Grief, Joy, and Pinwheel Pop
One small segment of the mishpacha…and their towels!
My mom, Frimit Jay, died on Nov 21, 2023. I was unprepared.
On Nov 15 I had driven to Brooklyn, New York to pick her up and bring her into the heart of Manhattan for a few days of luxury lodging, great food, and evenings of opera. We had done the same thing three weeks before and it had been everything that I could have hoped for.
When I arrived, instead of being packed and ready to go, I found her in bed. She was able to talk, but her words were not real words. And so started a week of the worst and best that life can offer.
For decades, she had made her wishes clear to anyone who would listen. She wanted to die quickly and at home, preferably alone. She was not willing to live a compromised life.
There was a brief stay in the hospital which gave us the information that she was in sepsis, and while her words were not clear, it was painfully clear that she was unwilling to stay in the hospital. And so, “against medical advice” I brought her home to die.
The medical system in the United States is not set up for this. Rather than making sure that we had good help quickly, so that she could be as comfortable and cared for as possible, care was withheld from us because we had brought her home when they told us that we shouldn’t. We did our best. It was messy, took every ounce of physical and emotional energy that I could find, and far more drawn out than I knew she had wanted.
But her children and grandchildren showed up, sat with her, loved her, and each of us cared for her in the ways that we could. It was good enough because it had to be. She died six days later, on a monday morning, the week of Thanksgiving, after the house had quieted down.
She was cremated and did not want a funeral, she wanted a party where everyone that she loved gathered, ate fabulous food, laughed a lot, and reveled in our love for each other and for her.
This kit is a tribute to my mom.. She lived a great life and took every bit of joy that she could find along the way.