When Get-Shit-Done Hits the Fan
Part One: Reaching In, Reaching Out
June 13, 2020. We decorated the car with a giant rainbow flag (actually a hammock) and taped our Black Lives Matter signs to the car. Piled the kids in and paraded down historic Route 66 to celebrate Pride and speak out against the constant brutalizing of black people. We blasted “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross and “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga at ear-splitting volume and danced defiantly in the street. (With our masks on, of course.) It was life-affirming and soul-filling, in the way that standing up for justice often is.
I could have never guessed that a few short hours later, my life would change forever. My sister called and instructed me to sit down away from my children. While crossing the street on her way home from the beach in Florida, my mom, may her memory be a blessing, had been hit by a reckless driver with the vanity license plate “AD1CTV.” Two hours after that, in this time of national pain and reckoning, and in the midst of a global pandemic, my mom died.
I live a life of relative privilege. I have not had a lot of direct dealing with death, particularly one as unnatural as my mother’s. I’ve never planned a funeral, much less one in another state and during a pandemic. Under normal circumstances, I know how to get shit done: identify the end goal, lay out the steps, and start chugging away. These circumstances were not normal and I was at a loss.
I also take pride in being a good friend. I have close friends from every period in my life. We maintain and even deepen our relationships regardless of geography and life changes. While I’ve sometimes missed the mark, I show up when my friends and colleagues need me and am often the one they call when they need help or a solid perspective. Facing down so much uncertainty, unknown and unprecedented, I found myself reaching out to those very friends for their help.
When your mom dies, you call the Rabbi. In this case, I called my beloved friends and unofficial mentors, Rabbi Nancy and Seth. In addition to comforting words, Seth quickly sent me a list of synagogues in Melbourne Beach, Florida. He scoured LinkedIn to see if Nancy had any personal connections to the rabbis there. Nancy sent a personal email to Patricia, the rabbi in Florida with the least degree of separation, asking if she could help me navigate the funeral planning.
I also asked Nancy to host a Zoom shiva call, the safest option during COVID for bringing family and friends together to honor and collectively mourn my mother in the Jewish tradition. Nancy agreed on the condition that I, a primary mourner, enlist a friend who could navigate the logistics of large zoom calls. Who could do that?
Hmmm. My close friend Mindy and I had recently co-facilitated a virtual focus group on Zoom. I knew she could handle it. Without hesitation—despite the stress of running her business and watching her three kids while her husband, a surgeon and essential worker, was taking long shifts—she said yes. My badass friend Laura, whose family had been safely co-bubbling with mine since May, came over late that night and helped me pack and get to the airport a few hours before dawn.
Throughout the week, my friends brought bagels and lox, green chili enchiladas and chocolate chip brownies to my amazing husband, as he watched our kids who had just lost their only grandmother. In the midst of this upheaval, I stressed about how to make sure my beautiful son, Jonah, had a joyful seventh birthday a few days after my scheduled return. I reached out to Alisa, Jonah’s beloved first grade teacher, who sent invites out for his upcoming drive-by birthday party. Laura and her kids made posters to decorate the driveway. (Sidenote, it was a super success.)
Florida was a shock to my system. The politics of mask-wearing had done a number on people. After three months of sheltering at home, I was forced into stores, funeral homes, banks and more where, more often than not, people walked around without masks. And despite my desire to crawl into a ball, I had to ask everyone I dealt with to mask up. My rockstar sister, Elissa, met me in Florida. We made endless to-do lists and divided up the work in accordance with our strengths. Elissa organized my dad’s house while I dealt with funeral logistics and all things financial. We vowed to let nothing during this hard time get in between us, and we even found a few moments to laugh.
The graveside funeral was beautiful. My father’s neighbors, Dottie and Frank, hosted a luncheon on their driveway so friends could safely provide support and express condolences. The first shiva call included over 100 households from across the country. It was so comforting to “be with” my family and friends, as well as my sister and parent’s friends, sharing in our collective sadness, while remembering my mother and singing Hebrew melodies.
The day of the funeral, my college roommate and “Sister of Sin,” Andrea, happened to be a few hours away in Florida visiting her mother who was nearing the end of her life. She drove to see me and had the forethought to rent a room a mile from my dad’s home. We spent a magical night on the beach, drinking beers, watching shooting stars, counting sea turtles, crying, laughing and trying to make sense of this difficult time. It was therapeutic and a night I will never forget.
During her life, my mother took care of all finances for her household. In addition to being in an absolute state of shock, my father knew nothing about how much money he had, where it was, or even where his pension was deposited. I maxed out my credit cards with the funeral expenses. Then I picked up the phone and called my colleague June, who helped me to run credit reports to identify what accounts my parents had. My parent’s longtime accountant overnighted tax returns. As I stared at the tax returns in total overwhelm, I remembered my cousin Johnny, living a few hours away from my parents in Florida, is an accountant. I called him up and asked if he could drive over to help me. He and his wife came. While Johnny worked with me, his wife, Pat, comforted my father.
We also needed to decide if we should pursue legal action against the driver. My parents’ friends were wonderful but could only recommend the attorney with the most billboards and TV ads (the Ron Bell of Melbourne, for my New Mexico readers). I had to think. I called my favorite couple in New Mexico, Sarah and Iggy, both attorneys, and asked for help. They quickly reached out to their networks and recommended a top-rated lawyer in the area.
Colleagues have picked up slack for me on projects. My dear cousin Emet organized a minyan of ten bar/bat mitzvah’d friends to help me say the mourner's kaddish over Zoom. Almost three month in, loving text messages, donations in my mother’s memory, flower deliveries and meals, all sent by friends who keep checking in on me, have continued in abundance. Just last week, my fellows from the WKKF Community Leadership Network Fellowship pooled money to send my family meals.
And still, it is hard. My sister and I are selling my father’s house in New York, opening an estate for my mother, and managing my father’s bills. Some days are better than others. Some days I feel energetic. Other days I want to sleep til noon. Some days, I wake up in a funk and the never-ending-ness of COVID and the challenges of virtual-everything drain all of my momentum. Other days, a jog in the Foothills brightens my mood.
So why write about this in my blog? It’s not to brag about the fact that I have the best friends ever (though I totally do). I’m writing to remind myself that I cannot (and should not) do it alone. Life doesn’t stop for COVID. But, while COVID keeps me physically distanced from my friends and loved ones, it also presents opportunities for me to ask for help and show up for others.
Through my friends' examples, I have learned how to be an even better friend. By asking for help in my vulnerable moments, others have stepped up in a way that truly made all the difference in my life. By leaning on my community, I have gotten shit done and made it this far through an incredibly hard time. I don’t know what will come next—both in terms of grief and the daunting tasks related to death—but at least I know I won’t get through it alone.