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Michele Dremmer, in pink dress, stands with her groom Martin Strauss on Sunday as they listen to Rabbi Shoshanah Conover during the signing of the ketuba, or marriage contract. The ceremony was held outside Temple Sholom in the garden dedicated in memory of Dremmer's daughter, Faith, who died in 2010. (Heather Charles, Chicago Tribune / July 3, 2012) |
When Michele Dremmer moved back to Chicago in 1999 with her 7-year-old adopted daughter from China, the rabbis at Temple Sholom gave them both Hebrew names.
Michele Dremmer was named "Michaela," meaning godlike. Her daughter was named "Emunah," the Hebrew translation of her English-language name: Faith.
In the two years since Faith Dremmer was killed during a biking trip with friends in southern Illinois, trees and gardens have been planted in her name across Chicago. But none has been more special, her mother says, than Gan Emunah, or Garden of Faith, outside Temple Sholom in Chicago's Lakeview East neighborhood.
At that synagogue, Michele Dremmer not only found the strength to survive. She found the will to live and discovered the importance of community.
This week, Michele Dremmer, 63, opened a new chapter of her life at the edge of that garden, marrying her true love after 39 years apart. There, on Sunday, beside the wildflowers and herbs planted in her daughter's memory, Michele and her groom, Martin Strauss, 61, signed their marriage contract, or ketuba, commemorating the couple's commitment to stand by each other and to keep Faith Dremmer's memory alive.
"It's not just to honor Faith," Dremmer said about the garden ceremony. "It's to include her."
On March 24, 2010, Faith Dremmer and two of her friends — seniors at the University of Chicago Lab Schools, on a spring break bike trek — were pedaling along a rural road near Shawnee National Forest when a minivan driven by an 86-year-old man veered across the center line and struck them.
Faith died. Michele Dremmer wanted to. But her family and the congregation at Temple Sholom wouldn't let her give up, she said.
"They believed I needed to still stay here. I still had more work to do," Dremmer said. "They believed Faith was doing her work up there, and I had work to do down here."
Most importantly, the congregation didn't let Dremmer do it on her own.
"As lonely and as horrific as this was, I didn't want her to feel like she was walking alone," said Rabbi Shoshanah Conover, who checked in on Dremmer daily in the aftermath of Faith's death. "I don't think any tradition has the wisdom to say this is what you do and this is why this happened. … I just had the good sense to be quiet and to call and to be there. I think that's what we all did."
Even before the tragedy, Temple Sholom had become Dremmer's second family. Faith Dremmer had insisted on staying involved in the synagogue after her bat mitzvah. She regularly donated her hair to make wigs for sick children. She recruited volunteers for the weekly soup kitchen called Monday Meal Mitzvah. And in every class, Conover said, she engaged with the texts and elevated the discussion to a new level.
"She took it and became more believing in the faith than I did and got me to temple," Michele Dremmer said.
More than anything, friends say, Faith Dremmer wanted her mother to be happy. To combat the inevitable solitude that would descend when she left for college, she and her mother agreed to an "exit strategy." Michele Dremmer promised her daughter she would ride horses and start dating.
Dremmer and Martin Strauss met as students at Ohio State University, working together in one of Columbus, Ohio's "most sophisticated head shops." It was, after all, the 1970s.
"We had 52 different types of paper — one for each week of the year," Strauss said with a mischievous grin, referring to the papers used for rolling joints.
"We did?" replied Dremmer.
"Remember the red, white and blue that would sparkle?" he said.
After dating for more than a year, Strauss had fallen in love. He wanted to marry Dremmer, launch a career and start a family. But Dremmer didn't share Strauss' vision for the future.
"I wanted to go to San Francisco, be a hippie, hang out and see what that was all about," she said. "I wasn't ready to settle down."
