By age 7, Aliyah Rotman had lived a full, outsized life
Published in the Lives Lived section of the Globe and Mail, October 7, 2022.
Aliyah Davida Elena Rotman: Joyful. Creative. Advocate. Kid. Born June 7, 2014, in Toronto; died March 9, 2022, in Toronto, from haemorrhaging after an arteriovenous malformation ruptured in her jaw; aged 7.
“You’ve only got one life to live, so you gotta live it good,” urged Aliyah Davida Elena Rotman to her schoolmates at Jackman Avenue Junior Public School in Toronto during morning announcements last fall. Less than six months later, Aliyah died suddenly of a rare vascular condition.
At just 7 years, 9 months and 2 days, her own one life to live was too brief. But Aliyah was wise beyond her years and followed her own advice to live a full, outsized life while she was here.
People were always drawn to Aliyah, and she was drawn to them. Unlike most kids her age, Aliyah had adult friends. At age four, and at the time living in Berlin, she and her dance teacher asked her parents if they could make noodles and ice cream dates after dance class; alone, Aliyah insisted. She could carry a conversation with anecdotes from her own life, curiosity, humour, sincerity and insightful observations.
Many of these insights, along with her strong moral compass, compelled Aliyah to social activism and advocacy. When she was 3, a daycare teacher once remarked that Aliyah carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She was clear about what was right and what was wrong and never shied away from saying so.
In Grade 1, she noticed that the March Madness ladder being run by her school had only the men’s basketball teams. “Why don’t we also have the women’s teams?” she asked teachers and eventually the school principal. Aliyah’s parents found out about this after it was announced that the women’s bracket would be included because of Aliyah’s advocacy.
She also knew she couldn’t make change alone, and so she organized a litter pick-up club at her school, encouraged classmates to make environmental awareness posters and was planning a kid-driven tree planting initiative. She had her allowance saved up to plant the first of what she hoped would be a million trees. Aliyah has inspired hundreds of trees to be planted since she died, and the Aliyah Rotman Fund to support social action has raised over a quarter-million dollars to realize some of her ambitions.
Aliyah was a kid, too. She smiled brightly, laughed generously and loved sparkly unicorn clothes. There wasn’t a body of water she wouldn’t jump into, including her first polar bear swim on New Year’s Day 2022. Cycling adventures, often riding more than 30 kilometres in a day, were a favourite, and she biked to and from school almost every day, including navigating Toronto’s snow covered streets in the winter. Through skiing, she experienced a kind of freedom, too.
At school and on her street when she moved back to Toronto, her imagination would often be the source of elaborate games and stories. One summer day her father came across neighbourhood kids gathered idly on the street — they were waiting, they said, for Aliyah to come back outside so they would have better ideas for games they could play.
Above all, Aliyah was unfailingly kind and giving. She would regularly bring her parents, unprompted, toys she wanted to give away to less fortunate kids, and would make gifts, write stories, or craft elaborate cards for friends and family, just because it would make them happy. The week before she died, she sneaked in before school to decorate the classroom for her teacher’s 40th birthday.
She made one final gift before she died, both kidneys and her heart successfully transplanted, giving another three people the chance to live their one life, and live it good.
