The latest ones appeared on my yoga mat. In downward dog, I looked down and realized the yellow lanterns I had always seen there were serpent heads, their bodies coiled beneath the spiraling mandala.

Once I saw the snakes, I couldn’t make them go back to being shiny, happy decorations.

It felt like that moment in The Sixth Sense when the boy tells Bruce Willis’s character, “I see dead people.” Bruce doesn’t get that he is one of the ghosts. He isn’t ready to see it yet.

Lately I’ve been wondering what else is right in front of me, waiting for me to be ready to take in.

Learning to see snakes

The snakes showed up late in the trip, after days crossing the Andes to sacred Inca and pre-Inca sites, where shamans guided us through rituals kept alive for centuries.

For all the lessons in staying present, part of me was already one week ahead, when Craig and I would leave Cary, our youngest, at college in North Carolina and drive home without him.

By Lake Titicaca, I was no longer just thinking about the serpent as a symbol of shedding. I wanted to feel what it meant. I plunged into the shockingly cold water, stayed under until I couldn’t take it anymore, and came out feeling I had left something behind. I just didn’t know what.

The next day, our bus pulled off the Inca highway for yet another serpent ceremony. From the road, I could make out only the serpent’s supposed head: a rounded rise of weathered stone with a small stone chamber on top. Whatever made it a snake disappeared into the landscape.

My brain went “Nope.”

After mountains that had begun to feel protective and alive, and logic-defying ruins, this roadside serpent stop required more imagination than awe.

Since I was co-leading the trip, I kept that review to myself. I followed the others toward the head, trusting our shaman guide hadn’t brought us to Peru’s equivalent of Lucy the Elephant.

By the time it was my turn at the head, I had mostly dropped the skepticism. I tucked a flower offering into a groove in the rock and asked the snake to take whatever in me was still clinging to the life I thought I was supposed to have. Then I followed the group beyond the head and onto the ridge, the serpent’s back.

I still couldn’t see it.

Somewhere along the way, I fell behind the others. The sun and altitude caught up with me, my head fogging like eyeglasses in sudden humidity as my legs began to wobble.

I looked down at the Inca highway below, then at the narrow ridge beneath my feet. The mottled stone suddenly looked like scales, and I could feel what I hadn’t been able to see from the head: I was walking the spine of a snake.

Through the fog came one clear thought: One wrong move and you’ll fall.

Then another thought cut through, surprisingly in Spanish.

No tengo miedo.

I am not afraid.

My breathing slowed, and my feet found footing again. I kept walking, arms spread like airplane wings when I needed them. By the last few steps, the brain fog was completely gone and I felt almost giddy stepping off the final rock. Fear had coiled itself around me, and I had stayed long enough to feel it loosen and fall away.

I wanted to bring that feeling home with me.

Another snake, this time between trolls

Less than a week later, I was in need of that No tengo miedo mojo.

I summoned it through the eight-plus hour drive from New Jersey to Chapel Hill. Through hauling Cary’s things up to his third-floor dorm room. Through wanting so badly for him to take this step into his own life while still searching for a loophole back to 2015. That was the one year Ravi, Lee and Cary were in elementary school together, when I could walk past one neighborhood building and know all three of my boys were safe inside.

At Hinton James Residence Hall that night, that old sense of having all three boys safely contained somewhere I could find them felt farther out of reach. Saying goodbye to Cary was hard, even though Craig and I weren’t leaving yet. We were staying two more days, through Ravi’s 23rd birthday. Since he died, we’ve always spent that day together as a family, and we didn’t want Cary facing it alone.

The next morning, Cary was off and running, leaving Craig and me alone together, outside the family roles that had always given us something to do. Fortunately, we had a troll trek.

I had read about a family of five giant trolls scattered across Dix Park in Raleigh. I knew artist Thomas Dambo’s work from Rusty, one of his trolls hidden in the South Jersey woods, and that his reclaimed-wood creatures come with stories you have to go looking for.

I love that kind of thing—public art with its own mythology, hidden in plain sight. It goes straight to the Muppet/Mermaid part of me.

Craig and I found the first three sculptures before the day got too hot, trying to figure out what story this troll family was telling—and why I cared so much about finding out. With two left, we debated whether to keep going.

Adventure, and the promise of milkshakes after, won out.

When we found the fourth troll, Dix, the youngest of the children, I held his hand for a picture and noticed a long coil of linked wood winding away from him through the trees.

My mind immediately went: Snake!

It took me straight back to Peru, and instinctively, I stepped onto its back. This snake felt playful, winding a few feet off the ground beneath shade trees. I let it lead me deeper in, certain the fifth and final troll was waiting at the other end.

Then the woods opened onto the fifth troll: the mother, enormous and stretched peacefully on her side. I loved that this snake had led me here—to a mother resting in the shade.

Except it hadn’t.

What I had followed wasn’t a snake at all. In Dambo’s story, the long coil is the mother’s tail, stretching more than 600 feet to her youngest child.

And then I saw what I had missed when I first took Dix’s hand. The troll child wasn’t attached to his mother’s tail. He was holding the end.

The timing was hard to miss. Cary had just started college; Lee would head back for his senior year a week later, and then the nest really would be empty. I had spent years bracing for what that would take from me. But here was a more interesting possibility: the line between us could stretch across the distance without any of us gripping too tightly.

I let the idea digest while the peanut-butter milkshake took care of my overheated body.

And still, my body was bracing for the drive home.

What was still coiled

The dread I had been trying not to name was Virginia.

Five years earlier, we had driven to the Shenandoah Valley for Spring Break with three sons and returned home with two.

Since then, our family had mostly avoided Virginia. Massanutten Mountain, where the accident occurred, was off limits. But really, any drive south of the Beltway set off alarms in me. When Cary wanted to check out Southern colleges, we flew down for the visits. I told myself he probably wouldn’t end up there.

Then UNC Chapel Hill became the obvious choice, and my brain kept staging the same eery scene: me driving north alone in our RAV4, while Virginia is for Lovers, the state’s tourism slogan, leered from the roadside like the “It” clown in a horror movie.

As drop-off drew closer, that imagined drive began to bleed into the old terror. My head would fog the way it had on the serpent in Peru, until danger was all I could see.

I knew where that feeling had first taken hold. At the accident scene, some part of me understood the truth about Ravi before I could let myself know it, before we had to confront it at the hospital. In that blur between knowing and not letting myself know, Virginia is for Lovers lodged itself in my brain as an enormous cosmic lie.

Because Virginia can’t be for lovers. It’s where love dies.

Over five years, I had found my way back to Ravi again and again, until I could feel the love between us without always having to pass through the way he died. But not everything had made it out.

Virginia is for Lovers was still down there somewhere, coiled in the dark.

The snake goes deeper

And there was the snake on my yoga mat again, its body trapped beneath the spiraling mandala, with only its head sticking out.

A few days later, a meditation in the woods with my friend Noreen went somewhere I hadn’t expected.

I rarely get very far with meditation. As my thoughts thin out and I get close to nothingness, some part of me panics and shuts the whole thing down. Since Peru, I think I’m getting closer.

Noreen and I walked to her favorite spot by a pond in her neighborhood woods. It was pretty and peaceful, though my newly Peru-inflated expectations had me noticing the swampy pond and highway first.

Improbably, it made me think of the Garden of Eden. Even paradise hadn’t been enough to keep its inhabitants from getting lost in fear and distraction. Maybe I didn’t need Peru after all.

Instead of trying to tune out the highway, I began sorting through the sounds: one bird call from another, then squirrels, wind through the trees, the highway beyond them. For a few seconds, there was only the listening. Then it all became noise again and I was thinking. So I started over: birds, squirrels, wind. Highway.

After a few passes through the sounds, I could still feel myself sitting beside the pond. At the same time, I could feel myself as the snake—my body coiled beneath the mandala, with only my head sticking out. I could breathe there, but suddenly that wasn’t enough.

The only way forward was back under the mandala. I slipped my head into the darkness and followed the spiral inward, trusting there was another way out. My body began to uncoil behind me. Flashes of light appeared until I found an opening at the center.

My head emerged first, then the rest of my body. I rose into the cobra and filled my whole snake body with breath. Yet I knew this wasn’t a place I could stay. I would have to make this passage again and again, hopefully with more ease. Knowing that, snake me focused on feeling the breath fully, fighting off thoughts that would take me away from it.

When I opened my eyes to the imperfect pond scene, I was almost as surprised by my willingness to trust the vision as I was by the vision itself.

Before Ravi died, I would have rejected all of this. Maybe I would have seen the snakes, but I would have dismissed them as my imagination run amok.

It makes sense that I became a journalist. I trusted facts. They could be checked and proven, used to make good decisions. That was how you kept the people you loved safe and alive.

Myth—Bible stories, spirit animals, messages from snakes—had always sounded like what people reached for when they didn’t have facts.

Then Ravi died and I had the facts. But they still couldn’t tell me where the love went, or how to follow it.

Over five years, I had found my way back to Ravi, until the love between us no longer has to pass through the facts of how he died. Now these snakes—and even a troll’s tail I had mistaken for one—were showing me another way.

Love had not died in Virginia. It had changed form. I just had to learn how to find it.

Following Ravi’s love kept leading me toward the life I was still here to make. And suddenly there was no getting around a question I had gotten very good at looking past: What did I want?

One answer kept showing up: writing.

I know what taking something seriously looks like; I built a life around raising three boys, mostly while working full-time. The frightening part is admitting how badly I want to give this more personal writing that kind of claim on my life now.

For too long, I’ve been waiting for the muses to come find me. But I had it backwards. I need to go looking for them the way we went looking for trolls—follow the stories that won’t leave me alone and keep going before I know where they’re taking me.

I suspect I’ll find the muses somewhere in the moonlight, although I have no idea what that means yet. But for once, I won’t be the journalist standing off to the side taking notes. I’ll step into the moonlight with them—toga, bare skin, whatever the occasion calls for—and dance loose the stories that have been coiled inside me too long.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end. It feels good to be back on Substack after a little hibernation.

If this story left you wondering what your own imagination might be trying to show you, Tina Green and I are opening another session of The Art of Putting Yourself First in October. It’s a place to follow those threads, get clearer about what you want and begin making choices that make more room for you.

Yearning, that uncomfortable yet expected guest, flooded in.

Oh, it’s you April third, said the voice in my mind.

It’s just another date on the calendar. Don’t give it more meaning.

It was tempting. She means well, this voice I call my unreliable narrator, so quick to spin a story meant to protect me from myself. For some time now, I’ve been drowning in a flood of conflicting emotions.

Because every day since April 3, 2021 carries the same knowing: Ravi, my firstborn son, the child who opened my heart to love, left his earthly body on that day.

At least the anticipatory dread was over.

Still lying in bed, I hesitated before glancing at my iPhone, holding on just a little longer before the heaviness could weigh me down.

The life we were still living

It was 8:21 a.m. While there’s no special significance to that time, my mind went searching, needing to attach meaning to it.

What were we doing at 8:21 a.m. on April 3, 2021?

We were still a family of five—two middle-aged parents and three teenage boys—piled into an Odyssey, the minivan that had never failed to carry us toward something worth remembering.

As the Odyssey moved through the Shenandoah Valley toward Montpelier, President James Madison’s plantation home, the morning light stretching across the road. The signs of spring awakening felt like a promise.

And then what happened?

My mind veered dangerously close to capitulating to the dark thoughts.

Was there anything we could have done differently? Anything that might have stopped Ravi from dying seven hours later along the same mountain road?

See, the unreliable narrator says, I told you so. If you just treat April third like any other day, it can’t hurt you like this.

But before I relented, tracing every turn, trying to find some wrinkle in time that could change the past, Moose, our high-energy rescue dog interrupted. In one fell swoop, he leapt onto the bed, onto my chest, and set to work licking my face.

His version of love was as overwhelming as ever, dog tongue inevitably finding my mouth and reaching into my nostrils. It was too much, and what I needed to lift myself out of bed.

Downstairs, the aftermath of Passover was everywhere—dirty dishes stacked, lettuce and parsley wilting on the Seder plate, shells from the traditional egg smash competition scattered across the floor.

Moose trotted past me carrying a small bone, displaying it like a prize.

I stood there for a second, watching him, wondering when and how he’d managed to hoist himself up onto the dining room table. Then I realized what it was:

The Paschal lamb.

The bone on the Seder plate, it represents lamb’s blood the Jewish slaves smeared on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would know to pass over their homes, sparing their firstborn sons from the ultimate, most horrific plague.

The bone serves as God’s promise to protect the Jews during their passage to freedom, a promise returned to each year in the telling.

So why didn’t it spare Ravi? Why didn’t anything?

And just like that, I was back in Egypt, feeling slavery not as something that happened thousands of years ago to someone whose trace DNA shows up in a 23andMe report. Egypt is here and now, in the moments when I’m unable to loosen my grip on what has already happened, a past that cannot be changed.

What it takes to leave Egypt

In my personal version of Egypt, the message of leaving—of stepping out of the fear that so easily drags me down—still requires a kind of faith that’s hard to trust, especially knowing that even with plagues and parted seas, my ancestors still had a hard time figuring out if they should stay or go. They questioned, they hesitated, they complained. They created false gods to worship, but that’s a bit later in the story.

Here I am being asked to leave my Egypt without the benefits of the age of miracles.

Still, for the first time, I can see myself in the story and feel what that must have taken for enslaved people to follow Moses, this outsider raised by the royals who exploited them, with a speech impediment, whose earlier attempts had already unleashed chaos without changing anything.

I picture Moses—not Moose—rousing me from that place I’d slipped into. Moses’ cooler older sister, Miriam, is there too. Her tambourine, partially concealed in a tie-dyed backpack with her Grateful Dead cassette tapes, carries the promise of greener pastures on the other side of the Nile.

They deliver an urgent message: Go quickly. Grab the unleavened bread, put it on your back and don’t look back.

It must have been a tough sell. After so many plagues and false starts, the departing Jews surely realized freedom would not arrive as immediate gratification.

And the siblings’ sales pitch likely didn’t mention 40 years of desert wandering.

What we left behind

Five years ago, we my family left home on our spring break trip to Virginia, it was the morning after the first seder, the last holiday we celebrated so completely with Ravi. We left quickly, before everything was put away, before the house was reset.

We had skipped out on the second night Seder, leaving dishes and Passover remnants behind—plastic frogs and wild animals and other toys representing plagues that were scattered in ways that now feel almost too on the nose.

I think I made it two days into vacation without eating bread before I got sloppy and then gave it up.

At the time, it felt reasonable although I carried some Jewish guilt. In those waning days of Covid, we were just excited to pull off a vacation combining what we loved as a family nature and American history. This after so many months living with the uncertainty of sickness and social isolation.

And still, my mind keeps returning to that moment of leaving, as if there’s something in it I didn’t fully understand then.

When leaving Egypt felt like a typo

In the past, that central idea in our Haggadah—the book we read from at the seder to tell the story of leaving Egypt—and, really, in Judaism itself—always fell flat for me.

“And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what God did for me when I, myself, went out of Egypt.”

That’s the line that’s meant to make it personal, the rationale for eating the bitter herb, (in our case it’s horse radish) to taste the bitterness of slavery as if it were our own.

As a kid, following our lifeless Maxwell House Haggadahs, the line confused me. Reciting it was like it was a school assignment. I remember focusing on reading the words right, trying to prove I was a better reader than my older brother Abe.

The idea that eating a disgusting vegetable was supposed to awaken something in me never crossed my mind. Maybe it was a biblical-times typo.

Also, the part about the four children— the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask— rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t think there was a lane for me.

A middle child, I most identified with the wicked one who rejected the story as something that happened long ago to ancient people so different than me. And yet… I spent a lot of time wondering why the so-called People of the Book would fall for that.

I suppose my curiosity kept the door open to discovering my inner wise child. So maybe that’s why now, fueld by Ravi’s love, my desire to personally leave Egypt feels so urgent. This time around, with Passover overlapping with an anniversary that is anything but ordinary, I do feel the weight of what those words are asking of me.

The Groundhog Day of Grief

Passover is starting to feel less like a single exodus and more like the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character relives the same day. over and over again, until he finally stops living it the same way.

In that sense, the Exodus isn’t something that happened once—it’s every day. It’s every moment I’m faced with a choice: Stay in the story sounds solid but is a lie, or recognize the ways my mind can twist even my growth into something to fear.

My unreliable narrator is a pro at spin. She can take the ways I’ve actually broken free over the past five years—leaving my full-time magazine job, writing about my grief, teaching about self-love—and recast them as failure, instability, something reckless instead of something more true to who I am becoming.

The signs of the narrator’s sway are obvious if I’m willing to see them. I’ve stopped Substacking regularly. I’m still collecting thoughts, turning them over, but not committing them to the page.

And I talk a good game about letting go of the past without actually getting past it.

This feels like a lot, too much, for a mother to take on on the fifth anniversary of her son’s death. And yet I know there is no other choice.

I want out of Egypt.

What I wanted most out of April 3 is what I want of every day— to fully feel the love that Ravi awakened in me, to remind myself what I know is true—that this love cannot be created or destroyed. I want to let it wash over me and then release it back into a world so in need of that kind of love, as I am so in need of it. But I can only feel it when I let go of grip of the past.

Not Once. Every Day.

So once I came downstairs, led by Moose but also Moses and Miriam, I decided not to wait for the matzah to rise. I asked Craig to start the day with me in our hottub.

When he admitted he too was fighting the same impulse—not to give the day more weight than it already carried, not to tip it toward darkness—it came as a relief.

We sat there, watching birds move between the young maple planted in Ravi’s memory, the feeder, and the older trees beyond. Meeting in the moment felt like a real step out of Egypt, or at least a break in the Groundhog Day loop.

Too many times, we forget to do this. We buy into the lie that talking about Ravi—the accident, the ways we’ve tried and failed to meet each other in grief over the last five years—will only cause more pain.

Later, we met up with extended family to hike in the Wissahickon Valley. Immersed in the beauty of these ancient woods reminiscent of the last hikes we took with Ravi during Passover give years ago, I let that memory move through me. First the sadness. And then, because I stayed with it, something else had room to arrive—the beauty of how fully Ravi loved our family hikes, the way his presence and joy infused everything, how much of him still moves through all of us when we’re together, including him in our time together.

It was a good day. It really was.

And then the next day came. And fog returned, along with a new appreciation how that comes wth the terrority of being human.

Hello Egypt. Hello Groundhog’s Day.

And again, I was asked to choose.

And I remembered in that moment to reach for the love.

Just under it, on my right arm, is a mermaid—my first and only tattoo—inked last year when swimming crossed a line I could no longer ignore.

After that, mermaids kept finding me — an Ariel dive stick from my favorite lifeguard, jewelry skewing sea green, mystic purple and ocean blue, my social feed reorienting around all things aquatic.

There was even a merman — a very manly felted Christmas ornament.

They were all playfully and safely symbolic.

Then, at our Chanukkah party, my husband, Craig, handed me a gift that moved things out of the metaphorical realm.

The wrapping paper strained around its awkward, fan-like shape. My body clocked it before my brain did. A shape like that can’t hide.

When I pulled the paper back, there it was — a foam monofin, paired with a nylon tail patterned in blue and purple scales.

I should have laughed. Or hugged him. Or at least said something gracious.

Instead, I froze.

Time did something strange. Surrounded by wrapping paper remains, bubble wrap, open boxes, and family chaos, I was also swimming underwater, hovering over the ocean floor, and straining to hear something. It was a faint sound, echoey but just out of reach, maybe some form of echolocation.

And ever since, a line from one of my favorite movies has been looping:

Am I a man, or am I a Muppet?

Which made the truer question unavoidable.

Am I a woman, or am I a mermaid? Seriously, what kind of mermaid am I?

Before Mermaids, There Were Muppets

Man or Muppet? Muppet or Man? The question sits at the heart of the 2011 Muppets Movie. It is an echo of the one I’ve carried but managed to evade for so long.

Gary, a Muppet-loving human played by Jason Segel, sings his way through an identity crisis. Am I a man, or am I a Muppet?

His brother Walter—a Muppet who passes as human in our world—faces the inverse: Muppet or man?

Before the climactic reveal, Kermit the Frog names the stakes: Growing up is deciding who you want to be.

Ever since the tail arrived, that song has been circling closer, waiting for me to catch on.

It’s not a question confined to the Muppet universe. Most of us will face itçsome sooner, some later. Do you live from the part of yourself that feels fully alive, expressive, and possibly very embarrassing? Or do you keep yourself presentable, sanding down that spark into something safer, hoping it still shines?

Was the mermaid tail going to force me to decide?

It’s time to put on makeup…

The Muppet–mermaid dilemma pulls me back in time to when the fault line first came to light.

I was seven years old in 1976 when The Muppet Show arrived. Too old for Sesame Street, I wasn’t sure how to live inside myself, and the clues around me didn’t seem to make sense.

The Muppetverse felt like the most exciting world stage. Even in my limited experience, I could picture the grand theater, all gilt and velvet lines. Philadelphia? New York City. Maybe London?

Unlike Sesame Street, where humans and Muppets lived as neighbors, the felted ones owned this world. The humans—even the brightest stars of the era—were merely passing through.

Everything hinged on one mission: the show must go on! But it was always one beat from implosion. Tempers flared. Muppets blew up—or were launched from cannons. There were too many acts vying for too little time, along with other show-dooming snafus. That the center held at all—by Kermit’s faith and relentless optimism—was reason enough to love the show.

And then there was Miss Piggy.

In her mind, she was Elvis at the height of his Vegas residency—certain the world revolved around her talent, her charm, her je ne sais quoi. She is the very reason I would later take French in school.

She hit a frequency I hadn’t yet named. I’d spent my preschool years pretending I was a boy, steering clear of anything that felt girly. Miss Piggy was the first feminine figure who electrified me. She was a plus-size pig in sparkly couture when I was starting to feel wrong in my own body. She could sing and dance in stilettos and follow it up with a Kung Fu kick — still wearing them.

Kermit’s coolness never shamed her; it only fueled her verve. Sharing the stage with divas like Liza Minnelli or Dolly Parton, Miss Piggy knew her place was to upstage — lashes fluttering, gloved hooves squared off, daring anyone to try her.

She performed her excess. I had to conceal mine. Awkward moments lined up like evidence — proof that crying, questioning, wanting too much was dangerous. I don’t remember the moments anymore. Only the strategy of burying all of it in tightly-bound places out of sight that I am only begining to unpack.

What I didn’t know then is that part of what I was carrying had a history: the vaudevillian bend in my family line that never quite made it to me.

My grandfather, Jay Jacob Hornick, managed burlesque theaters up and down the East Coast from the 1930s through the 1960s. I’ve heard the outlines: a shorthand sharp enough to lift jokes from rival houses got him in the door; an after-hours life that included bailing strippers out of jail after raids; Atlantic City beach days with comedians like Abbott and Costello.

But the black-and-white photos in my basement give back almost nothing. No kicklines. No feather boas. No record of the spectacle’s height or the price it exacted. Just faces frozen long after the music stopped.

Whatever didn’t get passed down had to land somewhere. For me, Jay Jacob Hornick’s namesake, it arrived years later as a larger-than-life puppet pig hogging the spotlight.

Miss Piggy yearned. She loved. She loathed. I wanted to be as alive as her, to be Moi-self. Yet, even as a kid, I sensed the tenderness and hurt fueling the bravado — which made her seem more real to me than most humans.

I watched every episode. Owned the merch, slept on Muppet sheets, under a Kermit comforter. Rainbow Connection — one of the few songs I could play on piano by heart— lodged long before Man or Muppet ever did.

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it.
It’s something that I’m supposed to be.

— “Rainbow Connection”

The Rainbow Connection

The Muppets’ glow didn’t dim for me after the show’s final curtain call in 1981. My Kermie comforter, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, and Jim Henson’s relentless faith in creativity stayed close — even if it took me years to understand why.

When I had my own children, there was never a question. They would know the joy of Muppets madness.

Before cynicism could take hold, I introduced them to Liza Minnelli as Lola the showgirl—the object of a deadly rivalry between oversized, dancing Muppets at the Copacabana. They fell hard for Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, enchanted by monsters and vorpal swords. And they understood, early on, that I carried a Miss Piggy–level karate chop should the moment call for it.

It all aged so well.

By the time the 2011 movie arrived, Kermit’s voice was as familiar as any trusted grown-up.

Even if the Muppets didn’t occupy the same central place in Ravi, Lee, and Cary’s lives, the spirit of the show found its way to them. I see it in their reflex toward creativity and connection, in how they turn to imagination when the world grows heavy. That feels like such a gift now, as they learn how to move forward without Ravi, the brother who lived that instinct out loud.

All of us under its spell

After the mermaid tail arrived, the echolocation gained volume.

Woman or mermaid wasn’t a question so much as a hum in my head asking me to follow it. And when that happens, my mind goes looking for the music. Not just Man or Muppet, but the deeper cuts.

I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole, landing back in Kermit’s swamp, backstage as Miss Piggy and Elton John belted out “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” grooving to the all-pig, Viking rendition of “In the Navy.”

Being inside the zany chaos had my heart singing. Then more signals started surfacing.

A reel on my Facebook feed flashed Fraggle Rock—Jim Henson’s fantasy world that arrived after the Muppets. A brief mention of a “local connection” was enough to set my journalist mind humming.

The name jumped out at me: John Tartaglia

I’d seen him onstage in Avenue Q—when I was nine months pregnant with Ravi.

I still remember the excitement of discovering the musical about off-brand Gen X Muppets and humans living on the seedier side of the avenues, and then realizing there was a hitch. The opening date landed within days of my due date.

One of the first ways motherhood would reshape my life was suddenly clear: I might not get to see Avenue Q.

So I asked the child inside me—unnamed, gender still a mystery—to wait. Just a little longer. For both of us.

Ravi did. He waited.

The show was electric. Through the puppet Princeton, John Tartaglia sang about purpose, asking, “What do you do with a B.A. in English?”

My first-born child waiting patiently so we could take it in together. Then Ravi Isaak Bloom made his entrance into the world about a week later, on August 15, 2003.

I didn’t know then how long it would take before I would let that question of purpose become mine.

Returning to these modern mermaid times, I noticed something else I’d somehow missed all along: John Tartaglia grew up just a few towns away from me, in Maple Shade, New Jersey.

I just followed it — pitching John’s story, now as the creative director of Fraggle Rock: Back on the Rock, to my editor at SJ Magazine.

When John agreed to a Zoom interview, my heart danced. It felt like a yes from the universe.

To prepare, I went back. I’d watched Fraggle Rock in the ’80s, but it hadn’t landed the way the Muppet Show had. I was older then. More guarded. Still, rewatching it now—alongside the new version on Apple TV+—the parallel was impossible to miss.

Like me, John was seven when Jim Henson’s Muppets entered his imagination.

Unlike me, he went all in, moving straight toward what made him feel most alive. He made puppets, wrote Fraggle scripts, and staged Fraggle shows. When that choice made him a target of bullying, he trusted it more.

At nine, John wrote to Jim Henson himself, announcing his love of puppetry and certainty that this was the life he meant to live.

You’ll have to check out the published SJ Mag profile to hear how that story unfolds. I’ll just say this: I felt the Rainbow Connection.

And it wasn’t weird at all that I let slip that Miss Piggy is my spirit animal.

Jim Henson, Idea Man

Tracing John’s path took me where this has always been heading.

Back to the rock, to the source of all this magic: Jim Henson.

I recently watched Idea Man. Ron Howard’s 2024 documentary about the man whose mind seemed to be in perpetual motion.

Henson didn’t set out to build a puppet empire or revolutionize children’s TV. Puppetry was not the intended destination but a doorway, a way into live theater, storytelling, to bringing imagination to life. He was an awkward boy genius when he met Jane, his future wife, in a college puppetry class. A fellow artist and idea person, she fell hard, and together they built the foundation for everything that followed. Her hands were everywhere in that early work, even as history has edited her to the margins.

The film makes clear that Jim Henson was in a race against time.

His ideas were as explosive as Muppets shot out of cannons. They came fast and furious—characters, songs, worlds, technologies that didn’t exist until he needed to invent them.

You can feel that urgency everywhere. In the avant-garde side projects. In Sesame Street’s counting songs, numbers race and ricochet with kinetic energy. The joy is unmistakable, but so is the intensity and velocity — like a meteor shower.

Watching, I kept bracing for the explanation. The loss that would justify the frenetic pace.

And there it was. Jim lost his older brother, his best friend, suddenly, when he was young.

The documentary doesn’t frame it as the reason for his unleashed genius, but it does illuminate something else: that sense of time pressing in. Like Alexander Hamilton, writing as if the clock were already ticking louder for him than for everyone else.

Jim Henson died suddenly at 53, leaving notebooks full of unrealized projects — worlds he never got a chance to bring to life himself.

He ran out of time, just as we all are. Like Ravi did.

Writing for me always becomes an exercise in making sense of the loss I live with every day, and sometimes that means searching for clues to keep living.

When I think about my son’s life in those terms, one moment keeps rising to the surface: the night I took him to see Hamilton for his birthday. It was the first day of his sophomore year of high school. I watched him watching, and it was almost like seeing Edison’s light bulb switch on. After that, he moved differently. He went for things, trusting his body more as an athlete, trying out for our synagogue musical, landing the starring role.

Ravi started living like someone who understood the countdown was on.

For years, I thought of genius as a separating word—a way to explain why some people take creative risks and others don’t. I don’t believe that anymore. I think ideas are communal. Otherworldly. We’re filters, not owners. The difference isn’t who sees the spark; it’s who lets it move through them—who stays a step ahead of paralysis and keeps creating even when the mind is busy offering practical and logical reasons to turn away.

I like to believe Ravi let the spark in the night of our shared Hamilton experience.

Here’s the part I don’t love admitting: I wasn’t ready to answer the call until everything broke.

And once I didn’t have a choice anymore, once staying the same was no longer survivable, the questions I’d been circling finally demanded answers.

Which brings me back — inevitably — to the mermaid fin. What is it asking of me already?

I’ve taken it to the pool a few times. It’s awkward. It’s conspicuous. It’s also fun and elicits smiles and conversations from other swimmers. I can only really use it when I can get a lap lane all to myself and time to experiment.

I don’t think there’s an answer in that, but there’s a lot to unpack there. It reminds me why my brain is circling the question. My purpose has always been tied to writing, the healing waters are leading me there, wherever there is.

Woman or Mermaid, Mermaid or Women? I’ve never been comfortable with questions that flatten a life into two options.

For now, I’m a mermaid.

Muppet Show Reboot?

Thanks, dear readers, for sticking with me.

I’ve been circling this story since late December, ever since a mermaid fin entered my life and refused to stay symbolic. It’s unfolded slowly, in fits and starts.

Then, last month, the 50th anniversary of The Muppet Show arrived—unexpectedly perfect timing —and reminded me it’s never too late to return to the questions that got buried.

It’s a relief to finally publish, as I’ve been wearing my Miss Piggy shirt for about two weeks straight for inspiration. I hope that helps manifest a reboot of the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational show!

For weeks, I’ve been naming 2026 my Year of A Space Oddity, marking the choice to leave the familiar orbit for parts unknown. And still, I’ve been doing everything except taking the leap.

Writer’s block is the excuse. The truth is more straightforward. I’ve been circling something intimidating — the question of whether I’m ready to go as deep as I say I want to go.

As I’m writing (finally), I’m in the quiet lobby of the Saugerties Holiday Inn Express, gazing at the Catskills mountain range. The boys are out skiing. Craig is next to me on his laptop. I keep thinking of the mountains as Apus — the Andean way of viewing mountains as beings that don’t conform to human timelines. Peru is on my mind because I’ll be co-leading a women’s group there this summer, but it’s more than that.

This isn’t about getting ready — it’s about stopping the delay.

Watching Lazarus Resurrect

On the drive back from dropping the kids off at Hunter Mountain, I streamed Blackstar, Bowie’s final album, recorded as cancer was overtaking his body. Before starting this Substack, I watched the video of the song Lazarus on YouTube.

Lazarus — the New Testament figure raised from the dead by Jesus.

In the video, Bowie lies on a hospital bed that seems to levitate. Blindfolded, buttons are over his eyes. His arms move around; the body stays put. What’s holding him there isn’t visible, but it’s felt.

This is a body that once defined beauty, set fashion, broke wide open gender and sexuality — and now it’s betraying him. You see it in the way he twists and strains, still testing the limits of what’s possible.

But there’s only one way out.

“Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he sings — refusing to let the failing body be the final word.

I’m transfixed, feeling the tension in my own body. What I’m watching stops being about Bowie, and the question turns toward me.

I Asked Before I Was Ready

With the Apus as witness, I ask to take this on — to get out of my own way, including the familiar fear that writing about myself isn’t the path, it’s indulgent or beside the point. This question has been with me longer than I’ve been willing to admit.

At the beginning of the Jewish calendar year before last – in 5784 – my synagogue sisterhood gathered to make vision boards. Collage supplies were spread across the tables. We used glue sticks, scissors, markers and stacks of old magazines — Home & Garden types, People, and a Rolling Stone.

That’s the one I honed in on. I don’t remember the article. The content didn’t matter. David Bowie’s focused face belonged on my vision board. I wasn’t sure why, only that it needed to take center stage.

The finished board isn’t especially beautiful. Still, I hung it in my office, above the diploma announcing the completion of my Master of Arts in Writing from Manhattanville College in 2002 — earned while working full time as a journalist, just before Craig and I stepped into our marriage.

The diploma marks a real accomplishment. But it also serves as a reminder of one of many attempts I’ve made over the years to really give writing a go — a declaration made before I was ready to follow through.

I finally understand what was happening these past few weeks: I was inviting Bowie in while keeping a little distance, aware that actually answering that invitation could come at a cost.

My Space Oddity

Before New Year’s, I was declaring it out loud: I’m going on my Space Oddity. The countdown was on. I test-marketed it, observing the reaction of friends and family. I watched myself react to their reactions. And the manipulative algorithms that power social media did their part, too. My Instagram and Facebook feeds are rife with advertisements for Bowie-related consumption, including a hideous fleece Space Oddity-themed sweatshirt that is powerfully seductive.

I kept taking Bowie in — the way I take in the mountains — not trying to master anything, just letting the scale of it register.

On New Year’s Eve, Bowie was the soundtrack Craig and I took into the Hot Tub of Truth, not talking it through, just letting the music seep in. It felt important not to rush to understanding.

Ziggy Stardust is so brash.

A rock god from Mars, here to deliver us from an apocalypse, Ziggy’s brazenness is intoxicating and otherworldly. Bowie understood that the further he pushed boundaries, the more power he had to jolt people awake.

And still — Ziggy burned out. The rock god was overtaken, collapsing on stage under the weight of his own myth.

What I didn’t realize until recently is how literal that danger was.

A few years later — during his Thin White Duke years — Bowie was deeply immersed in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, drawn to its symbols, diagrams, and language for making sense of inner worlds. At the same time, he was entangled in the occult, in heavy drug use, in paranoia. Light and darkness ran through him at once.

That combination nearly killed him.

When I place Lazarus in time — end-of-life Bowie, 2015 — it puts me right back in my own life then. Those were the years when my attention was poured almost entirely into our children — their joy, their safety, their becoming. Ravi, especially, was a driving force. All three boys were in elementary school together—the only year that ever happened. I was working full-time as a newspaper editor and still choosing to spend what little spare energy I had as PTA president, and carpooling the kids to hockey, karate, Hebrew school, play dates.

Looking back, I can see how familiar that pattern was. I was putting everyone else’s needs first, filling my days so I didn’t have to sit too long with the awareness that something in my own life wasn’t being fully lived.

I can feel that now without judgment. And I can finally let it go.

When Blackstar was released in 2016, it intrigued me. Later that year, Leonard Cohen — the Jewish songwriter whose work has always wrestled with God and death — released You Want It Darker. Both are unmistakably dark, end-of-life work, saturated with reckoning and an unblinking stare at mortality.

I recognized this back then, bookmarked them, and set them aside. I knew both works would stop me cold once I was finally willing to stop being so busy, ready to feel. I didn’t know when that would be.

What’s changed isn’t that I suddenly decided to “step into my power.” It’s that I can see, finally, how long this question has been weighing me down— and that I’m the one who has to make a move. Not wait for Bowie energy to take over my body or guide my fingers across the keyboard.

The Tap on the Shoulder

Around the New Year, as we listened to Bowie and talked in the hot tub about what we want to take into 2026 and leave behind, Craig said he felt I was entering a new stage of grief around Ravi.

At first, I resisted the framing, distrustful of what he meant. But the more I sit with it, the more it makes sense.

When Ravi was alive — a living, breathing boy, my earthly son — the love between us felt complete. What I see now is that this sense of completeness was a fiction I lived inside.

Ravi was always a conduit: between God and me, between me and love itself, the love I’m meant to move through the world. The heaviness of grief is wanting to return to that fiction — to the before-times, when the love felt contained.

I didn’t lose that conduit when he died. I lost the story I was living inside.

This new stage of grief is no longer about busyness or survival logistics. It’s about staying connected to a larger current — one that asks me to reimagine love rather than trying to reclaim the fiction version that weighs me down.

Ravi taught me how to access it. He still does. But I have to keep choosing the path of light, for it is easily obscured.

That’s where Bowie comes back in for me — not Ziggy’s excess, not the chaos that nearly destroyed him, but Lazarus. End-of-life Bowie, making art about dying without smoothing it over, without offering a sanitized version of the unknowable.

This New Year’s resolution isn’t late. It’s landing during Philly Loves Bowie Week — the days that orbit his birth on January 8, 1947, and his death on January 10, 2016. Philadelphia doesn’t treat Bowie like nostalgia. He stays alive here — on the radio, in clubs, in the collective memory of the city where he recorded during his Young Americans era. His energy belongs to this place.

I got a preview just before Christmas in Asbury Park. We were at the Stone Pony, our annual pilgrimage to see Low Cut Connie, my favorite live band. Early in the set, they slipped into a joyful cover of Young Americans. I felt it instantly — like a tap on the shoulder for the countdown to my own Space Oddity to begin.

That kind of invitation isn’t neutral.

In Bowie parlance, there’s potential to be putting out fire with gasoline.

But I’ve already been in the dark. I’ve walked through what most parents would call unlivable. What I know now is this: continuing my relationship with Ravi means feeling his love fully — and then doing the harder thing: letting the love move outward.

When I cling to the fiction that we could return to the before-times — that he’s still a breathing human I can hold onto — the love collapses in on itself. It turns heavy. It pulls me down. That’s where darkness lies.

Knowing this changes how I relate to risk. It doesn’t make me immune to seduction, but it makes me less likely to mistake it for depth.

I’m not confused about what choosing Bowie asks of me. It’s me giving myself permission to be brave — and the clarity to remember that real bravery never waits for permission.

I hope 2026 gives you the courage to step into whatever has been waiting for you too.

An Invitation

Bravery doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it shows up as a quiet yes — a willingness to go somewhere unfamiliar and let it change you.

For me, this summer’s journey to Peru is walking that path. With my soul sister Tina Tina Green, I’ll be co-leading a women’s trip to the Andes. If this Substack landed close to home and you’re feeling the pull to do something brave and embodied, this might be your next step too. We’re still gathering the group.

As some might know, I’m writing my memoir. My journal entries and my drive to keep writing are pushing me toward it. And even though sharing these raw pieces on Substack still feels scary, it pushes me to plug away at the book and to show up here.

What follows is an excerpt from the chapter in which the Hot Tub of Truth makes its debut — how it became the place where real, honest conversations happen, the ones grief and marriage keep demanding of us.

I’d love to know what resonates.

Much love,
JJF

The Words I Shouldn’t Have Said

“I don’t see the you I fell in love with anymore.”

The words spilled out before I could stop them—careless, sharper than I meant. They landed like a shark attack, not the truth I was reaching for but couldn’t yet name.

Craig flinched, like he’d taken an invisible punch to the gut. I wished, instantly, for an after-the-fact edit button. Jayne Unplugged really is the rawest cut.

What I meant was this: more than four years after Ravi’s death, we’re too often in parallel play—side by side but not joined. Too often, grief widens the gaps between us when all we both want is to meet inside it. And that distance hurts almost as much as missing our firstborn son.

To love, honor & cherish

When we married in 2002, we thought our vows covered every possible storm. But losing a child isn’t choppy weather; it’s an extinction-level event. No promise is built to absorb that kind of shock.

Even in the “good years,” when we assumed we were on solid ground, we poured so much into our kids and too often left our marriage a landscape we didn’t tend.

Ravi’s death didn’t create the fault lines — it just made them impossible to ignore. We grew softer with our children, but tentative with each other. Our grief kept moving in different directions, and the space between us kept catching on the same old cracks — what I’ve been calling, as shorthand, the same f*&king argument.

So when that string of unkind words tumbled out, they landed exactly where we’re already the most breakable.

Craig looked like he was watching his world collapse—divorce papers, college bills unpaid, the house full of our family’s memories soon to belong to some young couple who still believe love can withstand everything.

I could almost trace the flicker of fear moving through him, shaped by his father’s unraveling, the one that has shadowed him ever since.

In that moment, I hated that I had become the person who triggered such a painful echo of a memory.

But this is how it happens with us: one small spark—a missed text, a tone, a blunt first-draft sentence—and suddenly we’re back in the same f*&king argument, just a variation on the theme.

For the longest time, it felt like an infinity loop, a rerun of every argument we thought we’d outgrown. Yet when I pause, I can see it—we’re getting quicker at spotting the mic drop. And also that precise moment when I remember a better version of myself exists, and I know to choose water over warfare.

That morning, instead of walking away, I took a breath and said, “Let’s get in the Hot Tub of Truth.”

Couples therapy in chlorine

Of all things, it’s the 2010 movie Hot Tub Time Machine that inspired us to call ours “The Hot Tub of Truth.” Something about the absurdity of four grown men accidentally tripping the space-time continuum in a ski-resort whirlpool returns when Craig and I dip into our own inflatable cauldron for Mermaidism’s version of couples therapy.

In the movie, four washed-out friends climb into a grimy hot tub, spill something questionable on the controls, and boom—they’ve launched straight into a journey to their unfinished pasts. The ’80s kitsch—Miami Vice tees, Walkmans, brick-sized “portable” phones—sets the scene. But beneath the raunchy slapstick is a primal longing: the fantasy of returning to the moment you’d give anything to redo.

The plot hinges on a truth I’ve learned from water — that even in a grimy, time-bending, fictional whirlpool, it’s safe to dip into what we’ve tried to outrun.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wished, more than once, that our hot tub was magic—a portal activated by incense and some whispered phrase only the two of us know. Something that could carry us back to the before-times, when Ravi was alive and his curiosity and joy set the rhythm of our family.

But real life doesn’t work like that.

We call ours the Hot Tub of Truth because its magic is of an ordinary but powerful nature: somehow warm water, a delicate mix of chemicals and steam rising skyward can blur the harsh edges of reality.

From there, we can at least try to find our way back to each other.

Notes from a Borrowed Tub

Before we had our own, I’d already begun to understand that a hot tub can be a container where truths rise like steam. It’s a different portal than the deep-water alchemy of my swim practice. In lap lanes and open water, truth comes through motion and held breath — surrendering to depth and letting my body work through fear, stroke by stroke.

Hot-tub truth arrives in stillness. What loosens there rises with the steam, lifted into air that somehow knows how to recycle even the hardest thoughts and emotions.

I began to understand this earlier this year, while staying with my friend Tina in California. I found myself slipping into her new, inflatable hot tub, curious about what might surface.

Without the propulsion of swimming, I stayed still long enough to notice what usually slips past me. In that contained warmth, memories surfaced more gently — not something to outrun, but something I could stay with—a softer way for truth to come up for air.

And it made me wonder whether water might make it less scary for Craig and me to speak the grief we so often tiptoe around.

Back home, I persuaded him that we should get one too, half-joking that if anything could save our marriage, it was a hot tub of truth.

He was already halfway there. During the pandemic, we’d watched the era of the inflatable hot tub arrive — sturdy little cocoons, nothing like the shallow plastic pools we once filled for splashing toddlers, but also not the kind that required a construction crew or a fence tall enough to blot out the woods. Just something simple that could hold heat, gravity, and us.

So we ordered one on Amazon, and by the next afternoon, a huge box was on our driveway. Craig set it on the back deck, bordered by woods and facing the red maple tree we planted for Ravi in those first raw months, when we had no idea how to honor anything except by planting something that could outlive us.

That backyard view is part of the draw. In the fall, the Ravi tree blazes bright gold to red while the rest still cling to green. From the tub, it feels like a reminder: brilliance belongs to those who turn toward the light, not to those who get to stay the longest.

That’s the kind of revelation I can only absorb slowly, and water is the one place that invites that kind of listening. So the Hot Tub of Truth has become the warm pause between us. No sharks circling here. No scripts. No defenses. Just two hurt humans trying to remember how to connect.

Epilogue

This is still a work in progress. And even on the days when I question myself, the universe keeps finding small ways to nudge me forward.

A few weeks ago, my neighbor Karleen handed me a book called The Mermaid Atlas, filled with stories of Merfolk from around the world. Later that day, a package arrived that stopped me in my tracks. Carol Woodman — whom I met briefly at the Greenwich Craft Faire when I bought her beautiful book Ecology of Grief, written for her son Mark — sent me “mermaid tears” jewelry passed down from her 100-year-old friend who died last year.

I don’t pretend to know what all of this means. But each time I consider pulling back, something like this finds its way to me — another reminder that the story is still unfolding, and that maybe I’m meant to keep going.

And now, with the holidays — a time when we all feel Ravi’s presence so strongly and miss him so fiercely — mermaids are manifesting the way dinosaurs once did. Craig bought me a tail that may yet transform me into an anatomically-correct mermaid.

It’s amazing! And yet it brings up questions… I’m not sure if this is the kind of mermaid I am. I started calling Mermaidism a religion more as a reminder to myself to take my healing seriously. And yet I’m willing to dive deeper. Craig and I plan to take it to the pool on Christmas day and I’ll give it a try.

Sending love and peace to all!

I was deeply honored that he invited me into that space to talk about my healing work—especially the way grief can become an opening to love rather than a barrier to it.

Going into the interview, I was nervous; I knew that in the wrong hands, I could have sounded like a lunatic. But Rabbi Address listens in a way that brings clarity to even the most complicated truths. Through our conversation, I found myself speaking about grief, loss, and the unexpected path back to spirit and hope. And he even gave me the room to riff on Mermaidism, meeting the idea with real curiosity and respect. He helped me articulate how that refuge became the beginning of a new sense of safety and belonging.

Listening back, I realized something unexpected: I’m no longer cringing at the sound of my own voice. That self-consciousness has fallen away. Maybe you’ll hear pieces of your own story reflected in mine.

Here’s the full interview.

Welcome back and thanks for sticking with me. This is the final of three excerpts from the chapter in my book-in-progress about my encounters with mediums—the chapter where I trace the moment when seeking Ravi turned into actually hearing him.

This part picks up with the reading that went deeper than I expected, and somehow landed in the part of me that was finally ready.

What Finally Got Through

By the time Nadine entered my life, I’d already sought out Ravi through two different mediums—part hopeful, part skeptical, never fully one or the other.

But Nadine felt different from the moment she heard Ravi’s name.

Lisa met Nadine at Kripalu, a yoga and healing retreat center in the Berkshires. They were finishing up a class when Nadine mentioned she’d recently begun reading tarot cards. Lisa was intrigued, and before long, she was talking about me and Ravi.

As Lisa tells it, Ravi was looking out for me.

“Nadine asked, ‘Is Ravi tall and thin, with sandy-ish floppy hair? Because he’s standing here, and he wants me to talk to his mom.’”

Nadine didn’t ask for money. She said Ravi reminded her of her own sons.

Although she’d felt these intuitive nudges her whole life—and hadn’t always known what to make of them—she was still new to this. Connecting Ravi to me would be the first time she’d ever done this for someone outside her immediate circle.

Before our reading, she explained she wasn’t comfortable being on camera At first, that pricked my skepticism, but I could understand it too—communicating in an “extra sensory” way must feel incredibly vulnerable. So when it came time for us to meet, we connected through Facebook Messenger.

And then, as if Ravi knew I still needed to hear the truth of his life and death, he explained it again. Maybe it was the way Nadine and I found each other, or the directness of her words, or simply that it was the third time I’d reached for him, whatever it was, I could finally take it in.

Ravi began by having Nadine walk me through the accident again—this time with fuller, more textured detail than I’d heard before.

She took me back to the drive home from Montpelier—James Madison’s plantation home in the Shenandoah Valley—on that crisp spring day. Ravi was asleep in the second-row window seat of our Odyssey minivan. It wasn’t a given he’d be in that seat; he and Cary often rotated or negotiated. But Nadine said he was meant to be there that day.

She said, “He could have left his body at the moment of impact. But he held on, just a little longer, to tell you goodbye. Usually, people disconnect from their physical body right away. But he was trying to hold on… to say he was sorry that it had to happen this way.”

As I waited for her next message to appear—the little typing bubbles blinking on and off—I found myself picturing Ravi seeing it all from above—not frightened, not shut down, but with a peace that felt just beyond the reach of my normal understanding.

He also said that much of our suffering comes from trying to force a narrative onto something that defied narrative. Something that couldn’t have gone another way.

“There was no avoiding it.”

Of course I’d heard versions of it before, but I wasn’t ready to accept it. Before Nadine, that idea just sat on the surface of me—too impossible, too cruel to let in. This time around,the message didn’t change; my readiness did.

For all our rewinding, questioning, blaming… Ravi was saying that no different choice—driver, timing, traffic—would have spared his life.

I couldn’t have imagined it then, but trusting that he needs me to accept his death eventually gave me a way back to the accident scene—not to relive it and suffer more, but to meet it differently.

Since then, in dreams, in breathwork, in my mermaid rituals, I’ve returned to that patch of ground where time stands still, and there I am able to hold Ravi, to let my tears fall on his unconscious body and tell him that it’s ok to leave us. That we know he’s still with us, in a way the body can’t carry but love always can.

Sometimes I want to know more about why Ravi’s life was so short and his last moments so traumatic, but this alone is more than I ever expected. For now, I’m learning to let that be enough.

Where Things Get… Cosmic

After the heaviness of those truths, Nadine said Ravi was leading her to the idea of a book.

“Are you writing a book?” she asked.

“Well... not exactly,” I said. “But I feel like I’m entering a new stage where I’ll have more space to write from my soul.”

I remember thinking how unlike me that sounded. I didn’t talk like that then or even now. But something in me wanted it to be true.

“Ravi is telling me once you start writing it, you’ll know exactly what to do.”

Her attention shifted again, the way it had throughout the reading—following whatever Ravi was trying to offer next. This time, she said, he was showing her someone swimming.

“Swimming is a really good release,” he told her to tell me. “You can swim through grief.”

When I read back through my notes from that day, I can still feel how new it all was—how impossible it seemed that any of this could be real, and yet how fiercely I wanted it to be.
And then, just as the reading seemed to be winding down, Ravi dropped one more message.
So offhand, so unadorned, it nearly slipped past me.

“He said God is real. And he’s part of me and you.”

I practically did a cartoon double-take watching those words materialize in the little typing bubbles.

God? From Ravi?

My whole life, I’ve wrestled with the idea of God—tripped up by the way religious language so often felt hollow to me, and by how guarded I’d become against anything that didn’t fit inside the boundaries of the physical world.

Until Ravi died, I didn’t feel the urgency to find an opening.

Surprisingly, I didn’t write about this reading right away, but I know I read, reread and mulled over these messages obsessively afterwards.

A few days later, I journaled:

It’s strange. I spent my life as an agnostic, ‘I want to believe’ Jew. A stranger I connected with through a friend does a psychic reading claiming to connect to my heavenly son, and I can now believe in God—and that my cherished child is still with me.

On paper, it sounds nuts. But I was a different person before the tragedy. I wasn’t open to truths that couldn’t be proven. The plastic wrap was still packaging my soul. My heart has been pierced, dragged through the mud, and then nurtured with so much love. I feel so young and so old. Fifty-three in linear time and a newborn in soul awakening.

I don’t pretend to understand any of it. The journalist in me—the gatekeeper who once demanded proof—has surrendered some authority. What’s taken its place isn’t certainty, but a walk through some of my fear of the unknown.

Ravi’s words keep moving through me, asking only to be felt, not verified.

Here’s the continuation of the story I posted last week—my first encounter with the psychic medium who delivered messages that helped shape my understanding of love and loss.

But before I met her, there were other channelers—other attempts to reach across the so-called veil, to connect with Ravi, when I was still too raw to make sense of what I believed. This post goes back to those first shaky encounters, when I was learning, slowly, that seeking proof and finding meaning aren’t always the same thing.

It’s part of my memoir-in-progress, Mermaidism: The Religion I Made Up to Save Myself. It’s still a rough draft, but it feels right to share it here.

I want to believe

As Ravi’s heavenly eighteenth birthday approached, a restlessness to hear from him took hold of me. I started shopping around for psychics—encouraged by my friend Lisa, one of the few people I knew who admitted to doing anything like this.

Still, I found Nikki through another friend whose circle had used her. Nikki is a South Jersey-based intuitive whose practice combines elements of executive coaching, channeling, and something in between. We met over Zoom, which felt less intimidating for a first session with a medium than sitting across from someone claiming to talk to my child.

That meeting took place in the afternoon of August 6, 2021, and I could do little all day to keep my mind from spinning in anticipatory dread, excitement, fear — all the above.

Nikki had a warmth that put me at ease right away. She explained that she wouldn’t be looking into my eyes most of the time. To make connections, she said, she needed to turn her gaze inward. In practice, it looked like she was tilting her face toward the sky.

Then she began.

She said Ravi was in our presence—surrounded by others in my spiritual ancestral orbit, but he stepped forward right away. Through Nikki, this is the first time he told me that the accident couldn’t have been avoided and he doesn’t blame any of us—not Craig, not me, not anyone.

She spoke about the love that surrounds him, how he’s attuned to the ways our lives keep unfolding, and how each act of love in his name restores a kind of balance in the universe—an exchange between our world and his.

Ravi, she said, would help me write two books—one that would help others heal, and another the novel I always said I wanted to write. She suggested I use my phone’s voice memos to capture ideas before they disappeared. It struck me as oddly specific advice at the time, almost random. But now I swear by my voice memo app. It’s become one of the ways I listen for what wants to come through.

She said I needed to ground myself, though I didn’t understand what that meant at the time. Eat the rainbow. Write near water. I’m stronger than I realize.

Her words drifted somewhere between comfort and cliché—things I’d heard before, things I wanted to believe but couldn’t yet let in. I left the Zoom emotionally spent, but with a strange sense of recognition.

Something in the dynamic felt familiar. The way she listened, followed threads, waited for what wanted to be said—it wasn’t so different from what I do as a journalist. I ask questions, tune in, listen for what lives beneath the words. I’ve never been able to explain how I get people to open up, only that they do.

Maybe that same channel—the one my mind allows when I’m interviewing—was what made it possible to start letting this in. That idea needed time to germinate.

A few days after the encounter, I wrote: I just relistened to the Nikki Zoom. I still don’t a hundred percent buy in. It was all too cookie-cutter—guardian angels, take care of myself, etc. Nothing completely convinced me my people were connecting through her.

And yet, I could still quote every word.

Still Searching for Proof

Then came Kym, who is more of a celebrity psychic. She does group psychic events, both in person and on Zoom. She has a podcast and a long waiting list for individual appointments.

I’d booked her within days of the Nikki Zoom, but her next opening was months away and much more expensive. In that time, Nikki’s words lingered. I was still in my ‘I want to believe mode” —but it was bending.

She opened the Zoom with an image of Ravi holding seashells.

At the time, I dismissed it as generic—a beach symbol, the sort of thing a medium might offer any grieving mother so close to the Jersey shore. But now I like to interpret it differently: Ravi showing me the mermaid energy I was beginning to step into.

Like Nikki, she said Ravi wasn’t meant to live a long life, and that he wanted us to stop blaming ourselves.

I found comfort in the smaller, quirkier details she shared.

Ravi watching me make challah—though not being Jewish, she called it something like “ceremonial bread.” He spoke of the thread that ties me to generations of women before me, and that was comforting.

Through her, he mentioned traveling to Israel with Lee, who was about to take the trip they were meant to share with their synagogue, a rite of passage Ravi never got to make.

And then, almost casually, he said he liked his sneakers—the ones I’d debated burying him in. It felt like confirmation that I’d made the right choice: dressing him in his favorite clothes, including his hockey hoodie and Beastie Boys t-shirt.

Then came the detail that made me catch my breath: she said he called out his nickname for someone—Bug. That’s what Ravi called our dog, Auggie.

She also said Ravi loved that we were honoring him by creating an outdoor stage at his beloved camp, and how connected he has always felt with children, both living and now, I suppose, dead.

In her scrawled notes—which she emailed to me later—she’d written: Camp counselor in Heaven! Again, there was also mention of me writing books, with Ravi’s help.

This is Kim’s note from our reading.

Before I had time to process any of it, I met Lisa for lunch the next day. She had just returned from a retreat at Kripalu, a yoga and healing center in the Berkshires, and told me about a woman she’d met there named Nadine.

Lisa said, “You need to talk to her.”

So I did.

Afterword

That’s 2/3rds of my chapter for now. The story keeps unfolding, as they all do.

I’d love to hear what stays with you after reading. And below, I’m sharing my updated book cover. Are you feeling inspired to dive into the healing waters?

💙
Jayne

I haven’t officially announced this yet, but I’m writing a memoir (the title is still in progress — though it may end up being Mermaidism: The Religion I Invented to Save Myself). And by writing this, of course I’m trying to manifest it into being!

What follows is a rough-draft excerpt from a chapter about my experiences working with psychic mediums — part of the larger story of how I’ve been trying to make sense of love, loss, and what still connects us. Let me know what you think as it could help me tweak it for the memoir! Much Love, JJF

When love refuses to die

The first message came like triage – quick, urgent and meant to stabilize.

The act of dying was just like dreaming. Ravi didn’t feel any pain as life drained from his body.

Nadine told me that right off the bat. It was my first psychic reading with her, exactly ten months after the machines stopped keeping Ravi alive.

“He didn’t suffer,” she told me. “And he needs you to know that.”.

He didn’t suffer.

More than four years after the accident that broke my understanding of how life is supposed to work, I still summon those words when I need something to hold onto.

The message didn’t come in Ravi’s familiar voice—not the way he used to say “I love you, Mommy,” with a calmness that made everything feel right. But I could feel him there, somehow, inside me.

Then came something harder to hear. It was barely understandable.

Ravi said he knew. The day he died was the day he was meant to go. Somehow, his leaving us would become part of his lasting impact—a light meant to guide me, our family, our community.

“He was in such a good mood, like he was embracing it. And he wants to say he’s sorry that you had to be there.”

Those words hit me in the gut and still do – impossible to unhear. No matter how much spiritual unraveling I’ve done, and continue to do, I think of April 3, 2021, as the worst day of my life. Ravi’s take on it—shared from a spiritual plane that defies logic, through a medium I trust with my heart—is still working its way into my consciousness, finding new ways to surface.

Before Nadine, there had been others, and these encounters served as a kind of an opening act. But I wasn’t ready to fully hear what they were saying.

The two times prior, when I reached out to healers who carry messages from the dead to the living, I found reasons to doubt them. Each encounter left me searching for signs of trickery, scanning for tells. Part of me wanted to believe; the rest was busy dismantling the possibility that belief could be real.

With Nadine—who I like to think Ravi led me to—my brain didn’t fight it as hard, even though I couldn’t take it all in at once.

There was so much to absorb. Not just the widening of the frame—this cosmic lens on an accident that had blown apart all my assumptions about love, motherhood, and meaning. There were also specific things Ravi said through her and the other mediums. Details that landed like truth on something I’d always sensed about why I’m here, but had never quite let myself believe.

Through Nadine, he told me I do my best thinking—and my truest writing—in the water. In hindsight, it feels like he was predicting Mermaidism: the instinct to dive deep, to make the unseen my method.

Even with free will—the wild card that can derail divine plans, as Ravi explained—I’m meant to write something that helps people heal, maybe even earn from it. (Hard to picture, given I’m currently sweating over a self-published book on Amazon.) He said that this work—turning inward—could draw my husband and me closer.

Some of that was even fun to take in, to let myself imagine—tentatively at first—turning dreams into an action plan.

But the idea that my firstborn son—the beautiful soul who taught me how to love—came here knowing his time would be short is still the one I struggle to take in. I can consider the possibility that his death might hold meaning, but it doesn’t always stop me from bargaining with God for a do-over.

Still, that’s progress. It took months before I could begin to let most of these messages sink in. And when I could, they came in fragments—like pieces of a language I didn’t yet speak but was trying to learn through a spiritual version of Duolingo (alongside the French and Spanish I practice daily).

Cue Houdini

For most of my life, the newsroom part of my mind ran the press. Even as I turned to mediums hoping to reach Ravi, I treated the messages like quotes that needed sourcing. The readings were like news tips that might not hold up under scrutiny. The journalist in me didn’t want to risk publishing fake news.

I also didn’t want to be fooled. My heart was already raw from loss—open, vulnerable, experiencing vertigo. Maybe that’s why my mind kept circling back to Harry Houdini.

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by him—the escape artist who could slip out of anything except death. And now, thanks to modern technology, I can summon him from the ether: grainy clips of Houdini writhing free from a straitjacket, hanging upside down above a crowd, turning live entertainment into a kind of temporary escape from fear itself.

The Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant’s escapes still astonish me—but what holds me now is his crusade against fraudulent mediums in the 1920s, the ones who preyed on people like me, the newly grieving, desperate for a sign. He exposed their tricks to protect the living from being deceived not by the dead, but by those pretending to speak for them.

Houdini even made a pact with his wife: if there were life after death, he’d send her a secret message no one else could know. She waited for years. Nothing came.

For most of my life, I took that silence as proof. My journalism brain—trained to verify, to demand sources and documentation—felt safe inside that worldview. Facts were facts. Everything else was wishful thinking.

Losing Ravi didn’t instantly change that, but even before the shock wore off, I knew my old ways of coping had collapsed. I’d hit the limits of what could be controlled, of how many feelings could be shoved down and labeled “manageable.”

In the months and years that have followed our tragedy, I’ve been reading and listening to everything that feels relevant on the path to discovery — self-help books, spiritual talks, any voice that might help me make sense of what had happened, even if it strays far from the factual world.

And somewhere in all that searching, I began to feel what I hadn’t been able to think my way into: the love Ravi and I shared wasn’t gone. It was still alive, even if his body was underground, less than five miles from our home.

I trusted Ravi—his wisdom, his goodness and creativy—more than I trusted my own mind.

And still, belief didn’t come easily.

Looking back now, the first two mediums were largely spot on. I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.

At Graceland, the first person we see on foot was an Elvis impersonator — not a parody, I sense, but a pilgrim. The King truly lives on, even as he has left the building.

A few miles away, the air shifts at the Lorraine Hotel. We feel the heaviness of what lingers. The balcony, the wreath, the reverent stillness of a horrific day, April 4, 1968, are held in suspension. With a recording of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech playing in my mind, I feel the echo of Moses — seeing the vision of Zion but knowing it wasn’t his to reach.

That connection feels personal. I’ve been finding new pathways into Jewish spirituality by feeling the universal heartbeat of it — the quest for freedom. The same current that carried my ancestors out of bondage runs through history itself, through my country’s unfinished struggle to live up to its promise of freedom and justice for all. It leads me directly to my son Ravi too — how the Purim musical, our holiday story of outsmarting oppression, became his entry point into that lineage of liberation, the joy of being fully himself onstage, claiming his voice in the long story of freedom still being written.

Memphis was supposed to be a couple’s vacation — Craig and my first real one in years. No kids, no college applications, no alarms set for someone else’s needs. Just us. When we finally started planning, we didn’t want a resort. We wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t trying to sell a TikTok influencer’s version of paradise, rather a city with a pulse that wouldn’t lull us into comfort.

People warned us not to go. Be careful. It’s rough down there. They weren’t wrong. Memphis wears its scars in plain view — beauty and neglect shoulder to shoulder, signs banning firearms, pat-downs just to walk on Beale Street.

But maybe that’s what drew us. We’re both curious about what lies beneath, willing to go deeper — how metal detecting, the search for buried treasure, became a thing we do as a family; how our love of Hamilton fuels trips that turned history into both deep dives and sing-alongs.

And so we went walking in Memphis, trying to find a heartbeat that could move with where we are in our nation’s history — 250 years after the American experiment began — and where we are in our own story. We wanted something that wouldn’t whitewash the years since we lost Ravi, but would let our firstborn live on as music, creativity, and love — the way R&B, blues, gospel, and soul turn pain into something the body can move with. Not always joy, but release.

What We Saw in Memphis

This was also an Elvis pilgrimage. I wouldn’t call myself a devoted fan, but when I hear the music, I want to move. His deep, complicated voice — tender one moment, jagged the next — carries everything at once: sorrow, longing and joy.

Elvis’s imprint is everywhere in Memphis, of course, but what stopped me was his grandmother’s grave — the Star of David etched right there. That shimmer of Jewish bloodline felt like something I recognized in the King, long before I could see him beyond the parody, the veneer of Vegas and velvet.

His story was never simple. The gospel of the Black church moved through him, and that Star caught my breath — proof that Elvis shared my understanding that the search for God runs in multiple currents. He read widely, grasping for meaning beyond fame. And his true self — the sound, his hunger, the pelvis shaking — helped young America move towards greater freedoms. Suddenly, there was questioning of the patriarchy, color lines, and the way things were always done. Elvis didn’t dismantle society. But he exposed for many the charge waiting in the body when you stop pretending not to feel and let the music move shake, rattle and roll you.

And my heart aches for Elvis — for the absence of anyone who was truly looking out for his soul. For how lost he must have felt after his mother died, carrying the guilt that leaving to serve his country somehow took her from him. For the weight of responsibility he bore, holding up an entire orbit of people who depended on him. And for the loneliness of that final day — surrounded by every comfort, yet starved for the kind of love that wasn’t tied to being Elvis on stage.

That said, there was such joy in Graceland too — seeing the whole spectacle up close. In the home movies shown on the tour, he’s tearing around on go-carts with Priscilla and Lisa Marie, diving into his pool, laughing like a kid. I got lost looking up at all the rhinestone jumpsuits lined up like sacred relics, touring the Lisa Marie jet and seeing all the shag carpet and gold phones.

And then there’s the TV he shot — the real one, its glass spider-webbed from a bullet, still holding the shadows of his anger or exhaustion or heartbreak. Near the pool are the family gravestones. His mother’s. His father’s. And the small one for Jesse Garon, the twin he never got to know outside the womb — a loss that seemed to haunt the story from the start.

The Other Memphis

After Graceland, the music changed as we walked through that arc of American pain — the recreation of a ship that stole people from Africa, stripped of clothing, chained and dehumanized on the long journey here. There is a Rosa Parks exhibit, with its life-size bus and the seat she refused to surrender. Just as haunting are the white and Black dolls used in the Brown v. Board of Education case, showing how the youngest of children absorbed the lie that whiteness was worthy and their own skin was not.

The exhibits laid bare the brutal economics of slavery — how our nation’s wealth was built on that dehumanization, and how the remnants of it still hold. All of it was contained within the repurposed Lorraine Hotel — one of the few places Dr. King and other Black travelers could stay in downtown Memphis during segregation.

Finding My Place in the Story

I’ve often wondered what I would have done in the moments when history called ordinary people to act. Would I have marched? Spoken up? Risked safety for truth? I like to think so, but I don’t know. I see how fear builds walls, how comfort disguises itself as morality. The same destructive forces are at work now — civil rights protections hard-won by Dr. King and Congressman John Lewis are being dismantled under the sanitized language of “doing away with DEI.”

And as it was then, intimidation is once again state-sanctioned. Our government tries to scare dissenters into forgetting that protest is built into the Constitution itself — the First Amendment’s promise of free speech and assembly. Gathering at the No Kings rallies last weekend wasn’t subversive; it was as American as apple pie.

I’m the only one in my immediate family who’s ever felt that pull — the need to show up with my body, to join in what John Lewis called good trouble.

It seems like it should be a natural path in Jewish families that gather annually to celebrate Passover, the motherlode of freedom holidays, with its script that screams, “Once we were slaves in Egypt!” And yet it wasn’t. Those words felt ancient, distant, like they belonged to someone else’s struggle.

Growing up, there was no apparent connection to the original Exodus story. I wondered whether I was the wicked or the simple son of the story (and also why there were no daughters). None of the older relatives spoke about our history in a way that felt personal — not the pogroms, not the fear that followed them here to America at the turn of the 20th Century or even the depression. I grew up on a kind of flat earth, where there was no outlet for emotion, no space to name the tragedies of our time or even our own family storms.

But it still confused me how you could see images on TV, read about people’s pain, and not be moved to do something. I see now that the silence I grew up with was its own form of love — a way of trying to keep the world from harming us.

But the year I was born carries its own counteracting gravity. On my birthday — December 24, 1968 — the Apollo 8 crew turned their camera back toward Earth and captured Earthrise, our first glimpse of ourselves as one fragile, luminous planet suspended in the dark.

The day I was born marked a moment of awe amid so much chaos. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. The Vietnam War and the protests against it were tearing the country apart. Cities were burning. The uncertainty in the air must have felt a lot like now — the sense that everything was shifting, that nothing was guaranteed.

That was the atmosphere I came into — unrest and wonder, revolution and fear. Sometimes I think that energy came with me: the desire for justice, the hope that love will prevail.

The People Have the Power

I tried to channel that 1968 energy at the No Kings rally, and it seemed to work. At the South Jersey march I attended, people showed up for one another, peacefully and joyfully. Adding to the carnival-like atmosphere, I wore my son Lee’s pug mask and one of our friends was wrapped in an inflatable koala bear costume. You could feel the tension dissolve — the fear our government feeds by labeling protestors as dangerous, by trying to make ordinary citizens feel unsafe for exercising the very rights this country was founded on.

It reminded me of what I’d felt in Memphis — that ordinary people, linked in purpose, can carry the spirit of a movement forward. It felt good in this age when dissociation is as close as looking down at our cell phones to remember that people have the power.

That night, Craig and I went to see David Byrne — the iconic Talking Heads frontman, still the prophet of awkward grace in concert in Philadelphia. Between songs, he riffed on the idea that kindness is punk. I loved that — the irony, the truth of it. The Talking Heads came out of the punk scene, but they were not about chaos. They were about seeing through the noise, quirkily calling out hypocrisy, and refusing to shut down feeling. And what’s kinder — or more radical — than feeling and caring deeply, refusing to numb out? Kindness in today’s world is rebellion.

This is where grief has carried me — to the place where feeling itself becomes an act of resistance. Walking in Memphis, I pictured myself breathing out my heaviness and taking in the air that holds the memory of Elvis, Dr. King, and all the other warriors of love — their songs, their courage, their unfinished work moving through me.

That’s what it feels like, walking in Memphis.

And then came Peru. An Inquirer friend’s wedding in her native land became a final hurrah with my newsroom crew before we scattered to new lives. The vows and celebration were breathtaking — elegant in a fairy-tale way, threaded with traditions that brought flutters to my heart. I came home with beautiful art, a few reels of undeveloped film, and flashes of wonder at the ingenuity of a civilization whose terraces, astronomy and architecture still draw seekers from around the world.

But my journal entries from the time are almost bare. A few scraps about the wedding, New Year’s Eve revelry in Lima and the hangover that followed us into Cusco. Nothing of the ruins, the temples, the altitude, the sacredness of the land. Not even the sweetness of that last gathering with my friends. On the page, it’s all missing.

Like Eliza Hamilton in the musical — a story that reveals new truths to me each time I return to it — I erased myself from my own narrative.

Only years later did I understand that the silence in my journals was bound to a secret belief I’d been carrying: that travel could change me. Not just broaden me, but send me home with clarity, with the courage to chase dreams I had buried under layers of doubt and fear. The novels of hero’s quests, the poems I couldn’t shake, the films that replayed in my mind — they insisted that stepping beyond the borders of my comfort zone could undo me and put me back together differently. I kept hoping a plane ticket, a border crossing or a passport stamp might open that door. And still, I clutched my cynicism tight, dismissing the longing as nothing more than make-believe.

Safe Travels, Safe Assignments

I had traveled before — a semester in France, with "Europe on $40 a Day" as my bible and barebones youth hostels as my base. I Eurorailed across borders, even stuck out my thumb to hitchhike toward museums and cathedrals meant to inspire awe. Later, I folded travel into journalism itself: cycling through Kerry and tracing eco-tourism along the Orinoco River in Venezuela. Travel journalism became my safe cloak — a way to pay attention, to let myself feel something, but never so much that I risked exposing the deeper parts of myself.

But underneath that safety was a quieter longing. Even after getting married, having three young children, a full-time job, and summers at the Jersey Shore, I still believed that travel could change me. So when I finally went to Israel in 2014 — a free mission trip through my employer, to the homeland I’d been taught would hold answers — I thought, this could be it. I even wrote before leaving: I hope to find something. But what if finding it changes me?

Still, my notebooks from that trip are mostly blank. I blogged about food, filed the expected story, and bypassed the sacredness I had hoped would open me. I came home with a hollow conclusion: it felt like losing my Israel virginity with the wrong person.

Shenandoah – The Dividing Line

By the time Covid hit, I had stopped expecting travel to change me. What mattered most was the simple gift of being together and feeling safe when the world felt so fragile, when even breathing in shared air could bring death. Our family’s way of stepping outside meant day trips spent tracing Revolutionary history close to home in South Jersey and long walks in our woods — just grateful to have someplace to go.

So when vaccines finally arrived, it felt right that our Spring Break trip would follow that same thread: a drive to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, stitched together by history and nature. On one of the last days, we visited Montpelier, James Madison’s estate. Driving back to the resort, I remember feeling relief rise in me — the sense that maybe we had made it through, that life could begin to settle back into some semblance of its regularly-programmed rhythm.

And then, in a flash, everything changed. April 3, 2021. The car crash that took Ravi’s life — and left the rest of us shaken survivors — turned what was meant to be a re-entry into the world into the sharpest dividing line of my life: before and after.

The darkness that followed was nothing I would have ever chosen. But if travel was always meant to change me, this was change at its harshest — leaving me no choice but to be remade.

Red Rocks – The Unraveling

In the four years since that day, travel comes with an asterisk. Dark thoughts ride alongside me, warning that someone might not come home. Still, I can’t ignore the pull to leave, to lean into the fear, to let change have its way with me. It feels less like a suggestion and more like a summons to trust the unraveling.

When travel finally did return, it wasn’t because I sought it out. It was Craig, about a year and a half after the crash, who surprised me with a self-love couples’ retreat in Sedona, Arizona. Self-love. That was a language neither of us spoke, a word that felt impossible when I was pouring everything I had into keeping the boys and us afloat.

The self-love retreat itinerary read like something from a world I didn’t belong to (yet): psychics, hypnotists, energy workers. My brain kept trying to resist, to find the flaws, to prove that none of it could be real. And yet, I let it in.

What stays with me most is our time with Bear, a Native American elder who led us through a vow-renewal ceremony at the vortexes. Surrounded by the red rocks, standing in that charged air, I felt a stirring of what inner peace would feel like. I could finally let the energy of song and prayer flow through me — a willingness to face the unknown, even when it looked like a black hole, and to trust that some path forward was there.

Mexico – Where I Said Yes

The universe has a way of arranging itself when you’re finally listening. My dear friend Tina, living across the country in California, was going through her own healing journey at the time. Apprenticed to become a Toltec Healing Arts facilitator, she invited me to join a healing group, spending a week in Teotihuacán. Not sightseeing. A spiritual immersion.

Even after Sedona, what little I knew of the trip still sounded, frankly, strange. We’d be immersed in the “Toltec Medicine Wheel of Transformation”, walking the Avenue of the Dead — a sacred corridor lined with pyramids and plazas where people for centuries have come in their urgency, willing to drop their armor and let the land undo them. We would visit a sweat lodge and do a firewalk. My protective brain wanted to pick it apart, but I refused to overanalyze. If I did, I’d talk myself out of it.

Buying a plane ticket felt like walking through fire before my feet even touched the burning coals.

And then on that ancient path, where the energy of generations brushed against my spirit, I willed them in, and felt their calls: You’re not alone. Keep going. In my journal, I wrote: I was ready. I was ready to be reborn. And I let it happen. I agreed to die so something new could come alive inside me.

Spiritual Travel Do-Over

And now Peru — almost thirty years later — offers me the chance to step back into the narrative I once erased myself from. This time, I am ready. Not just as a traveler, but as a healer, a co-leader with Tina of Awaken in the Andes, a ten-day women’s journey into sacred land and deeper truth. I am ready to walk beside women willing to lean into the pull that says there is more to life — a pull that often makes itself known only when we step away from the noise of daily life.

For weeks, Tina and I have pored over the itinerary, shaping it not as sightseeing but as a way of traveling that invites reflection. We’ll take sacred paths where the energy is palpable: the sun-drenched heights of Machu Picchu, the moonlit sanctuary of Quillarumiyoc, the sky temples of Pisac, the elemental altars of Ollantaytambo. Places where ancestors prayed, healed, and dreamed a vision of the world that still hums beneath the stones — offering their dreams and echoes to those willing to listen and carry the light onward.

My role will be to guide fellow travelers in writing as ritual — helping them notice what moves within, put language to it, and revisit it when they’re ready to see what it’s been waiting to show them. Download first, decode later. That practice has been my lifeline. Now it’s what I can offer others.

And what I can give myself now is different. For years, I shut myself off from the rituals of my own tradition. It was survival, really — safer to treat Judaism as memory, not presence, as something bound to history but not alive in me. To do that, I had to shut out other people’s traditions too — to buy into a quiet superiority over cultures that had endured conquest but still carried their spirit intact. I wasn’t open to Pachamama (Mother Earth), to eagle medicine, or to mythologies that might have resonated with me and deepened my sense of connection — to the land, to life, to myself.

Losing Ravi shattered me, leaving nothing to hide behind. That it happened during a vacation — after a lifetime of hearing calls that travel would be the thing to awaken me — is a truth my body and soul still resist. I want to fight it. But I’ve had to let it stand, because the next chapter of my life grew from that breaking.

Since then, travel has carried a different weight. The wisdom of spiritual journeys has become part of me, and I try to weave meaning and ritual into my days wherever I can — some drawn from Indigenous and shamanic teachings, some from Judaism, some I’ve invented on my own.

Thirty years ago, when I first went to Peru for a destination wedding, this would have sounded like a harsh foreign language — maybe I could catch a word or two, but never enough to understand. Now I will return to Peru fluent in a different way of listening, ready to take in what I once could not, and to help others do the same.

Awaken in the Andes

This 10-day women’s journey to Peru takes place July 28 - August 6. If any part of this piques your curiosity, Tina and I are hosting a Zoom information session about Awaken in the Andes on Tuesday, Sept. 30, at 8 pm EST. You can find the details here.

I came home from California in April with my mermaid, my first tattoo.

For weeks, while she settled inside my right arm, I kept checking to see if she was still there. It was like being sixteen again, when my braces came off and I couldn’t stop running my tongue over my teeth.

She is my symbol of reclamation—of mystery and depth. The energy I’d long felt moving around me, finally claimed as my own.

A sign I’m not lost

In the four years since Ravi died, I’ve been circling the idea of a tattoo—something permanent enough to hold both my pledge to him, that I would keep living, and the truth that he lived too, his story still running through mine.

But for years, I couldn’t picture it. I wasn’t ready for anything that lasting until I had crossed into another place—until I could say yes to a mark that would remind me that loss doesn’t have to be the end of the story. I never imagined it would take the shape of a mermaid.

But she began to surface earlier this year in Northern California, where I spent four long weekends over the course of a year stepping way outside my comfort zone and into the Toltec Medicine Wheel of Transformation—a healing program rooted in indigenous practices.

During our first gathering, one of our ceremonies was a baptism of sorts: a plunge into healing waters. The site was ordinary enough—an outdoor pool. But amid the ritual of submerging, agreeing to die to be reborn symbolically, I opened my heart to something I couldn’t yet put words to.

God in the water

It was the shock of the water—and then the sense of being carried— that made it clear: my lifelong love of water was more than just a preference. It was the current that would carry me through healing.

Over time, I began shaping my own rituals in water and, half tongue-in-cheek, called it Mermaidism.

As I moved through the Wheel last year, my swimming rituals deepened. Each plunge became more than exercise or escape—it was a way of moving through grief and fear, thawing the layers of myself I had kept frozen. The Wheel is about transformation, and in water I felt its teaching most clearly: life as a cycle, pain as something you can’t avoid but can enter and emerge from, breathless but alive.

By the third gathering, water was already shaping how I moved through the work. Shell—my Wheel roommate, my witness through it all—arrived with a new tattoo. A mermaid stretched across her upper arm.

The moment I saw her, I knew: mine would come next.

I asked Shell to book me an appointment with her talented tattoo artist for the next and last time I would travel out West, and from that moment, the anticipation set in. I didn’t yet have a clear picture of my mermaid. Still, it was fun to scroll through Pinterest tattoos, to conjure possibilities, to imagine her emerging in ink, becoming the guide I longed for. I was both giddy and uneasy, not knowing how the image meant for me would finally reveal itself.

The Doubt

At the same time, I could have talked myself out of it a hundred ways. I had been conditioned to see tattoos as something for other people, not me. For years, I carried unspoken assumptions about them—that they were impulsive, or cliché, or bound to be regretted.

The Jewish barrier hovered too: the warnings that tattoos desecrated the body, that they were disrespectful to Holocaust survivors who had been forcibly marked. Also, all my adult life, I had never been able to imagine committing to something that would mark my skin with an image I’d carry to the grave.

But Ravi’s passing changed all of that. Four years had turned the idea of permanence into something else entirely. Inking my skin no longer felt like defacement—it meant remembering, testifying that Ravi lived, and that I would keep my pledge to him to continue to live, seek joy and purpose. That my life could stand as living proof of love that does not end with death.

Getting Inked

After finishing the Wheel, I was more certain than ever that I needed to mark the occasion—not just as a souvenir, but as a way of believing in the healing I had done, the shifts I had survived and the work I would continue to do.

By the time I walked into the appointment, I had a good sense of how she should look—her glide, her colors, the way she might feel alive on my arm—but she wasn’t yet fully formed. I had to trust that the mermaid meant for me would swim up to the surface in the hands of the artist.

I spent about half an hour with him, showing designs, trying to put words around the figure I saw in my mind. He listened, sketching notes, then disappeared into the back. That waiting was its own kind of test—nerves tightening, wondering if he could catch what I couldn’t quite describe, wondering how much it would hurt.

When he returned and showed me his design, I felt the click. Yes, that was her. We made a few tweaks and agreed she was ready. And then, as Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.

I went into the chair as he traced out the design that he would follow with the needle, placed my arm on a padded rest like I was giving blood, and reached for Shell’s hand. I couldn’t watch. I just listened as the machine started up, its buzz like a dentist’s drill turned angrier, and braced for the first sting.

The drilling began. Sharp and steady pain and the piercing, grinding sound as the mermaid came to shape. The pain wasn’t unbearable, but it was impossible to ignore. I breathed through it, Shell’s hand steady in mine. And then—less than an hour later—it was done. The mermaid was so radiant. We took pictures from every angle, and then I had to bandage her up for a while.

Does it hurt?

Back in the East Coast in my bubble of a community, people I know—usually a bit taken aback by how visible she is—tend to ask if it hurt. They say, ‘I could never imagine going through that kind of pain,’ the same way others say people still say to me, ‘I could never imagine the pain of losing a child’.

And the answer is yes, it hurt—but not in the way they expect.

It wasn’t like childbirth, where pain comes with chaos and the weight of ancestral memory—women dying in labor, babies stillborn, the enormity of suddenly being responsible for a soul. And it isn't the pain of losing a child, which four years later may not be as raw but is always there in the background, woven into everything. That pain is an absence, an unscheduled hollowing that has to be reckoned with when it comes on.

Tattoo pain is sharp, but it has edges. It happens within clear limits: the artist guiding the needle, my friend keeping me steady, my decision to be there, my ability to breathe through it. It called me into my body, into this moment, into the pulse of being alive. The sharpness was its own kind of prayer, a reminder that even pain can be holy when it is entered with intention.

A Vision Quest

My mermaid glides along my arm, not as a wound but as a blessing. She is my initiation. Not only the figure etched into my arm, but the becoming it required of me.

It took a vision quest to become the woman who could carry her. That feels fitting, given that the Wheel itself draws from indigenous cultures, many of which created life-affirming ceremonies around ink and skin—ways of inscribing transformation on the body so it could not be forgotten.'

In my own tradition, there are rituals meant to be felt—rituals that press memory into the body so we don’t forget who we are or where we’ve come from. Fasting on Yom Kippur, which is fast approaching. The Passover seder and the challah I try to make weekly. These are designed to awaken presence, to remind us of the holy woven through our lives.

And yet, until very recently, I experienced them mostly as performance, an intellectual appreciation of how they bind me to an ancestral line intent on helping souls rise above the human condition.

And somehow, as backward as it might sound, this tattoo—along with the water rituals I’ve been creating—has deepened those practices. Marking my skin didn’t take me away from my religion; it returned me to it. It sharpened my sense of what ritual is for: to remember, to live awake, to experience God in my own way.

Will there be a second tattoo?

The other question people ask is whether I’d do it again. The quick answer is yes—I’d walk into that chair again, face the buzz and sting without hesitation. The slower answer is harder. Because what image could ever mean as much as this one? What would I want to carry with me to the grave?

Sometimes I think about Ravi’s I love you, Mommy in his handwriting. Or one of his dinosaurs. But I already hold those in other ways—charm dinosaurs on my necklace, drawings etched into birthday and Mother’s Day cards I pull out when I need them. I don’t feel the same pull to engrave them on my skin. Not yet. Maybe never.

Another tattoo inspiration may surface someday. And if it does, I’ll know. If it doesn’t, that will be its own kind of faith.

For now, I have my mermaid. She is a reminder and keeper of memory and magic. When I forget who I am, she reminds me.

The Friday morning before Labor Day hit like a lightning bolt. As I fumbled to silence the 6:45 cell alarm, my sleep-stiff hand couldn't hold on. The iPhone dropped, heavy and sudden – thud! – smacking my lip and knocking against my teeth before it fell to the floor. It was sharp enough to swell and draw blood.

The sting knocked me upright, but that was a good thing. If not for that jolt, I might have slept through the first of the many lasts of this young school year: the Cherry Hill East PTA back-to-school breakfast for teachers, my final one as a parent volunteer.

Ok, it’s not one of the big milestones, but I really want to be present for as many of these “lasts” as possible. So there I was, lip swollen, back under the fluorescent lights of Cafeteria 1, laying out yogurts and granola bars and greeting teachers - some that I was meeting for the first time, others with long histories intertwined with our family. It felt very worth the sleep deprivation and jolt to my circadian rhythms. 

Since my own graduation from East in 1987, I’ve stood in this room dozens of times—for school meetings, concerts, PTA breakfasts. And yet of course that morning felt different. Almost out of body, as if every version of this room—past, present, and still to come—had folded in on itself, collapsing the way the cafeteria tables do when they’re no longer needed.

I could picture Ravi, tray in hand, scanning the room for his friends. I could see Lee, carrying his lunch down the hall to the German homeroom instead of staking out a cafeteria table. And today—the actual first day of school—Cary with the sandwiches he makes the night before, negotiating the who-sits-where ritual that mostly gets decided on day one. If I close my eyes, I can time-machine even further back, to myself in the lunch line decades earlier, waiting for fries, worrying they’d tip the scale on me but also relieved to land at a table with friends I’m largely still in touch with thanks to the blessing/curse of social media.

Time rearranges everything. Schools change too—new faces, new roles, a shifting cast each year. But the echo of what came before lingers, carried by whoever remembers.

And then the echoes give way to now. Cary comes home buzzing, unloading the highlights of his first day—teachers he already can tell are inspiring, friends in his classes, his multivariable calculus teacher wasting no time diving in to scary-hard math. He’s excited for Senior Sunrise on Friday, already looking toward what the year might hold.

It’s exactly what I hoped for, and still it catches in me. The milestones don’t line up the way they should. Cary is here, charting his last-firsts. Ravi never got the chance. And for Lee, senior year was marked not just by the milestones but by the changed responsibilities – suddenly, without his loving, wise older brother to light the path.

The Promise I Made

This is my ninth year on the East PTA executive board. My last. My little silo has been the weekly e-blasts, the quippy blurbs for Coach Bag Bingo, attending meetings, supporting hoagie and mum sales. It’s not a huge commitment.

On the surface, it’s about doing my civic duty in a way that works with my journalist/mom interests. But beneath is a more nuanced story: how I came to see parent involvement as a kind of contract, one I’d been circling since long before East.

Like many of my Gen-X generation, the extent of parental involvement was getting my mom to sign permission forms. The tacit understanding—for better and worse—was that I’d figure out school and other stuff on my own. I didn’t realize that showing up at school could be useful in an uncringey way—or that it could give parents a window into their kids’ lives.

In my mid-20s, when I landed the journalism job that would take me to New York City, I was assigned by my newspaper to write almost exclusively about schools. At first, I leaned on the caricatures I grew up with: PTA parents as cliquey, overbearing, straight out of Harper Valley PTA.

But the more time I spent in schools, the more my view stretched. Parents, teachers, superintendents, custodians, kids tuned in and tuned out—I started to see how it all fit together. And I went down lots of rabbit holes: the fight over who controls what kids learn, the growing sense that education is as much about mental health as academics, and the way the drumbeat of school shootings, climate change, politics, and now social media was shaping an anxious generation.

What I came to see was this: those loud parents weren’t drama queens, scheming to give their kids unfair advantages over the children of the less involved. They were part of a contract—helping educators in what I believe is one of the most important jobs there is. I saw how the right teacher could change a child’s sense of the world.

Later, I would see it with my own boys—teachers who gave them the courage to be bold, curious, joyful learners. And, though I didn’t know it then, the same school community would one day carry Lee and Cary through their darkest hour.

So by the time Ravi started preschool, I knew I was going to seek out a way to be meaningfully involved - whatever that meant. And it wasn’t just to put into practice the knowledge I gained about parental involvement. 

My gut told me Ravi needed me close. With his introverted sensitivity, I wanted him to feel supported in ways I hadn’t. That’s where the contract began—not on paper, but in me

.

Finding my Lane

My volunteerism started at M’kor Shalom (z’l) preschool. I was tasked to revive Letters from the Ark, the modest preschool newsletter. Interviewing teachers and parents, jotting down blurbs about field trips—that part was easy, just my reporter muscle. But the by-product was how close I got to those loving teachers who, although my kids probably wouldn’t be able to pick them out today, left such an imprint. They made it safe to be curious about the world, safe to feel connected.

Elementary school pulled me in deeper. By third grade, I was somehow PTA president. This was by no means because I was good at corralling volunteers or running events— I know I wasn’t! What I had were words and unbounded support for the teachers. I threw myself into things like arranging author visits, even as the school cycled through principals and edged toward a teacher revolt. The instability and our teachers’ resolve to keep putting kids first drew me in closer than I expected.

Still, I was told that high school was the cutoff for parental involvement. But when a friend on the East PTA board asked if I’d do the eBlasts, I said yes. And there it was: my lane.

The Rupture

It fit me. I was an editor in real life, and here was a way to filter the flood of information into something parents could use. But underneath, it was always about Ravi, my quiet child. I was relieved that my volunteer job would force me to learn what I needed to do help him succeed in high school. It helped to know what clubs existed, which teachers dreamed up inspiring projects, and the deadlines for all the forms. I liked slipping stories into the eBlasts about graduates who had gone out and made their mark, or details about school politics and bond ordinances—first the failed one, then the one that finally delivered the repairs and upgrades our schools have needed for years.

For years, the rhythm held. E-blasts drafted during halftime of Eagles games, in airports, in the FlyersSkateZone before Cherry Hill East hockey games. I figured I could do this for the nine years between Ravi’s freshman year and Cary’s senior year, and then pass the baton.

The first sting was Covid. Schools shut down, and arguably stayed shuttered too long. But the e-blasts still hit inboxes. My volunteer job felt even more necessary with so many unknowns, fears, and half-truths swirling around.

The rupture came a year later, during spring break of 2021. Signs of life were returning everywhere—the vaccine had just made its debut, schools were edging back, and for the first time in a long while, a family trip felt possible. We mapped it out to hit the things we love: history and nature, with a college stop at UVA. But it ended with us gathered at the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, in shock, unable to fathom what it would mean to return home to our shattered lives after the car crash that changed everything.

The week I almost stopped

It was the Monday after Easter when the PTA president, understandably, asked why my post–Spring Break letter hadn’t gone out like clockwork. That was my first reckoning: the moment I had to carry this news beyond the circle of family and close friends. I remember the text I sent: I would not be delivering the East PTA letter that week “because of a terrible family tragedy.” That was all I could manage.

That was the week I almost stopped. The board gave me the option to quit then and there. No one would have blamed me.

But I didn’t.

Week after week, I did it. In my mind, it was still for Ravi. Like my iPhone smacking my lip, the e-blast was its own kind of sting—painful, but part of the process that helps me keep reaching for healing.

Some were harder to compose than others. Announcing junior prom ticket sales while mourning Ravi’s lost chance to work up the nerve to tell the girl he loved how he felt—that was brutal. Drafting reminders for senior milestones he would never reach. Including a photo of him with the other Merit Scholars—that hurt.

True to those pithy grief expressions that float around my Facebook feed, time does do a tune-up on sorrow. The sharpness has softened, enough that I can list senior milestones now without only feeling the pinch of our family’s incomplete K–12 story.

Which brings me back to the fat lip—the jolt that knocked me awake and sent me to Cafeteria 1 for one more breakfast. Cary is moving through his last-firsts, each one fresh and alive. Everywhere I turn in that building, I feel Ravi and Lee—one whose story ended too soon, the other who had to carry more than a middle child should. My part in their K–12 story is nearly over, but I’m beginning to see what comes after. Space for something new.

The habit remains—the rhythm of showing up every week to send the eBlasts, even when it stings. That’s why I’m here now, shifting some of that energy to this Substack. It requires discipline, the same ritual of presence. Only now, the words are for me—for my voice, for making sense of grief and love, and for finding purpose in the jolts that keep knocking me awake.

It’s day five, and I’m just now starting to adapt to the rhythm here — the hair-pin roads in the first manual car I’ve driven since before I was married, the mix of awe and surrender it takes to simply be in a place like this.

Writing isn’t any easier. Nothing tumbles out of me; every piece feels like a painful birth. The reflection below is the one I had to labor through before I could really arrive here, in the company of a sky that keeps reminding me how little I understand.

What the Stars Already Knew

I remember when it came out that Madonna was studying Kabbalah.
She’d also picked up a British accent,
which made the mysticism feel like the latest reinvention of the Material Girl.

But at the same time, she was doing some of her best music —
rhythms that pulsed into parts of me words hadn’t reached yet.

Not long after, someone — I wish I remembered who —
said to me: What you are looking for is a direct connection to God.

The words lodged in me,
but my brain hadn’t unraveled the emotion yet.
I didn’t know what kind of person I was.
Maybe wise, maybe wicked,
perhaps the one who didn’t understand the question.
All I knew was that I couldn’t place myself in the story.

I bookmarked it, then slid it back on the shelf.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be kicked out of the tribe —
for letting grief leave the door open
to new isms:
shamanism, mermaidism, Buddhism,
even The Chosen.

But Judaism hasn’t shut the door on me.
If anything, it keeps saving me a seat at the seder table.

What did I even know about Kabbalah?
My Hebrew, on a good day,
is like a third grader —
sounding out prayers I’ve heard all my life,
but not knowing how to unlock them.

It surprises me that I’m still welcomed.
Surprising in the best way.

That a faith can feel right,
even when you color so far outside the lines.
Instead of squeezing into a mold
that’s a few jean sizes too small.

And maybe that’s the kind of mystic I am —
diving into the well,
pulling up driftwood that’s always been of the same sea,
scattered across different waters.
I try to notice how it fits together.

Trusting the seen and unseen
to work it out between them,
leaving me with words that point to the mystery.

Looking for God in water,
in the glint of a fish my son catches,
in the moments when my brain shuts up.

I used to think mystics wore itchy, ugly brown robes —
stone silent in Eat, Pray, Love land,
praying for the rest of us.

But here I am,
living among sinners and saints,
most of the time missing
that the cool breeze itself is the blessing —
and then remembering that it is.

I thought I wanted to be like Madonna.
But that was only ever the opening act.
I’ve discovered I’m a swimmer in a vast ocean —
still bound to the shore of my people,
even as I drift.

Craig said that, and the words lodged between us like The Epstein Files. I knew what was inside, but opening it would be like lifting the lid on Pandora’s box — memories of all intensities spilling out at once (none, for the record, involving sex trafficking or political cover-ups).

We’d just left Ravi’s Bimah — the new outdoor stage at the boys’ day camp built in his honor — carrying the strange mix of lift and weight that comes from being there.

I knew instantly my husband was right, but it was too much to agree out loud. My mind went into emotional triage.

“Every month is hard,” I said instead. I regretted it instantly. 

Even as I pushed it away, the truth had already settled in. Craig heard it as me brushing him off — another in a string of moments when we could have let the other feel less alone, but didn’t. A trap I set for myself and still walked right into.

The Augusts We Had

August has only been the hardest stop on the carousel of time for the last four years, but maybe it was always meant to be. It’s prone to tempest winds and heat waves, like the one that charged the air when Ravi was born. The night sky starts darkening earlier, the cicadas and night crawlers turning up their chorus. August has always carried that tug between holding on to the last golden rays of summer and bracing for what’s next.

For me, it’s also the month that remade me entirely.

Ravi arrived on his due date — August 15, 2003, despite, or maybe because of, the blackout that swallowed half the country. In New York City, so soon after 9/11, it should have been a sign of how little in life we control. Instead, I was swept into the chaos of the Bronx hospital on generator power: the cord around his neck, his tiny, bruised body not breathing at first, the blur of hands taking him to the NICU before I could even try to remember what I’d learned in Lamaze. 

I buried my worries about how such a rough start would shape his life, our lives together. But his love broke the spell of fear, making that late summer feel like the hinge of the universe, the point everything before and after would turn on.

A year later, it gave us the day we learned our three-person world would expand — still in the Bronx, just home from Ravi’s first haircut, when we found out I was pregnant with Lee.

It gave us Auggie, our doggie, who Ravi wanted more than any of us. Darth Augusto Bloom was not an August arrival, but named by Ravi for the main character in Wonder, the tender book we read together at bedtime, maybe the last of the classics before he decided he’d outgrown being read to.

As a camp family, August was also our week at the Jersey shore, bringing home sand and piles of laundry with our memories in the final rush before school.

The Birthdays That Come Anyway

And then there’s August’s shadow side. The year Craig’s mom, Ravi’s beloved Nana, died — on his birthday. I spent the days before silently willing her to hang on just one more day. Not his 13th birthday. But life didn’t bend to my bargaining.

The deeper break came years later. Ravi’s 18th birthday — what should have been the summer before his senior year of high school — arrived just four months after the car accident that took his life. That was the August when everything split: the ones we had with him, and the ones we’ve had to find a way through without him.

Since then, his birthdays can’t just happen. They need intention — a plan for how we’ll meet the day as a family, keeping him close in both the sorrow and the love. That first August without him, we hiked Valley Forge and planted the red maple Ravi tree. Another year, we walked the trails by Rancocas Creek. We’ve painted rocks and left them around his tree.

Still, I never feel prepared for the eighth month to roll around. The air thickens, the light tilts, the cicadas scream as if warning me the day is coming, ready or not. Now it’s just days from what would have been his 22nd birthday — the summer before senior year of college. I still let myself drift into wondering where he’d be, what he’d be doing, whether he’d have been on stage singing a duet with Cary’s girlfriend in the production of Grease we just saw. 

But after the Ravi’s Bimah visit, I wasn’t yet ready to imagine what we could do for his 22nd — one more reminder of the ways August bears its weight.

Facing It Together

I finally felt ready to face it during my swim yesterday, the water, as usual, working like truth serum. Stroke after stroke, my mind loosened its grip, and I could see it clearly — how my protections had stepped in, thinking they were keeping me safe from the weight of August, when really they were keeping me from Craig. From letting myself stand in both the love and the sorrow.

Later, I told Craig as much — admitted that it wasn’t dismissal, just my defenses flaring. We found our way back to each other in that conversation, a small repair, but one that felt like an opening.

This year adds a new layer to August. For the first time, we won’t be circling the wagons with my brothers’ families and my mom. We’ll be far away on his birthday — in the Canary Islands, a beautiful and otherworldly place, the kind of place Ravi would have loved to explore. 

I want to step into that different energy, let it hold us, and meet the day not in retreat but in offering — sending love into the world in a way he might recognize. I believe he still receives it, just not in any way I can map or measure, held somewhere in the current of God, the universe, and us.

The giving is as necessary as the keeping. And this year, I want to give it from a place he would have chosen too — somewhere wild and beautiful, where the horizon feels wide enough to carry it.

Three summers have passed since the outdoor stage at JCC Camps in Medford—built and dedicated in our son’s memory—became part of the landscape. By now, I’m sure most kids barely notice it as new. It’s just part of how flagpole mornings begin here, like fishing, like instructional swim. 

For us, it will never be routine. It’s not just a stage—it’s a rhythm we return to. Where Ravi’s spirit stirs in the sandy, stubborn Pinelands earth and drifts through the air in song and spirit. It’s not bound to any one space or even time, but carried forward by a tradition that insists on remembering.

But of course Ravi’s Bimah wasn’t always here. When he died in 2021, there was no Bimah—just grief, and the need to do something with it. So we raised money. We built. Because even without a structure, Ravi already belonged to camp—a place that shaped him, and now, somehow, helps carry what we can’t.

Camp Moves On. So Do We.

Ravi’s Bimah is permanent—or at least, as permanent as anything can be when it’s built of wood, concrete and love. That’s the strange comfort of it. A fixed structure in a world that keeps shifting. Campers and counselors come and go. They age out. My own kids grow up and move on. But the Bimah stays, marking something lasting in a place built around the fleeting.

Last summer, our visit still felt tethered to something familiar. Both Lee and Cary were working at camp. Most mornings, I’d walk them to the bus stop with our dogs Auggie and Moose, waiting beneath the tree where campers gathered. For a moment, I could pretend we hadn’t moved on—Ravi still here, leading his bunk, his beautiful smile pulling kids into the joy of it all.

This summer is different. Lee’s at a college internship now, stepping into what comes next. And Cary—now a rising senior—rides a different current. He’s still part of this world, still wearing his camp shirt, still leading bus songs. But college is on the horizon.

He is still a part of Bus 29, but there’s no dog-walking riutal as he is now bus counselor, probably the most brutal camp job. He boards it at the start of the route, in charge of the morning chaos and end-of-day fatigue of kids in that unstructured, unairconditioned space between home and camp. His station is just a block from my mom’s condo. Maybe a coincidence. Maybe a wink from the universe.

​​And yet I still return to visit Ravi’s Bimah, this third summer, as the mother of the boy whose Peter Pan–like memory is tied to one of camp’s most meaningful gathering points. And somehow, too, as a donor—a role I never looked for, never imagined claiming.

Witnessing as Ravi’s mom—and so much more.

We arrived just before flagpole.

Security pointed us to the welcome center (amped-up presence, which sadly feels normal now), and we got the donor treatment: a ride on the golf cart. 

I sat with Lee in the cart’s flipped last row, facing backwards. My arm around my middle son’s shoulder, I observed the familiar pattern of a camp morning unfold— passing structures that haven’t changed much since my own camper days, and a steady flow of kids and counselors moving from the buses toward the Bimah. Most wore their color-coordinated JCC shirts, peeling off in bunk-sized clusters to find their usual spot in the field for flagpole.

I scanned the crowd for familiar faces—campers and counselors I might still recognize—aware that we’re still in those early years of after, when so many who knew Ravi are still part of this place. It won’t always be that way.

In the past, I never quite knew how to be when we arrived. Was I supposed to disappear into the crowd and let it all wash over me? Stand apart and observe, like I do in my journalism life—always a little removed with a notebook in hand, even if it’s invisible? Or huddle close to our camp hosts and let them guide us through the motions?

But this time, with Lee no longer attached to a bunk, the answer was clear. We wove through rows of campers like threading through an outdoor concert crowd, making our way to Cary and his gaggle of adoring seven-year-olds. 

L’Chaim in Motion

On stage, the morning show kicked off with high-energy greetings from camp staff and the turtle mascot, and rolled right into camp theatrics. One bunk led the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an electric version of Hatikvah—a lifeguard with a guitar, introduced like a headliner, launched into the Israeli national anthem with full Hendrix-at-Woodstock energy.

What followed was all-in singing and dancing—the kind of follow-the-leader joy that turns flagpole into something like Jewish Zumba. Israeli teens, here for the year and staying with local families, took the lead, guiding campers and counselors through the moves. Enthusiasm over polish, always.

And all of it—every stomp, shout, and spin—unfolded on the Bimah that didn’t exist before Ravi. A place built for this kind of spirit. Where kids can showcase their talents or simply belong.

What caught me this time was how naturally Israeli culture and Jewish joy move through this space. Even now—with the heartbreak in Israel and Gaza, and the rising static of antisemitism always humming just beyond this wooded day-camp utopia—this place carries a different frequency.

No one’s giving sermons. Kids whose families may not agree on much politically are dancing beside each other, figuring out the steps. The tension of the outside world doesn’t exactly melt like lemon drops in the sun, but it doesn’t show up here either. What remains is motion and music, kids being kids, and the expression of something ancient that still says l’chaim—to life—with a kind of lightness and ease.

And seeing kids with special needs seamlessly folded into their bunks, thanks to one-to-one advocates, reminded me that the values I was raised to believe in—dignity, joy, community—aren’t just abstract ideals. They’re being practiced right here.

And then, just like that, it was over. Bunks, kids go off to their next period activities. The stage was quickly turned into a rehearsal space for the upcoming musical.

As we lingered, stopping at the dedication sign, looking at the iconic photo of Ravi surrounded by woods, wearing a sweatshirt from the congregational trip to Israel that never happened because of Covid, always a reminder that he never got there, the tears always on the verge, exploded. 

What Grief Still Asks of Us

The Bimah—this sacred stage—wasn’t just built. It was summoned.

I thought about that after hearing about a tragedy earlier this week: a 20-year-old boy in our community, a friend of Lee’s, who died suddenly. He was so much like Ravi in spirit—bright, joyful, beloved. He was studying to become a special ed teacher, inspired by the support he’d received and the love that had helped him navigate life’s hurdles. His brothers started a fund in his name, “Do it Like Dylan,” and we gave right away.

It brought me back to those early days after Ravi died, when we couldn’t even lift our heads, and friends started a GoFundMe to build something in his honor. That’s how Ravi’s Bimah began—seeded by love, loss, and a deep urge to do something.

A Dream That Didn’t Feel Like Him

We live differently with the grief now. But that blend of sorrow and sweetness still adds to the endless and changing emotions.

Before our visit, Lee told us about a dream—maybe a nightmare. It was set in the present. We were all still living together in our house—functioning as much as we could—and one day, Ravi appeared at the door.

He’d been gone for four years. Not dead—just gone. Out west. Living on his own. Mature. Magnetic. The kind of man who turns heads. He explained that during a family vacation years earlier, he’d reached a breaking point. That our family—dysfunctional and so heavy with sorrow—had become too much for him. So he staged his death and disappeared.

Lee said he felt confused and flustered. Somewhere inside, he knew it wasn’t real. It was too hard to feel the same connection they always had because this was so unlike him. That’s how he knew it wasn’t real.

I told Lee what I saw in it: that maybe he’s being asked to let go on a new level. To accept Ravi’s death more fully, so that Ravi can live more freely in him, in all of us. Lee said that made sense. The grief never really goes away, but it does ask us to grow with it.

Lake Medford Sends a Sign

I didn’t leave camp feeling light. I left with the weight of it. The Bimah bears Ravi’s name because he’s not here. That’s the part that doesn’t change.

But later that day, Cary sent a text to the family chat. A photo: him, grinning, holding up a pickerel he’d caught in Lake Medford during bunk fishing. The first fishing photo of the summer.

Back when they were younger, before the boys had phones, I’d get those pictures from the head of fishing— young Ravi, Lee and Cary beaming over their latest catches. Along with all sports, fishing was their joy. Ravi was the ace during Color War, the kid who could fill a bucket with just a net.

So this photo—this fish, this grin—it was the sign I didn’t know I was waiting for.

Because honoring Ravi means holding both: the sorrow etched into the foundation, and the joy that still rises from it—like a fish leaping from the lake, reminding us he’s still part of this story.

Epitaph

After the completion of Ravi’s Bimah, we knew there was still more good to do in Ravi’s memory at the camp. So we created the Ravi’s Mensches Memorial Fund to support camp initiatives that remain so tied to Ravi’s spirit. This includes arts programming around the bimah, sustainability initiatives promoting environmental awareness through a Jewish lens, and expanding opportunities for all children through the Open Hearts/Open Minds initiative.

It’s one more way Ravi’s light keeps shining forward—and for me, one more thread in the tapestry of purpose and joy I get to carry, always, as his mother.

They rise from the churn I create—air caught and shaped by my movement, then released. Again and again, they appear, each one as fleeting as the next. Captivating in the instant I see them, then gone, out of my mind without a trace, as if they never existed.

Somewhere in that rhythm, I feel total presence—motion and stillness woven together, and the sense that I’ve slipped into a current untethered from time or place.

At first, it was just sensation—the rhythm, the muffled splash of each stroke, the way the world fades when I focus on the bubbles. But then I noticed something else: the bubbles are an answer to me. They rise in response to my action, to my breath. And with that came a new awareness: I’m not just being carried. I’m shaping the current, too.

The Praise That Never Made Sense

And I wonder now—could praising God be like that?

Religion asks us to believe that God-praise is a portal to unlock heaven on earth. That’s a big ask! For most of my life, I’ve recoiled from even contemplating what that would be like. It felt more like feeding the ego of some distant power,  hungry for constant applause, enforced by fear and force, not devotion. Was God really some cosmic narcissist, desperate for praise like Trump or any other strongman who can’t stand to be questioned?

And then there’s the Ned Flanders version in my head: relentless God‑praise chirping away while chaos abounds in Springfield. It plays well in cartoon form, a shiny shield of “hallelujahs” thrown up to block out what’s actually happening.

That, too, was easier to grasp than whatever praise was meant to be. Mocking felt safer than opening myself to something I didn’t understand—and didn’t trust.

Letting Praise Rise Like Bubbles

Now I wonder if praise is less something we give and more something that rises, like the bubbles, when we are paying attention.

When I was a child and heard all the “Our Father, Our King” and “King of the Universe” language in synagogue, it felt like background noise. It was high ceremony that seemed to demand reverence without offering relationship.

It was confusing, and as I became the cynic I needed to be, I assumed that’s all it was—something people said to feel safe, or to belong, or worse, to exert control.

That assumption fit neatly into my worldview. It made sense to stay skeptical; I was attuned to how often God‑praise had been weaponized in history. And with hate once again being sanctioned by governments, including my own, and antisemitism spreading like a plague, the way it always seems to, those defenses don’t go quietly.

But curiosity led me here anyway. Even with all of that murmuring underneath the surface, I’ve followed the thread, wondering what praise is really for. And in the rhythm of bubbles and breath, I catch a glimpse.

Water Has Always Taught Me

Whether I pay attention in the water or let my mind drift, the bubbles still form. They’re what happens in the act of moving through an element that could drown me, but instead keeps me buoyant and light of mind —what I’ve come to think of as my own made‑up religion of mermaidism.

It’s why I was drawn to the water in the first place. In childhood, it was where I felt the protection, comfort, and peace that life on land—life inside my own family—couldn’t offer.

Swimming has carried me through so many seasons of upheaval, reinvention, and grief. But for years, I thought of water mainly as a refuge—a place to retreat from the weight of the world, not a teacher showing me how to move through it.

Now I see it differently. Water has been shaping me all along, showing me how to feel held and how to keep moving forward at the same time. And that’s what I’m starting to see about exultant praise. It’s not just a string of meaningless over-the-top words or a tool for control or a hollow recitation.

It can be something else entirely. It can be a call for attention, asking me to reach for a truer, light‑filled version of safety and protection. A way of loosening the old, armored layers that have long been too heavy, not just in this moment, but across generations of human struggle.

For that reason, I’ve started to consider exultant praise not as giving God something God lacks, but as something that stirs us awake, gently parting the defenses so we can feel what’s been there all along.

That’s what the bubbles have become for me: not just a rhythm, but a kind of praise. A rising I don’t force but can join. A sign of connection. A portal.

In my Reform Jewish tradition, it helps, too, that the language has shifted. It’s no longer just “Our Father, Our King” or “King of the Universe.” I couldn’t see myself in those words. There’s room now—for Spirit, for Divine Presence that doesn’t sit above us but moves through us and between us.

The words don’t feel as distant anymore. They carry real charge. Like the bubbles when I swim, they rise from presence and motion. And when I pay attention, they shimmer with meaning.

Ravi—my beloved son, gone from this world too soon—keeps guiding me toward that shift. Not as some holy messenger, but as my reminder to notice. His love is in the hush of the backyard wind, the birdsong that breaks through my thoughts and fades, the still gaze of the dogs who watch me like they know. He finds me, again and again.

And that love always brings me back to words.

Not just words, but charged language—words that hold feeling, memory, God. Praise that bubbles up and unlocks something I didn’t know was inside me, that I was afraid to unleash for so long. That’s what I’m learning to follow.

If praise is how words open the hidden door, then I want to keep drifting toward it—the way I’ve always drifted toward water.

A rare Saturday with all of us home—until we answered, stepping into the wet, weighty morning, drawn by that faint hum underground.

A promise only the soil could keep led us to a stretch of the Cooper River on the quieter, swampier side —away from the polished stretch where the rowers launch and the regatta crowds gather.

Here, the trees leaned over muddy banks, the grass patchy and blotted with goose droppings. Near the water, smoke curled from a grill where meat had already been sizzling over coals—a promise of a gathering still to come. Joggers and bikers cycled past. Dogs tugged their walkers along the path.

Meanwhile, we were unloading two metal detectors and a pair of shovels, already attuned to that faint signal humming under the radar of everyone else’s Saturday: the lure of buried treasure.

Metal detecting is like that: digging for treasure but without the luxury of a map. You sink time and effort into patches of earth, knowing most will hold nothing more than bottle caps, pull tabs, and can slaw. But every bleep carries the spark of possibility—this could be the one.

The Rhythm of the Hunt

This morning, Craig was the first to break from our cluster. Detector in hand, he easily slid into a meditative rhythm—the engineer’s mind, methodical, sweeping the earth in patient arcs.

Lee and Cary stayed together, moving as a pair without needing to speak too much. Lee scanning, Cary crouched low with the shovel, ready to pounce and dig.

I hung back a little. I get restless with the long stretches of waiting, the false starts, the digging and filling back in. But I love being there for the moment something real is found. So I set up my beach chair with my laptop and a book, happy to hover at the edge of their orbit—watching, listening, ready to wander over when a signal sounded or to hand off water or a snack.

We were working on the grounds around the Hopkins House, a colonial-era home with white shutters and brick chimneys, a land layered with centuries of footsteps and the possibility of something left behind.

Threads That Run Through Us

Watching them fan out over the grass, I felt that tug again—the way this need to search and uncover is something we share as a family. We haven’t had a day like this in a long time. It gets trickier as the kids get older. And anything touched by Ravi’s presence carries its own weight.

So much of what we’ve chased together—rocks, fossils, coins—traces back to Ravi. The oldest so often leads the way, and Ravi’s passions became ours before we even realized it

During the pandemic—when being near others carried risks we didn’t yet understand and isolation weighed heavily—this hobby became a refuge. We let it draw us outside, into the open air, chasing faint signals and, in some small way, chasing answers —clues about what people in other eras endured. Digging into the past felt truer than trying to make sense of the present.

Then came April 2021, just as the world was beginning to open up again—the tragic accident that took Ravi from us. After that, even the thought of picking up the detectors carried a kind of gravity. The family has since been on unearthing forays, just not with the regularity of the before times.

But like so many unexpected turns in our life, the spark came through a story I was writing. An SJ Mag assignment took me to an animal rescue farm that Camden County Commissioner Jeff Nash and his wife, Krista, tend with such devotion. At some point, I mentioned that Craig and I had been out along the Cooper River. One thing led to another—the Hopkins House, the county‑owned grounds around it—and before long, we had permission to try our luck here.

And just like that, the pull returned. The detectors came out of retirement, batteries charged, shovels packed, and we found ourselves here, chasing signals in the ground and the threads of memory that brought us back.

Where History Meets Our Own Story

It makes perfect sense, really, that we’d be on the banks of the Cooper River—a winding thread carrying centuries of South Jersey’s history—coaxing the soil to give up whatever stories it’s been keeping.

Long before we ever listened for beeps and blips in the ground, we were a family of collectors. Ravi started it—pockets full of rocks, then an interest in fossils that line the window shelf in his room, still a Ravi museum. He shared that fascination with his brothers, and in so many ways, it shaped our family agenda.

At some point, Pokémon cards and coins slipped into that same current of obsession. The three boys were convinced their robust card trading with friends would bankroll all our early retirements. They’d come home from a swap session or trip to Target for packs and carefully slide the cards into binders, the most valuable tucked into protective sleeves.

At the same time, rolls of pennies would be spread across the table, Google searches open as they matched mint marks to years, tracing coins to eras and places. With Craig’s help, they got savvy bidding on eBay, holding their breath in those final seconds, then tearing open the padded envelopes when they arrived.

And then there was geocaching—modern‑day treasure hunting with GPS, following cryptic clues to little hidden containers tucked under rocks or in the hollows of trees. Another way to believe that the ordinary world might reveal something secret, if you are patient enough.

All of it overlapped, a tangle of quests that came and went in waves, but always with the same pulse: discovery. That feeling of holding a fragment of history in your palm and wondering about the hands that held it before.

And living here in South Jersey, that history is never far. The Cooper River feeds into the Delaware; along these waterways the land’s first inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape people, once flourished. These same currents later carried George Washington’s ragtag army and their supplies, along with whispered plans and fragile hopes for a country built on the promise of welcoming people from many other lands. We feel it when we’re out there—the way a coin or button might carry the echo of Revolutionary America—history and optimism threaded through this place, even as most people jog by, walk their dogs, and move through their mornings, unaware of what rests just beneath their feet.

What the Ground Gives Back

Family legend says Cary was the one who dug up our first truly old find at historic Fernbrook Farms—a button with a faint floral pattern, likely early 1800s, lifted from soil we’d once only thought of as u‑pick fields and CSA shares in Bordentown. For years we’d spent long afternoons there with the kids, bent over rows of beans and flowers, filling grocery bags and vases. But somewhere along the way, we started looking down differently, wondering what lay deeper.

That button wasn’t the only thing to surface over time. There was a friend’s wedding ring, the pocket watch we like to imagine might have slipped from someone’s coat a century ago, a scattering of arrowheads, and a handful of coins whose dates sent us down rabbit holes of local history. Some of these finds even found their way into a piece I wrote for SJ Mag during the pandemic—a story about how, when the world felt shut tight, this hobby opened a path for us, pulling us outdoors and into the sweep of time.

And now, here we were again, crouched in damp grounds, following that familiar suspense. For 3-plus hours. The beeps were frequent, but the finds were mostly trash and a smattering of coins.

By the time dark clouds grew more menacing, we knew. This would be one of those bust days. We were packing up when the rain came—sheets of it, sudden and heavy, drenching us before we even made it to the car.

On the drive home, we stopped at the bagel shop, dripping and streaked with dirt, then headed home, hangry and a bit frustrated. But back in dry clothes, after showers and nourished, we decided it would be worth another, more strategic try. We remembered that some days you bring home nothing but stories and wet clothes, and that’s enough to keep you coming back.

We’d just gotten home from Friday night Shabbat services. The package could have been shaving stuff, vitamins. Something ordered the day before, and halfway forgotten since.

Then I saw the return address—Cherry Hill Township—and the hand-written instruction: “Do Not Bend.” I knew exactly what this was: a proclamation officially commemorating the reopening of Ravi’s Rink— the hockey rink named after my first-born son months after he died at 17. It was formally reopened this May, meriting this official notice, which had been mailed earlier but returned for insufficient postage.

I brought it inside and looked at the folder labeled New Jersey Legislature.

Before I even opened it, my mind kicked into flash drive mode—when one small thing pulls up the entire timeline at once: the family we used to be, the accident and this ever-shifting afterlife, which includes the re-opening ceremony on May 18.

In truth, I hadn’t thought about the actual proclamation since that day. There were so many moving parts—so many people there from different parts of our lives, government officials, a hockey game, and the media.

The moment I started reading it, the memory came back—what it felt like to hear those words spoken out loud.

The Proclamation, Spoken Aloud

It wasn’t just the words. It was Melinda Kane reading them.

She’s our state assemblywoman, but more than that—a friend, and a mother of three. After her son Jeremy was killed in Afghanistan, Melinda became an activist for Gold Star Parents. She was the first mother I spoke to who knew the kind of grief I was just beginning to live.

She was the one saying Ravi’s name out loud that day, naming what we had lost and what we made in its wake.

I wasn’t prepared for how that would feel.

Back when I was a newspaper reporter covering local news, proclamations were background noise, part of the job. Town meetings, dedications, community events. “Whereas…” and “Be it resolved…” was on loop.

They always felt kind of empty to me, like well-intentioned Mad Libs. Plug in the name, the date, the occasion. Clap politely. Move on.

I see it differently now. This proclamation for Ravi’s Rink tells a story about this rink where my son Ravi found joy and connection. It’s where he is remembered—in our town, in our time and in the everyday life that keeps unfolding around us.

And then there is this part:

“WHEREAS, The strength and prosperity of the State of New Jersey and the vitality of our American society greatly depend upon exceptional endeavors, exemplified by Ravi’s Rink, that strive to uplift their fellow citizens through positive action in furtherance of the common good and a brighter tomorrow…”

The phrasing is formal, somewhat stilted, but underneath is something real. It shows that, in a world that can feel so fractured, we still know how to show up for each other. Ravi is still bringing people together. Still bringing light.

And now it has been filed by the Secretary of State under the seal of the “Great State of New Jersey.” But where was it filed?

This kind of bureaucratic remembering feels different. Less intimate, maybe—but oddly enduring. I find myself imagining where it lives—maybe in an overstuffed Harry Potter–like Ministry of Magic archival room, filed between tax liens, marriage licenses and 911 calls. Somewhere in Trenton. More likely, it just lives in the cloud now.

Still, his name is there.

A Modern-Day Tale for a Rink Reborn

After the ceremony, once we stepped back into something like regular life—gear packed up, thank-you notes underway—I realized I needed somewhere to place all that was rising up in me.

Now, I am not a poet. Maybe someday.

What I wrote came out in one long breath, and oddly—almost inevitably—it felt like my own version of The Canterbury Tales.

That piece of literature had stuck with me since high school. So I was thrilled when Ravi took to it in 10th grade—and even more delighted when he pulled Lee into it during the pandemic, just as it was Lee’s turn in AP English to read the epic. The two of them even made me a Mother’s Day card entirely in Middle English. It took way longer than they expected, but they were so proud of it.

For them, the Middle English was the fun part—but what’s stayed with me is how language can carry life forward. How long after the moment has passed—and even after the words go out of style—it can still hold the shape of a feeling.

Because beneath all the layers, it’s simple: people—travelers—sharing stories to make sense of being alive in their times.

I’m not under any illusions—no one’s assigning my epic poem in future AP English classes.

But for that day, for that ribbon-cutting, writing an epic poem was what I needed.

It also felt right to dedicate the story to two people most responsible for seeing the restoration of Ravi’s Rink through— Mayor Dave Fleisher and Camden County Commissioner Jen Fleisher. They are a husband-and-wife team, also parents of three, who knew Ravi and were in a position to help us make his memory a blessing.

It gets more poetic the more I think about it.

So here’s my own Canterbury Tales-like version of Ravi’s Rink reopening.

Ravi’s Rink: A New Core Memory

Dedicated to Dave and Jen Fleisher

Core family memories are supposed to shimmer.

Bar mitzvah dance floors gone sticky with sweat and joy. Family hikes ending in waterfalls and unintended soakings (usually me). Lobster nights on the Jersey Shore—fish stink, butter-slicked fingers, the dock gently swaying like a meditation.

That’s the version of life we reach for. The reel we hope will play in our final moments.

But grief insists on its own kind of imprint. Just as lasting. It erupts, then settles—like volcanic ash, entombing everything it touches.

For a long time, the final moments we carried of Ravi lived in that terrible space.

Then came Sunday. The wind-whipped, joyful, slightly chaotic reopening of the rink. Our hometown rink that bears Ravi’s name.

And something changed.

Lee and I named what we didn’t see coming: This day has become a new core family memory.

One that holds Ravi not as the ache in the room, but as fully present—no longer guiding from beyond, but here, fully broken through.

A day of wind. Of skates and sticks. Of adults and kids chirping, gliding, colliding. A game infused with Ravi’s charm, his love of life.

First came the kind of busyness that leaves no room to feel. Floor sweeping. Weed-pruning. Food prep. Me yelling “Lee! Get out of my shower!” —probably with an expletive thrown in. Craig pacing, convinced we’d be late. Uncle Ian trying to stay invisible, still catching flak for not wearing Ravi Red.

Still...the energy shifted the moment we pulled into the fields.

The rink was alive. Friends. Elected officials. Coaches. Hockey players. Ravi’s former teammates. Others who just felt called to be there.

Here, the air moved like a main character. A force with something to say. That God was in on the game. Ravi too—of course. Maybe even Gritty, despite the Flyers’ mascot’s absence.

I needed a role, so I passed out the caps we made—Ravi in red thread, a shadow figure skating into the horizon. It gave my hands purpose, linked me to those trying to hold this with us: players, officials, friends— all who have longed to help carry this weight. A moment of eye contact, a pause, a shared smile.

Then came the official moment. Our family gathered at the goalie net with Mayor Dave Fleisher, my old high school friend.

Was it fate that he—our class president—and I—the school paper editor—would be here, collaborating again, decades later? I’ll go with yes.

What wasn’t lost on us: All those windswept afternoons we’d already spent with the Fleishers on these township fields, cheering on soccer teams—their son Robbie, our Ravi.

Gifted athletes. Heart-centered boys. Theirs, now heading into his senior year of college. Ours, memorialized in this space we were about to dedicate.

Dave’s speech wasn’t the usual ribbon-cutting fare. Not just the mayor doing his job. His words came from a place of knowing. A father who still carries the weight of a friend’s loss.

Craig was up next—the speech we workshopped together. It wasn’t just the words—it was that Craig chose to be the one up there, telling our story. That’s usually me.

For those who’ve seen the shape his grief has taken, that shift said everything.

Then came Kosta—the Russian-born anchor of the Sunday morning hockey crew. He asked ChatGPT to describe Ravi. What came back was eerily accurate, down to his gentleness and quiet intensity. AI didn’t just make that up. It was echoing the voice I’ve been sending into the world all this time—Essays, posts, fragments of memory—all part of the open-source swirl now.

Ravi’s story never went quiet, because I never stopped telling it.

Next, Evie stepped forward—my six-year-old niece, no longer the toddler who lost her doting oldest cousin but fully present now, part of the story.

She gripped the oversized scissors and made the ribbon cut, making a clean slice into the ceremony. Into memory.

Then, at center ice, it was Brody’s turn to shine. He was six when Ravi died—a tagalong cousin just finding his balance on ice. Now ten, a full player, he stepped into his puck-dropping moment like opening night at Wells Fargo Center.

Brody dropped it cleanly between Lee and Cary—his older cousins, his hockey heroes. Lee, the middle son, the beast, got to it first. And the game was on.

What followed was less ceremony, more essence. Players pursuing pucks, chirping and laughing. Great hockey music, loud. The unspoken understanding that heart, memory, grit, and joy were the real tribute.

After the game, we returned to a house that felt settled—yard swept, tables laid, bagels sliced.

The food, arranged with care by Sarah, the sister I would have chosen, and her young kids—a mitzvah in motion.

And I realized: This was what we’d been circling toward these four heavy, shape-shifting years. Not just the reopening of the rink. A return to something we feared we’d lost—ease, joy, the feeling of being truly alive.

The years of fits and starts. The setbacks. The planning.

The questions with no easy answers: How do you live with grief that shows up not just in the milestone moments, but in the quiet ones?

How do you let joy back in—while holding fast to the memories that made you?

There was never an answer key buried in the back of the book. We’ve been writing it as we go.

And here we were—not just hosting, but allowing in what needed to be remembered.

A time-lapsed, deconstructed shiva. Not crying. Remembering. Laughing. Telling tales.

Sitting in a home full of Ravi’s energy—his friends, his family, his music drifting through the house. A post-hockey, pick-up basketball game pulsing in the cul-de-sac.

Later, the photos and videos came in. The Action News segment collecting likes. Texts from friends near and far.

Lee and I circled back to where it began.

A new core memory, carved not out of loss, but of life force.

No, this light-filled day doesn’t erase the hard memories. But it stands beside them.

A counterweight. Proof that the reel of memory doesn’t have to crash and burn. We get to keep adding to it. Layering in light. Insisting on presence—even while carrying the burn of what will always be missing.

And Ravi keeps whispering—like he did in the quiet months after he died: It all mattered. This matters, too. It matters so much.

The reply came quickly. Not quite the one I had hoped for. A clean rejection from one of my go-to places. Ghosted by the rest. And I was more crushed than I want to admit.

Rejection of writing, or anything I put personal effort and meaning into, stirs up more than just disappointment. It scrapes the edges of my ego, that part of me still hoping someone in a position of power will say, you’re amazing. I tell myself I’m more evolved now, more zen. That I know better than to take it personally. But here I am—still trying to convince myself it’s not personal.

Still, I know I needed to write the essay. Not to prove anything. But to get honest about something that keeps happening in my marriage, the pattern that flares up when I get scared and everything feels too hard.

And then, sometimes, the moment comes when I remember how to try again. How to make the effort to be the person I say I’m trying to become. And how it’s usually when I let Ravi’s voice guide me.

So here it is—my fourth Substack. Not a backup plan. A choice.

So here it is:

My Husband and I Keep Having the Same F*&king Argument

(And the Beatles song that might finally be the way out)

My husband Craig and I have been having the same  f*&king argument since at least 2002—that’s the year we stood under the wedding chuppah and promised to love and support each other. To weather life’s storms together. 

And life didn’t hold back. We raised three sons. We grieve the one we lost. Over the last four years, we’ve been trying to move forward in a version of life we never saw coming.

The same f*&king argument, that’s what I call it, is never about what sets it off—like something sentimental the dogs chewed because one of us left out, me steamrolling a conversation without meaning to, or a critical appointment that’s been botched up in the family calendar. 

I know. It’s not exactly the most helpful label. The F-word, even with symbols instead of the U and the C, is not the top tool in the conflict-resolution handbook. But it’s the word that cuts through. The one that tells me: we’re here again—so maybe I can spot the pattern before it takes over.

And it’s the same loop every time, even if the triggers vary. One of us gets thrown off, the other moves into shut-it-down mode, and suddenly we’re not partners—we’re mortal enemies when all we really wanted was connection. Safety. Peace. A hug.

Lately, I’ve gotten better at noticing when we’re in the thick of it. And that awareness—naming it as the same f*&king argument—feels like progress. After the fact, I flag it to Craig or our therapist. I whisper it into my voice memo journals, trying to get closer to the thing that keeps pulling us back in.

The Pill Incident

Most recently, the same f*&king argument was over Moose’s nighttime pills. I’d been out all evening—first the PTA meeting, then food shopping—returning home with the hum of the outside world still clinging to me. I walked in, hands full of groceries, ice cream melting in the car, and was greeted not by human help but by our dog Moose. Day two post-neutering, he charged toward me in his cone of shame like I was offering up the ground meat in my stuffed arms as a treat. (I wasn’t.)

Craig, half-asleep on the couch, asked if I could give Moose his meds. I wanted to be helpful and set the tone for us to relax together that evening. But I also wanted to get the groceries inside before the ice cream turned to soup. I said yes too quickly, and stepped away from the bags.

 “Use the medication chart I made,” he added sleepily.

Craig had whipped together this table, with help from ChatGPT, detailing which pills Moose needed at what time for each post-op day. He’d shown it to me the day before—another moment when I was multitasking. Before I grabbed the dog pill bottles, I glanced at the chart again, trying to make sense of it, but at that moment, my brain just wasn’t in chart-processing mode.

I saw marks for three medicines, vaguely remembered the doses weren’t straightforward, but I skimmed right past the fine print. Wanting to get it done quickly, I wrapped the meds in leftover chicken. Moose happily inhaled them in one gulp, and I went back out to grab more groceries.

Upon my return, Craig asked if I gave Moose the meds. 

“Uh huh.” 

“Did I follow the chart?”

That’s when the realization crept in. I missed a pill. And instead of just saying so, I went full improv. “Yep, all done!” I said, as I stealthily wrapped the last pill in white meat and slipped it to Moose.

But my poker face sucks. Craig asked again. I doubled down. He bristled.I got snippy and called the chart dumb.

Cue: dramatic spiral.

All over one measly missed pill. But of course, it was never about the pill.

When the Fight Isn’t About the Fight

Another round of the same f*&king argument. One of us slips, the other goes primitive. The loudest one gets the point. We each scramble to protect the scared kid inside—the one who can’t bear to feel blamed or shamed. And in the chaos, we forget what actually matters: we’re supposed to be in the same corner.

Instead, we throw emotional jabs and lose sight of why we ever said yes to any of this in the first place.

After this latest round, I wanted to check out. STAT. So I went to the piano.

I didn’t even realize what I was doing at first—avoiding Craig, regulating myself—but my fingers found their way to Here, There and Everywhere. Playing the Beatles on piano always brings me back to calm. It’s a portal to peace—even if, in that moment, I wasn’t exactly open to the love all around the song was offering.

And somewhere in the middle of playing it, I heard a voice saying:

Why do you want to leave it like this? You want peace. You say you never want to go to bed angry. Then don’t.

Fighting gravity, I willed myself off the piano bench. I found Craig in the kitchen looking defeated and told him to look at me. He hesitated—no doubt bracing for a lecture.

But not this time.

I laid it all out: the mental tabs crowding my brain, the guilt, the panic, the effort, the mistake. I added gestures. Humor. It turned into a full-on Jayne Show.

And Craig listened—first guarded, then smiling. He laughed at the reenactment. And when it was over, he said, “Thank you.”

And I found myself thinking: Wait. That’s it? Is it really that simple to diffuse a fight?

Not always. But sometimes. Especially when what you’re really diffusing isn’t the situation—it’s the armor. That familiar, false sense of protection that only ends up keeping us apart.

And then Craig offered his take: when I say yes to something—like giving the dog pills for the first time—he still expects I’ll mess it up. And honestly, he’s not wrong when it comes to fine print, especially when I’m in multitask mode.
But that expectation carries a dark kind of energy I sense before he says a word. It walks into the room ahead of him and hangs in the air before we even start.

So I told him—if he really wants it done right, maybe explain his chart at a time when I actually need to use it. I won’t retain it otherwise. That’s not defiance; that’s just my brain. 

And I told him I’ll try too. To slow down. To pause. To stop saying yes just to please, when the timing’s off and I’m already overwhelmed. To say, yes—but not right now - or even “could you do it. I’m unbagging groceries.” 

I could even ask him to help with groceries and then show me his medicine chart.

We both want peace. But our mismatched instincts—our different survival strategies—have tangled us in years of hurt and misunderstanding. And that’s how we keep ending up here: same f*&king argument, different day.

This feels like something we should already know. Marriage 101. But knowing it and living it—especially now—are two very different things.

The Song Ravi Left Me

Later that night, I was still thinking about that moment at the piano. About how just playing Here, There and Everywhere settled me.

And then it clicked: Martha My Dear.

That was the last song Ravi played on repeat at the piano before the car crash four years ago. That catchy, Vaudevillian ode to a sheepdog who keeps getting into trouble. The melody lifts you up before you even realize what it’s doing.
And when I picture Ravi’s beautiful, serene smile while he played it—sometimes that’s all it takes to remind me what still lives inside me.

This time, I heard something else.

I’d always thought of it as a sweet, slightly goofy love song to a dog. But the line—

Hold your head up, you silly girl / Look what you’ve done—

It felt like Ravi speaking.

Not to scold but to remind me: We both will mess up but we still deserve love. 

And this line:

When you find yourself in the thick of it / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you.

I made a mess. I didn’t follow the chart. I got defensive. I hurt someone I love. But that doesn’t have to ruin the night. We get to make up if we can just pause long enough to let love lead instead of fear.

And if I believe the voice in me is real—the one that says I’m here to write, to make space for truth and healing—then I have to let it lead me here too. Into this humbling experience of learning how to stay close, even when it would be easier to just pull away to prove a point.

We made those vows, and sometimes I roll my eyes thinking about how naïve we were. We had no idea what we were agreeing to when we promised to build a life together in love, to weather whatever storms would come.

I’m only now starting to understand how often we’ve gotten in our own way. How much energy we’ve spent circling the same fight. How exhausted we both are by it. And how much we still want to find our way through it.

The same f*&king argument doesn’t have to win. Not every time.

I can choose to be vulnerable. I can choose peace.