Decimating My Village

So, a few months ago, I decided to write this blog: “Business and Babies.” I felt that a little over a year into my motherhood journey, I had life experiences across a myriad of topics that I could share with other working moms. I believed I had advice on how to “do it all” and, more importantly, be good at it all (something that is very important to me). And I know that is still true. But I have also seen so much change in the past 9 months since I wrote that first post, both in the world and in my personal life. In late February, coming off of a business trip, I had prepared an entry on traveling for work when you have a family. I had suggestions on how to balance making your client felt like you had put his/her needs first, catching the latest outbound flight while still making it in time for the meeting, and squeezing your way into the last standby spot for the earliest flight back home. I was going to discuss the benefits of my home location: less than 15 minutes from ORD. And I was going to talk about the importance of building your village (your support system) to be there for you and your kids when you can’t be.

I had written:

“One thing that helps me to make it all work is my support system. Our au pair, Fernanda is flexible in supporting us and our kids as part of the family. I also rely on my parents, who I can call to fill in for an hour or two when my flight may land at 6. They even willingly stay at my house with the kids for an evening if George and I both have work trips on the same night. This support system is a key piece to ‘having it all’ and making it work as a career mom.”

I was going to reference that tried and true saying, “It takes a village to raise a child” as my opening, and talk about the personal meaning of that quote in my childhood, having attended Village School for kindergarten through fifth grade, where we stood by that mantra. Then I would go into more detail on each of the members of my own village, and their unique roles in keeping it all together.

But then, COVID arrived like a tidal wave, resulting in a chain effect of changes to my work and personal world. My travel shifted overnight from weekly to never. My commute declined from 50 minutes to non-existent. I had to find a new way to work with my team over Zoom calls, to onboard 5 new hires, and to create some semblance of normalcy and work-life balance with my desk sitting in front of my bedroom window and my children running around and playing on the floor below me.

Next, there was a resurgence on the focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. And that hit home for me too, especially as a white woman, raising a strong, beautiful bi-racial daughter. Our city was over-run by protesting, looting, and crowds gathered with faces covered by masks. My social media was filled with black screens, trendy hashtags, and calls to action. And everything felt just a little more hopeless and a little more isolated. My extended village of friends, colleagues, and fellow board members had shrunk and I was limited to my immediate family for many weeks and months.

But then the worst came for me. And this one didn’t stream in like a tidal wave; it arrived in an instant, like a punch to the gut, and changed every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

My mom died.

And my father-in-law died.

And it wasn’t COVID, and they weren’t sick, and they weren’t suffering. They were celebrating life. They were seizing the moment and they were seeking ways to embrace their new-found retirements while making safe choices. Margie (Mom) and Tom (my father-in-law) were always celebrating life. Rarely would they turn down a chance to toast and share a beer. Never would they say no to a request to get dinner with friends, to try a new restaurant. Never would Tom reject a vacation opportunity, especially if it was a location that he could fly to himself (and even better for him if he could fly us along with him). Never would Mom reject an invitation to come visit her grandchildren, to make them laugh, to sing them silly songs, and to cover them in kisses. Rarely would either see a photo come across their phones in our family group chain that included the kids or the dogs and not seize the opportunity to drop a comment.

No, they had decided to make the most of a challenging year. Tom and my mother-in-law, Diann, had decided to fly his plane to Alaska. They were going to stop first in Seattle, and then hop from city to city in Alaska – from Ketchikan, to Anchorage, to Fairbanks, to Juneau – before ending with wine tasting in Oregon. They had done it once before- in 2008- and Tom was determined to make the trip one more time “before they were too old and couldn’t do it anymore.” They decided it was a relatively safe place to travel: they would be in a private plane, touring mostly outside, in a state with a low number of COVID cases that required negative tests upon arrival.

So they invited my parents. When Tom asked if I thought they would go, like an excited child asking his parents for permission to go out with friends, I was skeptical. My dad has never been great with small planes and I knew that they were being extra cautious with COVID.  George (my husband) and I said we would feel it out with them, but I kept forgetting to call. So one day, tired of waiting for me to get around to it, Tom finally called them himself instead.

They said yes.

“It looks wonderful!!! I’ve been trying to talk Jon into going for years,” Mom had written in a group text, after viewing photos of their last trip.

“This may be the right time!!” was Diann’s response.

And it seemed like it was. They were having the trip of their lives, one my parents had been loosely planning for a decade, but had never pulled the trigger on. Even now as my dad looks back, he’ll say,

“If everything had gone well and we all came home, we would have said it was the best trip we had ever taken. We never would have experienced things the way we did had Mom and I done it alone. We were able to hop from town to town, see the bears, fly 4,000 feet over Mount McKinley.”

They saw moose. They saw reindeer. They saw an unreal number of bears. They drank wine, they drank beer, they ate well. They rode on a Ferris Wheel overlooking Seattle. They rode on a chairlift to the top of Mount Alyeska. They took a boat ride in a storm and saw whales. They shopped for themselves and for the kids, always in the minds and hearts.

And I felt like I lived it with them. Mom and I were in the middle of a constant text chain every day of our lives to begin with, but during the week they were gone, it felt even more consistent and even more exciting. Every time they took off for their next flight or landed at a new stop, Mom would write,

“Onto our next adventure!”

Everything they saw, I saw through photos texted over to me. And the photos that weren’t texted to me, Mom had loaded onto her Shutterfly site, every night diligently, leaving this huge vault of surprises and “gifts” waiting for me to explore and experience after she was gone. (For the record, I haven’t been able to look at them yet).

On their last day, they started with a breakfast of crepes. They went to the “North Pole” and “Santa Margie” wrote letters to Keira and Jackson, that the North Pole intends to send to our home closer to Christmas time. And then they went to the Chena Hot Springs. For anyone who has known my mom, Christmas and a hot tub = her happy place. Dad said that when they stepped out of the hot springs,

Mom laid back on a lounge taking in the sunshine and said, “I could lay like this forever.”

I wish I could scream out to her now, “So do it Mom. Lay there just a little longer. Another hour. Another 15 minutes. What’s the rush? Just stay.”

True to form, Tom was socializing with the workers at the hot springs for the majority of his time versus relaxing in the water with the others. Dad would always joke that Tom preferred talking to strangers so that he could re-tell his favorite stories and make them like new. And equally true to form, Tom had made friends with their waitress at lunch, especially after he learned that she grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, where Diann and Tom first lived together and had George.

Tom took a photo with her and said, “I’ll go over to your dad’s home in Whitefish Bay when I get home and show this to him.”

But he never made it home.

And neither did Mom.

It was a car accident. And it wasn’t their fault. Someone else was in a rush. Someone else couldn’t wait to get where they were going. Someone else took their lives into his hands.

When George got the call from Diann (my mother-in-law) early the next morning, I was lying in my bed in a fog beside my dogs, as I am every morning while George gets ready for work in our master bathroom. But in my fog, over the sound of the bathroom fan, I couldn’t help but hear the words:

“There was a tragic car accident.”

I jumped up out of bed in a second and went tearing into the bathroom. I could barely understand what Diann was trying to say as I just started screaming, “Who was it? Who was it?”

“Tom. Tom is dead, ok?” Diann finally blurted out, upset with my frantic insistence. I took that news in and breathed deep for a moment. George’s dad was gone. Part of me relaxed, my mind telling me that that was it. That was the terrible, tragic news.

But then, George asked.

“What about Michelle’s parents? Are they okay?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. And finally just one choked up word, “Nooo.”

That no seemed to resound on forever. I can hear that No over and over in my head every day and the inflection of Diann’s voice as she said it.

My mind was racing with the possibilities. Was it Mom? Was it Dad? Was it both? Would one be worse? I couldn’t even process it. I started asking her who, who, who was it. Was it Mom or Dad?

“Margie is dead.” She finally said.

And I screamed.

And suddenly my village was broken in an instant. In a split second, everything we had built, all the plans we had made meant nothing. It was like homes had been torn down, the center had been ransacked. Everything I had built my life and support system around felt like it was no longer there.

Two and half months later, when I look around, all I see is this gaping hole. Like I am living in a house with no foundation. There are still walls around me, but now the ceiling is unsupported by beams. Like one small huff and puff could just knock the whole thing down and leave me standing in the middle of an empty space, alone and uncertain how I am going to do this whole thing called life and be that person I set out to be.