More About Eileen

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Last week I introduced Eileen Scheshko, the daughter of Celia and Isidore. Here she is on our right, a bit more mature than in the photo with her parents.

The dresses and accessories on Eileen and her friends are absolutely gorgeous and of the era: the 1950s! The sweetheart neckline, the wicker basket handbag, the button earrings!

In 1951, Eileen married Louis Horowitz. The following year she gave birth to her first child, Michelle. The year after that her father, Isidore, passed away. In 1955, her second child and only son was born in the same month that the gardener was born.

In the next photo, Eileen and Lou are seated on our deck in Michigan in April 1985. They were in Kalamazoo/Portage for the occasion of the unveiling of the headstone of Eileen’s brother Murray (the gardener’s father).

Sadly, on 15 June 1994, their only daughter, Michelle, passed away.The inscription reads Michelle Trager, her married name. Her Hebrew name was Malka.

Less than a year later, on 17 April 1995, Uncle Lou passed away as well. Aunt Eileen was plagued the last few years of her life with a brain tumor that caused her excruciating pain. Her strength was remarkable. She herself passed on 6 January 1998 and was buried at New Montefiore Cemetery in New York (where Uncle Lou and Cousin Michelle are buried). Eileen’s parents are buried at Montefiore Cemetery. I added Eileen’s headstone photo and sponsored her memorial at Findagrave.

Eileen lived just long enough to meet her two beautiful grandchildren through her son and his wife.

22 thoughts on “More About Eileen”

  3. Just checking to be sure I am putting the pieces together correctly. Eileen and Lou were the gardener’s aunt and uncle, and their son was his first cousin and they were born on the same day. Is that right?

    Michelle was so young. That must have been just terrible for her parents as well as her brother.

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    • All correct except the boy cousins were born 8 days apart, so just the same month. The gardener’s father’s family was very small. Until we discovered the Goodstein “cousins,” there was only Murray himself, his sister Eileen, the families of the two of them, plus Isidore and Celia, and then Isidore’s sister Malka, her husband, and her daughter Charlotte!
      Michelle’s death was a very sad shock.

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  5. Those dresses are gorgeous. Seeing 50’s clothes always makes me think I was born in the wrong time! Eileen looks like such a lovely woman — that smile!! And how sad for her son to lose both parents and his sister so young.

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  7. Those outfits are great!
    And the loss of their daughter must have been terrible. I can’t even imagine.
    Enduring the pain of a brain tumor must be awful. For years! My grandmother died from a brain tumor that at that time they were not able to treat–apparently now, they could operate and remove it. I was toddler, so I don’t remember.

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    • Oh, I am so sorry about your grandmother, Merril! So frustrating to see/hear of a family member die from something that is now curable. I expect that it depends on the tumor, too, how much pain there is–location, type, size, etc. I’ve heard that there are people who live with brain tumors of a certain sort who get no pain with them if they stay a certain size.
      Those outfits are the best!

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  8. That’s so tragic, to lose their daughter. And Eileen lived with the pain of a brain tumour? Didn’t anyone give her morphine or something to treat the pain? That’s astonishing. (Or maybe it was the cost… I tend to forget about medical costs in the USA).

    I love that middle dress. I don’t know if it was the same in America but in the UK a lot of clothes of the time were starched, which is what made them look so crisp.

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    • I actually did not know that about starched dresses, but I can see where it is possible because that crisp look was very popular. I would not have been able to do that. My skin is way too sensitive for that starch–both the harshness and the chemical. Eileen was treated with what I presume is good medical care. Although we lived in California and she in NYC with her son nearby and so I don’t know all the particulars, I remember visiting her and searching the phone book for pain centers (pointlessly, I guess) and calling her doctor because we couldn’t stand seeing her in such pain, but the pain seemed to be beyond medicating (where she could still function).

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