Lisa Niver's Blog: We Said Go Travel, page 43

My Mother was the Center of our Jewish Universe

by Drew Steinberg

Jewish values and the importance of family are engrained in me because of my mom. Because of her, we celebrated Shabbat every Friday night as our family of four, at a minimum, while I was growing up. High Holiday meals and Passover seders had full tables of extended family (blood relatives and friends who are equivalent to family). The din of stories of the holiday intertwined with family kibbitzing encapsulated my parents’ home, holiday after holiday, year after year. My mom made sure of it. When COVID hit, we were fortunate to be in close proximity that we were able to continue to have Shabbat and holiday meals together. Although it was not the large family Jewish celebrations we were all used to, it was still Judaism mixed with family. 

Our Passover this year was out of the norm, more so than COVID out-of-the-norm. A few days prior, my mom had her tenth procedure in four months, and we were anticipating another hospital discharge. The procedure and hospitalization were timed so that Mom would be home with all of us for our Passover seder. What we had hoped would be a morning discharge so that my mom could oversee the decorating of the table, ended up being a late afternoon discharge where we were rushing against the clock to get her home and situated in time for seder. Keeping the kids calm while getting my mom comfortable back in her house and also trying to prepare for the sacred holiday was overwhelming but manageable. The kids and my mom were so excited that they got to sing the “Frog song,” “Dayenu,” and others together. My mom got to watch her two older grandchildren (Pre-K students) sing the “Four Questions” in Hebrew. We got to have a new version of a Passover seder for my family this year. We were scared it would be our last seder with my mom, but we also somewhat knew how likely that would be the case. We wanted to make sure my mom got her holiday with her family at her home. She deserved that. As my family is still in the first weeks of my mom’s passing, everything feels raw and uncomfortable. I anticipate Jewish holidays going forward will have that uncomfortable feeling, especially Passover since it was her last holiday with us.

Losing a loved one is challenging. Losing a loved one while having young kids is a different challenge; then there is losing your person, who has been your loved one while having young kids. When my mom entered comfort care, she shared with her rabbi that her greatest sadness was that she was not going to get to experience her grandchildren growing up. She was not going to get to see them become of Bar Mitzvah age and use the tallit bags that she needlepointed. Her not being here to celebrate with my children and their milestones has already been so devasting for me. I am so grateful for the time she had with all of us, but especially her last visit with my boys.

During my mom’s time in comfort care in the ICU, the Palliative Care team wanted to make sure that she felt at home, as much as possible. They asked us to bring things to decorate her room. Immediately my sister and I thought of bringing family photos and the grandchildren’s artwork, things my mom had decorating her bedroom since she got sick this last time. In addition to the decorations, my mom felt most at home having family nearby (immediate and extended). With that in mind, I wanted to figure out how to have my sweet young boys visit with her one last time. I am sure like many, I am not comfortable in an ICU room. The fact that you can see other patients through the glass walls/doors with their illnesses and ailments, which sometimes involve tubes or ventilators, is not something I enjoyed seeing. I did not want my boys to share my fear of ICUs, especially at such young ages. 

I was extremely grateful when the Palliative Care team offered a patio visit where family could visit with my mom outside of the hospital room setting. It was both a way for the young kids to visit her as well as have a larger group visit since we were outside. Due to how she was doing, the patio visit got moved to a time where only my boys, my dad, sister, my husband, and I would be able to attend. That final visit for my boys with their grandma was something special. It was a time for my boys to be themselves. A time for them to see Grandma one last time and share their feelings with her. A time for me to see smiles on all their faces together for the last time.

My mom’s absence is already so palpable. Unfortunately, there were celebrations so close to her passing where the void was felt. I know the void will continue to be there. I just wish it didn’t have to be there at all. 

The following was said in the handful of memoriams, both written and verbalized: My mom truly achieved greatness in all aspects of her life. Her life was tragically cut short when she had so much more to give to her family, her community, and the world. My mom was loved by many, respected by more, and admired by all. May her memory be a blessing.

תהא נשמה זו צרורה בצרור החיים
T’hei n’shma zu tzrura b’tzrur ha-chayim

May the soul of their loved one be bound up in the bond of life.

May the memory of this loved one be for a blessing.

Wise mourns loss of pillar and past president Dr. Eve Kurtin-Steinberg

Stephen Wise Temple mourns loss of pillar and past president Dr. Eve Kurtin-Steinberg

Former Pacific Regent Eve Kurtin remembered for caring and generosity

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Speaker at Turkish Consulate: Niver’s News: May 2022

May News 2022 with Lisa Niver & We Said Go Travel:Thank you to Gizem and her Turkish Coffee Lady Foundation for inviting me to be the keynote speaker at Premier of the “Turkish Coffee Tales of Anatolia” documentary at the Turkish Consul General’s Residence.

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Cruise Ship Stories: Mexico on the Majestic Princess and the naming of the Discovery PrincessExplore the Majestic Princess Spring break in MexicoMexico Tours from Majestic Princess: Cabo San Lucas whale watching, Mazatlan cliff divers and Puerto Vallarta walking tourDiscovery Princess Naming Ceremony New articles:Our Stories Matter: Writing Can Heal Our Hearts for Consciously UnbiasedMy Pasadena StayCation: The Huntington Library, Arlington Garden and Nick’s PasadenaMy Favorite Reese’s Book Club BooksHula hooping Around the World

Thanks PENN GAZETTE for sharing my alumni news!

Lisa Niver C’89  writes, “I loved being back on campus for Homecoming! I spoke at the RealArts@Penn program at Kelly Writers House to students who are aspiring writers; and I went to the football game with Heather Smay Fudala C’91 and Carl Law C’87. I am also happy to report that I won a third-place technology reporting award in the 2021 Southern California Journalism Awards for my piece in Thrive Global, ‘Is Talking Through Technology Making You More Human? with Rana el Kaliouby’ (tinyurl.com/LisaNiverThrive), and I sold my first article to WIRED, ‘8 Useful iPhone Tips for Ex-Android Users’ (tinyurl.com/LisaNiverWired).”

Thanks Harvard Westlake for sharing my alumni news:

LISA NIVER ’85 writes: “I won a Southern California Journalism Award for technology reporting and was a two-time finalist for the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards. During COVID, I have been working on a memoir and my YouTube channel is now over 1.5 million views.  I hope my next update is that I have a book contract! Read my article about My Octopus Teacher in HuffPost Personal.“

Since the Jewish Journal resumed print publication in Fall 2021, I have been in the Blog Bytes section eighteen times! Click here to see me in print in September 2021, October 2021, November 2021, December 2021 , January 2022, Feb 2022 AND April 2022!I am working on videos from my May adventures in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin:WHERE CAN YOU FIND MY TRAVEL VIDEOS?

Here is the link to my video channel on YouTube where I have over 1.58 million views on YouTube! (Exact count: 1,588,000 views)

Thank you for your support! Are you one of my 3,530 subscribers? I hope you will join me and subscribe! For more We Said Go Travel articles, TV segments, videos and social media: CLICK HERE

Find me on social media with over 150,000 followers. Please follow  on TikTok: @LisaNiver, Twitter at @LisaNiver, Instagram @LisaNiver and on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and at LisaNiver.com.

Fortune Cookie SAID:“A new adventure is at your fingertips.”
“A new love is waiting around the corner.” Lisa Niver in the Sky Suite on Discovery Princess –Naming Ceremony Princess Cruises

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Exploring Pasadena, A California Staycation

Pasadena is relatively close to where I live in Los Angeles and during COViD I explored more of it. You may think of Pasadena as the place for the Rose Bowl football game, the Tournament of Roses Parade as well as the place where Jet Propulsion lab, Caltech and ArtCenter College of Design make change happen!

Recently, I spent the day at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. The grounds are vast with 120 acres of botanical gardens, 42,000 works of art, 11 million library objects, 7 million manuscripts. It seemed like I had traveled to another country. The Chinese garden made me feel like I was transported back to my travels in Beijing and beyond. I also loved the Japanese Gardens, the Rose Garden and the Desert Gardens. I cannot wait to return.

Susan and I decided to catch up on all of our missed celebrations during COVID with a lovely dinner at Nick’s Restaurant after our day at the Huntingon.I was able to walk in Arlington Garden with my Ms. Magazine editor, Carmen. We especially loved the labyrinth.

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Arlington Garden is a three acre garden on Caltrans-owned land. It is leased to the City of Pasadena and entrusted by the city to Arlington Garden in Pasadena, a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation. This garden is not only friendly to people and pets but also serves as a refuge for Pasadena’s native fauna. Birds, bees and butterflies are particularly abundant and can be seen throughout the year.

Arlington Garden was developed in collaboration between Arlington Garden in Pasadena, City of Pasadena, Pasadena Department of Public Works, and Pasadena Water & Power, with help from Pasadena Beautiful Foundation and the Mediterranean Garden Society. Continued support comes from garden clubs, local businesses, nurseries, neighbors and friends.

Where is your favorite California staycation?
See my adventures in Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley National Park

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Our Stories Matter: How Writing Can Heal Our Hearts

Thank you to Holly Corbett and Consciously Unbiased for publishing my article: “Our Stories Matter: How Writing Can Heal Our Hearts“Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

During the past two years of the COVID roller coaster, life has been more obviously uncertain. Anna Quindlen’s newest book, Write for Your Life, suggests that “it [is] possible to be in a dreadful situation and find a respite from events through putting down words.” She talks about Anne Frank’s journal and the way it inspired teacher Erin Gruwell’s Freedom Writers project, in which Gruwell helped a group of “at-risk” students in Long Beach’s racially divided community filled with drugs, gang warfare, and homicides to find strength and power through writing their own stories.

In recent weeks, especially during Passover, I have been wondering what the Ukrainian people are writing in their journals as Russia continues the most barbaric invasion that Europe has witnessed in 80 years. When Vlodomir Zelensky told the West, “Why repeat ‘Never Again’ for 80 years, if when the bomb falls on Babyn Yar, the world remains silent?” he is referencing the Holocaust when six million Jewish lives were extinguished, and during which Anne Frank penned the journal for herself that has gone on to inspire and bring light to so many.

Anne’s diary has endured, Quindlen tells us, in part because “it offers comfort” by showing “so many of us that our voices can be heard.” She goes on to assert: “As Anne Frank showed the world, as the Freedom Writers learned themselves, history is our story. Those who write it own it, today, and always. Why not you?”

I agree with her and, although Quindlen’s book focused on pencil and paper, I have found that the newer forms of connecting through social media can also offer us all a place to share our voices. During a recent 90-day social video challenge—which felt more like a mash up between journal writing and my own personal Truman Show, I felt more visible — not only to others (with 500,000 views) but also to myself, which is exactly what this book is about.

I’m a travel writer, and for me, during COVID, there was no more traveling so no more writing about it. Instead, like everyone else I knew, I sat in my house, apart from friends, unable to socialize. With each passing day, another work contract was canceled, and I felt increasingly isolated as I watched everything that I had built fall apart like a real-life Jenga game. Was this going to be a repeat of the days following 9/11, when my former employer, also a travel company, went bankrupt? Without any assignments or weekend plans, or even the possibility of inviting people over for dinner, I knew I needed something to help me find purpose and connection. So I wrote.

Quindlen tells us that “Writing is undoubtedly interaction with another human being, even if that human being is only yourself.” As my favorite meditation on Insight Timer begins, “There is nowhere to go and there is nothing to do.” So I stayed home — #saferathome — and worked on my memoir.

Writing about ourselves can change us and, although writing solely for your own eyes might seem cowardly or mundane, it can, I discovered, make a difference. Quindlen says that, “Writing done correctly may wind up being a kind of emotional striptease, the equivalent of spreading your arms wide and saying, ‘Here I am.’” I was writing about the dissolution of my marriage, among other topics, and some days the writing was so challenging that I literally wrote until I was certain I would throw up and had to lie down on the floor.

Many times, I was sure it was not worth it and only served as a form of self-torture, but somehow I continued. As time went on, I did begin to feel that the writing was changing me. I had always blamed myself for the failure of my marriage, but as I worked to describe scenes and circumstances, I could more clearly see the ugliness of our relationship and how I had chosen to leave to save myself.

While I was writing with the hope that one day it might be published, putting the emotional anguish down on paper — from the way he criticized my every move, including how many fingers I used to hold a sandwich, to the excessive drinking that led to physical abuse — wading back into the nightmare of it all and laying bare the reality of our marriage on the page really did heal my heart. I was not a failure and it was not my fault.

Reliving it in my mind over and over again, which I had been doing for years, did not teach me this — but writing it did. As Quindlen says, “The process is not always easy, but the result sometimes invaluable… the point is to reveal what lies within.” I revealed the truth.

Whenever we put pen to paper, or tell a story on TikTok, we do not know what will happen with our tale when we set it free. Sometimes it centers us in our own power; sometimes it empowers others. Quindlen says, “Writing is part of a chain. We spin words for ourselves, a few others, or even the world.” Anne Frank “was living through an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary time, an extraordinary horror.” She was able to “ground herself” by “committing everything to paper, much of it not particularly profound.”

Similarly, the Freedom Writers wrote about their struggles being bullied or homeless, feeling alone or forced to join in gang violence. By learning to choose writing over guns, they were able to gain perspective on their experiences, realize their own strength, and ultimately finish school and start a new path. For today’s young people, who are struggling with skyrocketing levels of depression and anxiety, Quidlen believes that writing is “an unacknowledged panacea, a craft that can lead to healthier human beings.”

After two full years of COVID’s presence in our lives, we are all living with nearly empty emotional bank accounts due to the pandemic, death, hardships, strife amongst friends and neighbors, desperation, and now a war that is visible to us all through social media and other outlets. The lives of everyone on our planet, young and old, have all been changed; none of us asked to be a part of these events, but they are here.

Every year in the Passover seder, we tell the story of how the Jews were slaves in Egypt as if we are also experiencing this slavery. We remember the ten plagues and hope that next year not only will we be free, but that also everyone will be freed from the yoke of oppression of all kinds. Our community moved from a narrow existence to the openness of the desert in search of a new life and new home, just as we must all continue to find new paths in these uncertain times. Writing can help.

During this time, and now with my book nearly finished, I have come to realize what I have control over and what I can do. I finally understand my past and how to want to live my future, even if I don’t know exactly what the future will bring. The novelist E. L. Doctorow said about writing a novel, “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Quindlen also reminds us that this widsom is, “Not only true of writing a novel but also of living our lives, living in an indefinite, infinite now.”

Writing can heal us and anchor us in times of duress. What step will you take toward sharing your story?

BIO:
Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who founded We Said Go Travel in 2010 and now writes for WIRED, Teen Vogue, USA Today 10Best, among many others. Her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After 50, will be available in 2023. She is a KTLA TV travel expert and her YouTube videos on diving, travel, and more have over 1.5 million views. See her videos, articles, awards, and interviews here: https://lisaniver.com/one-page/.

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