And she has all these existential thoughts and questions.” Like the night of the recent tantrum…
“I said, ‘You know what? I also wish Daddy was here. Sometimes when I really am sad for Daddy, I just try to close my eyes and imagine that Daddy is right here.’ She’s like, ‘You always get to do that, you always get to just imagine that Daddy’s there and you feel that he’s there. But he’s not there. I can’t just feel that he’s there,’ and she said, ‘because he’s nothing now. Mummy, what is nothing? What is Daddy now?’
“So I said, ‘You’re right. That’s a really good question.’ I said, ‘I choose to feel that Daddy’s here. I’m choosing to feel that he’s here, and maybe it’ll take you more time, and you don’t have to feel that.’ It’s really hard, but we’re doing the best we can.”
The Frock NYC co-founder said she’ll never forget having to tell her eldest what had happened.
Simi made that choice at the birth of her son, almost six months after Shua’s death.
“I knew that I had to keep it together until that baby was out, because I knew my body just had to do it,” she said. “I said a few times, ‘Shua is going to walk in.’ I said, ‘I know Shua is going to walk in when I have that baby.’ And I really thought he would.”
When that doorway remained empty, Simi broke all over again. But as she held her little boy in her arms, as the nurses and doctors joined in her tears, there was a light, a love, she hadn’t felt in months.
“[Shua] was so there. I felt it,” she said. “It’s so weird. I said to my therapist, ‘When I feel that he’s there, am I just imagining it…?’ And she said, ‘Whatever you feel, it’s real. It’s real for you; it’s real.’ And he was definitely there.”
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