Literanista
April 22, 2025
The first to die that year, the year before COVID-19 changed everything, was my aunt, Ruth or “Chin” as we called her. I was sitting at a rehearsal for a company investor event and brand launch, when I got the text from my sister. I quietly told my teammate sitting next to me and carried on, unsure of what else to do since there was nothing really to do with this news. My mother, mind clouded with dementia, was in a long-term continuing care facility overlooking the Conservatory Garden in Central Park.
At the time, I was not aware that in just six months time, my mother, Chin’s older sister, would also take her last breath, but how could anyone, really? Recently, I learned that “Chin,” a word I heard used repeatedly growing up especially when asking my mom for one of her recipes, was a Taino word, meaning a bit or small amount. And so I wondered, If my voluptuous, cigarettes and Murray & Lanman Florida Water Cologne smelling aunt had been a small child while hoping that she had gone gently.
My uncle, a fellow book and history buff on the younger end of my grandparents’ nineteen children, had lost with battle with cancer, three years earlier, the year my son was born. I was in an uber, braving holiday traffic across states and boroughs, when I received the text that he had passed. Death waits for no one.
The week before Thanksgiving, my mother’s body, coursing with morphine and other palliative milieu, slowly shut down. In a few months, the world would shut down because of the pandemic, and that April, my aunt, who had beaten the short life prognosis that was often assigned to children with Down Syndrome, passed away at age 59 in care facility in the Bronx. As a proxy for my mother’s sibling grief, overlaid by my own, I was terrified to contemplate what her experience must have been like in the grips of COVID.
I learned about grief. Anticipatory grief, complicated grief and then disenfranchised grief.
The following year, huddled in our bubble, I would learn that my biological father, followed by his sister, and separately, my uncle (through marriage) would also pass away. The year after that, my uncle, my mom’s closest and favorite brother, would also pass away.
It’s difficult for me to reconcile these losses. I often find myself in disbelief when attempting to explain to people that I lost eight close family members in the span of six years.
It seems unthinkable and yet here we are.
