. For dinner I ate all my Italian favorites surrounded by my best girlfriends in a small private room on the Lower East Side with The Godfather , streaming on the wall in the background. After dinner we danced and flirted with boys and had too many vodka sodas at our favorite spot in Nolita. Everything about that birthday celebration perfectly encapsulated who I was at the time: “carefree NYC girl, who loves her friends, Italian food, cute boys, and a good cocktail.
The next day also perfectly captured who I was back then: a grieving child whose mother had decided the week prior to stop receiving treatment for the cancer that had most recently camped out comfortably in her brain. The cancer that had so weakened her immune system she spent the prior month battling Tuberculosis. The cancer that we all knew would soon take her life. The next morning we all cheerfully hopped on a train headed north so I could be with my mother for my last birthday with her.
I have come to realize in the many motherless birthdays following that day that I learned how to hold grief and joy simultaneously: how to laugh and cry in the same 24-hour period and sometimes at the same time, from my mom. In addition to the stage four breast cancer that she battled for nearly three years, she also had Multiple Sclerosis for 12 years. During more than a decade of very serious illness, unfathomable pain, hospital stays, chemotherapy, and wheelchairs, she had a fucking blast.
Right now, we would all do well to emulate my mom: focusing on some impossible balance of cultivating both grief and joy in the midst of so much uncertainty and anxiety. To date, we have lost over 225,000 Americans to COVID-19. When I wrote this article, I was thinking about the millions of families grieving the unexpected loss of a loved one this year—and then my family became one of them. On October 24th, we lost my 35-year-old cousin Ebonee Abby to the novel coronavirus.
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