Thoughts From This Past Week (Not Book-Related)

I posted all this on Instagram but have been asked to share here, too

It has been a week. Here’s what I posted on Instagram on July 31st and again this morning. People have been asking me to share it all as a Substack as well, so here you go.

Posted the night of July 31:

I went to Wesley LePatner’s funeral today and am still flattened. Gutted. How can I post about books and podcasts after that without addressing the trauma I saw?

I was just scrolling through Instagram quickly, looking at everyone, all happy and smiling in their feeds... but all I could think about was the grief and trauma etched on the faces of everyone I saw in the synagogue this morning. The words of her daughter. I just keep replaying all of it. From watching the news Monday night to hearing someone died... to hearing it was her.

I’ve known Wesley since we served on the Young Friends of Mount Sinai board together 20+ years ago. Since then, I’ve run into her and Evan at events and around the city countless times. They are the nicest people.

In an email exchange, Wesley wrote me about an article I’d penned about parenting and told me how much it had resonated. She was so kind. So giving. Everyone loved her.

The fact that such a spectacular woman was murdered in such a random act of violence is unfathomable to me. I just can’t believe it. Of all the people. Why? She was a superstar on every level, basically an ideal human. I knew her socially before, but after today, hearing from her loved ones, I got to know her in a whole new way. How intentional she was with her time. How devoted she was to friends and family while still excelling at work. How giving. How present.

I’m also shocked that this could happen just down the road in a building that felt like a fortress. I’m scared.

Every day something happens that rips another layer of false security off of me. It’s getting harder to pretend everything will be okay. But if we don’t believe that, how do we go on with our day-to-day life?

I’ve been working on my Fall Most Anticipated List for weeks and am scheduled to release it tomorrow. All I’ve been able to do work-wise this afternoon since the funeral is formatting Canva slides and tomorrow’s Substack. But sometimes it all feels so pointless. Why even bother with lists?

I’ll probably feel better tomorrow, but that’s because I have the luxury of waking up without having lost someone super close to me. I didn’t lose a parent, a best friend, or a child this week. The depths of the grief of those I heard and saw today was so raw, so physical. Just being near it made me feel ill, made me sob. To be them?

To be clear, this isn’t my loss. I don’t want you to comment that you’re sorry for my loss. It’s ALL of our loss.

The world lost an incredibly special soul who was just leaving work on a Monday night. Somewhere she should have been safe. I’m not the one you should be consoling. Her family and friends need that. I’m a bystander to the devastation. We’ve all been robbed.

And yet, our only recourse is to live our best lives, to take inspiration from people like Wesley who got the plot early and maximized every minute, especially with her kids.

So I guess I’ll post the list and release the Substack as planned tomorrow morning and hopefully make even a slight difference in the lives of the authors I selected. Even if only a smile. Although one author I notified wrote me back and asked to be taken off the list because I hadn’t publicly condemned Israel for the starvation in Gaza. She was Jewish, too, by the way. I didn’t realize statements on international policy events were a pre-condition for making book recommendations, but okay. Noted.

All the bullying within the Jewish community now. When people like Wesley, so deeply religious, are being killed right here under our noses. Disgusting.

Part of being sensitive like all you empaths out there is that I feel things so, so deeply, as if I’m experiening it myself. I think that’s why I love reading so much. My whole body seems to live through what I take in from stories, those in books and today, those from the bimah.

I am so sorry to all of Wesley’s close friends and family. I’m so sorry for your loss. To her dad who kissed her casket today. To her colleagues and friends. To Evan. Same to all the victims from Monday night. Random but so unlucky.

It’s pretty unimaginable that we humans can live with the level of pain and grief I saw today and yet can heal somewhat, at least enough to function.

I know so many of you have grieved the loss of someone you loved. And yet somehow you pulled through. I know all of the amazing people who spoke today will somehow get through this trauma, in some shape, but never the same. Somehow, we all get through it. I don’t know how, but we do.

Sending love and prayers for safety and peace tonight. And may Wesley’s memory be a blessing. Amen.

Posted this morning (August 2nd)

How has all this happened since Monday? How, on Saturday morning, have I already been to the funeral and shiva of a friend murdered by a lunatic? How have I been through a night of cold-sweat-fear, watching the news and refreshing Twitter feeds on my couch, fearing for the lives of so many people I know in a place I’ve been to regularly for basically my entire life, since my last weekly team Zoom meeting?

And now, on just another Saturday morning, people are out running...and another tennis tournament is on TV... and everything appears totally normal. But it isn’t.

On Monday evening, after an early dinner on a beautiful summer night, my daughter and I were in town, out for ice cream, when my husband Kyle texted that there was an active shooter in midtown.

My first reaction was dismissal. It couldn’t be anything serious, right? Maybe a robbery gone wrong? Terrible, but... not a big deal? My desensitization to horrific news is just part of being in the Citizens app era. There’s tragedy around the clock. But then Kyle sent where it was. At a building with personal meaning. Close to our home. Close to our hearts.

I couldn’t even move. My daughter and I stared at the phone as NYPD swarmed the building. Oh my gosh. I called everyone in my family, making sure everyone was okay, that everyone knew.

“Come home,” Kyle texted.

But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t walk to the car.

I tried to gather news from everywhere in real time. I kept reading: “Mass trauma. ”Bomb squad.” “Multiple shooters.” What was really happening?

“Come on, Mom. Let’s go home,” my daughter urged.

She had to usher me to the car. Somehow I drove home with the news streaming on the phone, my daughter telling me what was happening. Yet before I got back in the car, I’d started reading the comments on the sidebar of the Citizens live broadcast. Out came the incomprehensible vitriol of strangers saying the people in that building deserved to be killed. Deserved it. What?!?

We made it back and watched for hours on the couch, often learning things from Twitter/X before the broadcast news showed it, eventually seeing the man’s face on my phone which I held out: “This is the guy.”

As we all tried to figure out just how bad it was, just how bad it was going to be, I held my breath. I covered my face. I crossed my arms and bit my nails. I texted the many, many people I knew, inside the building we knew intimately. It was personal. It is always personal. And then, on the phone, I found out who had been killed.

I’ll never forget hearing, “Wesley LePatner.”

“What!?! I know her!” I screamed. “I know her!”

It wasn’t someone random. It was someone I’d known for 20+ years. Someone younger than me. Somehow who had gone to the same college. Who lived nearby. Who I’d served on a board with. Who had organized a book event for me. Who I saw around town all the time.

I know her.

This is going to sound ridiculous. But the way I’ve come to process the fact that I seem to be close to or intimately affected by so many of the big tragedies of my lifetime is that I was put on this earth to be an observer and a scribe. My role, I’ve decided, is not just to report but to share emotionally from the so-called front. And so I do.

I do it because I feel called to do it every single time.

I do it because after Wesley’s funeral on Thursday, when I couldn’t get out of bed afterwards, so heavy with the trauma, the grief of her close friends and loved ones resting physically on my chest, the words in my head, the sobs from those in the synagogue, including my own, replaying... I finally sat up so I could open my computer to write. To share. I just had to.

I’ve been sharing since I lost my best friend and college roommate on 9/11.

I shared through Covid when Kyle’s grandmother died from it early and then gave it to his beautiful mother, only 63 years old, who battled Covid for six weeks in multiple hospitals before succumbing to the effects while we were in charge of her care.

I shared through 10/7 and after when antisemitism flared and even diaspora Jews like me became targets.

I shared through the fires in the Palisades where our beloved bicoastal home, close to my bookstore, nearly burned down, giant flames in our backyard caught on our Nest cam. Our community decimated.

I’ve shared about a close friend who died by suicide, about an amazing mom friend who died from cancer, about my family’s housekeeper of 30 years who was pushed in front of an oncoming subway by a woman who had just been released from Bellevue. Murdered.

And of course I’ve shared “regular” losses like my BFF grandmother and others whose time had come more naturally but whose losses still punctured my soul.

And now, I’m sharing as a beloved place in my life was filled with thousands of terrified people barricaded in bathrooms, and where a friend was killed in a lobby which I’d walked through and driven by countless times.

If my role isn’t to observe and share, then... seriously, why?

Someone commented on my recent post after Wesley’s funeral:

“I have come to recognize every time there is a horrific event I can turn to a post from you and find all the right words. I don’t know how you sift through the horror, loss, sadness, fear, and put together your thoughts in such a meaningful way at the same time as you bare your soul. I know those posts come from a place of your own pain and yet you give us strength and hope.”

If only I didn’t have to.

Now, as I reel from another trauma a few blocks away, I’m also trying to process the hate, the many people posting on TikTok and elsewhere that Maya Sulkin documented in the Free Press. People who are celebrating Wesley’s death. It is sick. And yet, not only are people posting, but others are reposting, including people in the publishing industry I work in. Are you kidding me? How is this okay? How is it allowed to celebrate the murder of an innocent soul – publicly!?! Brazenly!

There need to be tighter controls on social media. There need to be consequences.

Honestly, I’m tired of it all. Everyone gets a channel! Everyone on the planet gets to spew hatred and ill-will with no recourse! And we don’t think that has something to do with the demise of our society? The fact that anyone can just do or say something dangerous and no one does anything about it?

People amplify and celebrate hatred, false narratives, brainwashing each other. Now people feel it is okay to say innocent people – fellow Americans! – deserve to die?! It’s okay for people to bully each other over countries they’ve never been to and didn’t used to care about? Desecrate people they’ve never met thanks to free speech?

On top of everything, a new hostage photo was released yesterday that took my breath away. I literally had to sit down when I saw it. A man so starved I couldn’t tell his leg from his arm. Does anyone even remember that there are hostages? A man that could be anyone’s beloved son taken by Hamas just for being Israeli?

Free speech is one thing. Hate speech is another. We have to change the rules before our civilization is completely destroyed. There have to be consequences for doing what we learned in preschool is wrong. There has to be a refresher course on the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Make it part of the driver’s license test or passport renewal.

I don’t want to have to keep sharing about disasters. But I will.

Here’s hoping next week brings less trauma than this week. That innocent people are protected. That we learn something from what happened here this week. And that something sparks actual change in how we share with guardrails against evil and the perpetuation of hatred, division, targeting, libel, slander, and discord.

It’s time. Remember: you could be next.

Closing note:

My heart goes out to all of you who were directly impacted by the events of this week in ways far greater than my view from afar. You are the real sufferers. But you are not alone. We are here for and with you. Sending love.