Simon Conway

Simon Conway

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My Mom... Personal reflections on my short time with her...

My mom and dad

Sheila and Jack... my mom and dad around 1976

It is more than 36 years since my Mom passed away. She went way too soon and this planet we all call home is a much poorer place without her.

And yet in so many ways she is still here.

So let’s go back in time for while today. Sheila Helene Conway was born in London just like me. Her maiden name was Truman.

When the Nazis decided London was a legitimate target and bombed it pretty much every day and night for nine months, she - like so many other young kids - was evacuated and went to live in the countryside with total strangers. They put what to you and me looks like a toe tag in a morgue on her coat with her name and home address. She was just 7-years-old.

But my mom was made of tough stuff! There’s a lot of her in me.

My grandparents were poor and lived in a small apartment in the Dalston area of London.

After the war, my mom met my dad and she told the then Jazz musician that if he really wanted to marry her, he needed to get a proper job!

Not only did he get a job in retail, but he also had to change his name. I should not really have been born a Conway because my dad’s original name was Monty Bilaski. It was hard for a Jew to get a proper job and so one day he was walking down Conway Street in Central London and decided that was as good a name as any other. He also went with Jack for his first name.

The road is still there. It is in fact one side of Fitzroy Square if you ever happen to be in London and are nearby. It’s kind of weird for me to walk down it (which I haven’t done in a very long time) because I just wonder what the young Monty was going through at the time.

Me and my mom

Me and my Mom on the beach in Herzlia. Israel also around 1976.

Anyway, back to my mom.

I have wonderful memories of growing up. We started out in the same apartment building as my grandparents, but when I was about three we moved to a house with a back yard!It’s probably my earliest memory. While they were moving in, I was out in that yard and I remember saying to my Mom, “I had a great time, but can we go home now?’. Probably not those exact words, but that’s what she told me I said.

She always had a job, but she made dinner every night, was at all my elementary school events and we went to the synagogue most Saturdays and always for the big Holidays.

She was a driving force behind her Ladies group - The Women’s International Zionist Organization! WIZO! She got to lead that group as the previous two chairwomen made Aliyah! That means to go up (to Jerusalem) and is the word used when Jews immigrate to Israel.

And then she got cancer.

It was around the exact same time that I got Meningitis and even though she was really sick, she never left me when I was in the hospital. I was 12.

My mom fought like a Lion and although cancer treatment is no fun thing ever, back then it seems to me to have been literal torture.

And then we went through all the phases. Mastectomy, radiation, chemo. Every time she finished a treatment, she went back to work.

She wanted to be a lawyer. There’s no real equivalent here to what she did, but she worked in a high powered legal firm as a paralegal, but a paralegal with massive authority.

One of her clients was Hollywood actor, Robert Wagner.

So to become an actual lawyer, she had to take some exams and it seemed to me that every time she booked to take those exams, she had a cancer relapse.

Eventually she was told she had between six months to a year to live. She told my dad that she wanted to die in Israel and even though he had only ever been there for a one week vacation; even though he didn’t speak the language and even though he would have to give up his well paid job and learn new skills, my dad wanted to fulfill her dying wish.

And so when I was just 16 we moved. The brain is a very powerful thing my friends. My mom lived for another seven years and is indeed buried in Israel.

From her I get my strength; my will power; my ability to laugh at myself and so much more. Quick diversion here. ATMs were new in Israel and my mom needed some cash. My dad parked across the street and she went out to the machine, only to turn back to my dad and shout across the street: “WHAT’S MY SECRET NUMBER?” We all fell into fits of laughter.

My mom was the most giving person I have ever known, fighting for the causes she believed in. She was always so grateful to those who served in WWII because she knew that if the Nazis had won, she would have died and I would never have been born.

On this Mother’s Day, cherish your mom. If she annoys you in some way, push that off. Some of us have not had our moms for a very long time and when the time comes for you to be without yours, you will regret the times you brushed off seeing yours or even talking to her.

I still think about my mom often. She was a very special woman. She would have been so proud of me and of my girls. My girls refer to her as “Grandma Sheila” even though she had died long before they were born. They both have pictures of her in their homes.

I love you mom and I just want to wish all the Moms a Happy Mothers’ Day.


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