I've tweeted you all through my mother's death. We buried her this morning and I want to share my eulogy with you all so you can know her in life, not just in the indignities of death... Please indulge me.

A eulogy for my Mother in a 🧵...
1/
My mother was elegant, discriminating, funny and complex. The ultimate critic, she could pick apart a novel, an art exhibit or your outfit with equal ease and strength of conviction.
2/
Her attention to detail was, at once, her superhuman strength - her ability to recall and recount the trim on a dress she bought in 1958, the tuna salad from the luncheonette in Far Rockaway, an exchange with a sixth grade teacher, a dish served by a friend fifty years ago.
3/
But it could also be crippling, as her ability to see details sometime obscured her broader vision of the world.
4/
To know my mother was to have had a rocky relationship with her. There were so many ups and so many downs. For everyone, from those closest to her to the staff at local stores, many of whom had banned her from their premises.
5/
Lucky for her, there's been always been a robust turnover of commercial retailers in her neighborhood. But she would always return when the seas had calmed. She couldn't help the conflict but she ultimately yearned for resolution.
6/
My mother was not made for the era into which she was born. It was too modern, too casual, too reliant on technology. And her frustrations only intensified as the years progressed.
7/
She was a defiant Luddite, as any of you who ever tried to communicate with her by email can testify. Texting was never even an option given her refusal to move on from her flip phone, or to really even keep it charged and turned on.
8/
The occasional email would arrive, I can probably count them all on one hand, and each looks like it could have been penned by the Unabomber.
9/
Her standards were high and you were let know immediately if you fell short in any way, from how you held your cutlery, your choice of words and, always, how you buttered your bread.
10/
I hope she's in a happier place, another dimension where time stopped still in the early Mad Men era. Where no would ever be referred to each other by their first name.
11/
She was quite happy to go by Mrs. Robert Zicklin and she wrote down her occupation as homemaker without a flinch. I hope that she's in a place where the department stores of yore, Bonwit Tellers and such, have been returned to their former glory.
11/
Where dinner parties still happened where both the menu and guest list were labors of love. A time before sneakers and dungarees. Where manners reigned supreme. Where Saturday nights brought dinner with friends and Monday nights the Opera.
12/
She mentioned recently how disappointed she would have been if any of her children or grandchildren were colorblind and unable up join her appreciation of art, fashion and jewelry. But the irony is that when I imagine her in her ideal world, it is in Black and White.
13/
She was complicated. She could be selfish and then generous beyond belief. She was self centered but an incredible caretaker of my Dad.
14/
Cooking every meal from scratch to ensure it would be salt free. And arguing with every Dr. she encountered, with the protective instinct of a lioness.
15/
After my father died she found love again in a tumultuous relationship with Joe. They were broken up as much as they were together but in each other they found a partner with whom to critique the world. And they did.
16/
The mother daughter relationship is frought by nature. It is literally your very first relationship in the world with another human, and it becomes riddled with the million lacerations inflicted by life.
17/
By childhood. The teen years. Choices made. Disappointments on both sides. No one quite turning out to be exactly what the other hoped and expected.
18/
So I stand here, in the shadow of the life that gave me life. I stand here with love and appreciation, frustration and gratitude. Death is tricky that way. It doesn't simplify. It doesn't clarify. It only compounds the murkiness of life.
19/
I will take with me from my mother her love of cooking, her talent for bargain hunting, her deep held belief that anything Japanese was better than anything that wasn't. Her love of reading.
20/
And I know that despite my best efforts to quiet them, I will continue to hear her soundtrack of criticism running in the back of my mind. But most importantly, her artistic bent will be carried on by Rebecca, her love of reading and a good sport coat by Spencer.
21/
Her appreciation of humorous details by Benjamin, her love of a good debate by Danielle and her ultimate joy, talking on the phone, by Zelda. They might never watch the movie version of Heidi by choice, but they each had a real and true relationship with their grandmother.
22/
And they will hold on to a little piece of history through her many stories and anecdotes.

Mommy, I know it's been a rough ride but we will miss you. I love you. You are loved. I see you. You are seen.
/end

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More from @dianaberrent

14 Sep
Thought it was hard to find monoclonal antibodies before? Well, it's about to get harder.

@HHSGov just announced that rather than take orders from hospitals they will allocate to states based on hospitalization rates and have the states distribute them.
1/
This system will reward the states with the lowest vaccination rates and harm those with the highest.

Ex: NY has high vax rate and low hospitalization rate. NY will receive 4000 doses weekly. How will they be given out?
2/
If they are distributed to each participating hospital no one will provide the therapeutic. It is too costly to set up an infusion center if you only have 10 doses to give out weekly.

Who is harmed?
3/
Read 5 tweets
13 Sep
PSA: if you weren’t able to get tested for Covid and / or didn’t have a detectable antibody response you are STILL eligible to be treated at a Post-Covid Care Center.

Find one near(ish) you:
survivorcorps.com/pccc
From @CDCgov:

“At this time, no laboratory test can definitively distinguish post-COVID conditions from other etiologies, in part due to the heterogeneity of post-COVID conditions.”
Read 8 tweets
2 Sep
A 🧵 on death (not Covid related)...
I’m sitting in a hospice room on death watch waiting for my mother to take her last breath. That said, I have a few thoughts about death that I want to share. And, trigger warning, it won’t be easy to hear… but we can do hard things.
2/
My mother is almost 82 and is over 2 years into a stage 4 cancer diagnosis with a 6-9 month life expectancy.
3/
Read 21 tweets
3 Aug
“Our members are getting denied disability every day and this is a recognition of the wrap-around services that we are going to need to provide to all survivors of COVID.”
1/
#LongCovid abcactionnews.com/news/coronavir…
“And it’s not the end of the line either. It is a good first step. I worry that it’s a bit toothless because we still don’t have a diagnostic code for long-term COVID, said Diana Berrent, the founder of the organization @Survivor_Corps.
She’s preparing to lobby at the Capitol.
2/
“We need long-term COVID care centers throughout the country. I could go on and on. We need a billing code. We need a name,” Berrent said.”

3/
Read 4 tweets
2 Aug
“Right now, Berrent is focused on long COVID advocacy and convincing the CDC to mandate reporting of all breakthrough cases.

“We have to step in where nobody else is doing it, and that is ludicrous,” she said. “But if it’s necessary, then we’re here to do it.”
#LongCovid @CDCgov
“In my opinion, CDC should be tracking all consequences of breakthrough cases, not just hospitalization and death,” Akiko Iwasaki, the Yale University immunology professor at the forefront of long COVID research, said in an email.”
@VirusesImmunity @YaleMed
“Even mild or asymptomatic infection can lead to long COVID. Tracking this on a national scale would be very informative.” Iwasaki is one of the only experts to have stated outright that fully vaccinated people can still get long COVID.”
Read 4 tweets
22 Jul
Let's talk about breakthrough symptomatic infections in fully vaxxed adults...

Today @SurvivorCorps will meet with the @CDCgov to present our data and ask for changes in policy to reflect real world evidence.

@CDCgov is only tracking hospitalized cases so we did it instead.
/
We ran a poll of our 170K member group and had 1949 fully vaxxed adults participate.

Our Key Takeaways:

-Vaccines Work (but not all the time)

-Of 1949 fully vaxxed adults there were 44 breakthrough symptomatic cases (we couldn't measure asymptomatics for obvious reasons)
2/
-Vaccines will likely keep you from acute symptomatic Covid needing hospitalization

-*HOWEVER* 55% of breakthrough symptomatic cases led to Long Covid (this is staggering)

-(Narrator Voice: If I had J&J I would want a booster)
3/
Read 18 tweets

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