Judy Bornstein is the most joyful person I’ve ever met despite the sad fact she was profoundly unhappy, lonely and abused for the first 68 years of her life.
“I love being old!” she exclaimed at the dining room table of her Valparaiso home. “And now that you know my backstory, you know why I feel this way.”
Her troublesome backstory is what gives meaning to her current life at 87 years old. After an oppressive childhood and then two marriages filled with abuse, victimization and five decades of manipulative “brainwashing,” Bornstein finally found her way in life — and her purpose — at 70.
“I’ve had two lives,” she said. “I didn’t begin to live until I was 70 years old.”
Her life dramatically changed during a devastating strike of four separate hurricanes in 2004. While living in a little town in Florida, the 170-miles-per-hour ferocity of Hurricane Charley forced Bornstein into her bathroom, where she oddly experienced the eye of serenity.
“God didn’t take my life. He gave me my soul,” she recalled. “After I survived that hurricane, I found the courage to tell my second husband that he had to leave.”
She had no money, no car, no plans and no experience at making decisions of any kind. She had lived in “survival mode” for nearly seven decades, victimized by two men who were drunken on the power of controlling her every move.
“On the night before I was married to my first husband, who was a minister, my grandmother who raised me said, ‘Judy, there is only one thing you have to remember after the wedding. Your main purpose is to please Jack in whatever room he wants. You should be so grateful that you are marrying a man of God.’”
He ended up manipulating and controlling her, to the point she wasn’t allowed to leave home without his permission, she said. Her second husband turned out to be just as abusive as her first.
“I didn’t know that men could be …,” Bornstein said, pausing to find the right word.
“Kind?” I asked.
“Yes, kind,” she replied. “I had no idea until I was 70 that men could be kind.”
It took a natural catastrophe to unearth her natural disposition.
“Life was sucked out of me like what that hurricane did to my home,” Bornstein said with a sigh.
Her life dramatically changed two years later after moving back to Northwest Indiana to be closer to one of her children. The moment occurred while singing the gospel hymn, “Amazing Grace” to a dying woman named Mary in a nursing home.
“Amaaaaaaaazing Graaaaaaace,” Bornstein began singing. “How sweet the sound …”
The old woman cut off Bornstein just seconds into singing that old hymn.
“No!” the woman barked in a gruff voice.
Bornstein apologized and suggested she could sing another hymn. The woman mustered every ounce of energy in her frail body to say in a whisper, “How sweet He is.”
Bornstein sang the hymn again, this time with the altered lyric. The woman nodded in peaceful contentment. Bornstein experienced a spiritual epiphany while singing it that new way. In that singular moment, she found her salvation and her purpose in life, at 70.
She softly held the woman’s hand and thanked her for sharing those powerful new lyrics. The woman quietly smiled and gently squeezed Bornstein’s hand. Five minutes after returning home, Bornstein got a call from the nursing home. The woman had died. Her last words were to Bornstein, “How sweet He is.”
“Mary’s life was ending. Mine was just beginning,” Bornstein wrote in her 2017 book, “Hold My Hand: All About the Blessings of Volunteering.” Its introduction is titled, “How sweet He is.”
Since that day, Bornstein began a life of volunteering, providing a cushion of calmness to patients in hospitals, residents in nursing homes, and dying people in hospice situations. I met her at the annual meeting and dinner for VNA Hospice Northwest Indiana, which depends on volunteers.
“Most people think of hospice as the end of life. But, to me, hospice was the beginning of my life,” she told me. “I am so blessed to have been a VNA hospice volunteer for the past 16 years.”
Bornstein has sung dozens of old hymnals to hundreds of patients who clung to her joyful kindness as they clung to their last gasps of life. She’s held the hands of strangers who desperately yearn for human contact. She has touched the lives of people in their most fragile or vulnerable moments.
“It’s been a true blessing for me,” Bornstein said as she looked through her old book of gospel hymns, its pages tabbed with current patients’ favorite hymnals. To see her exuberance in action, watch my videos at or @JerDavich. More photos also are shared at both websites.
After her new life started, Bornstein also began painting and creating artwork that adorns her home’s walls. She also creates greeting cards based on her artwork that she sells to cover the expenses of driving to nursing homes and the hospice center.
“You see, you’re never too old to start again in life,” she said as I left her home. “I’m living proof.”
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