A RemoteShiva Chat with Emily Wind, Lead Designer.
RemoteShiva Chats are blog posts based on real-life conversations between members of the RemoteShiva volunteer team about the experiences, emotions, and challenges that drive their work on the project. In this post, RemoteShiva Lead Designer Emily Wind shares how COVID-19 deaths in her in-laws’ community motivated her to design a space that makes the process of digital mourning more bearable.
Most weeks, my social life revolves around Shabbat meals. I have a demanding job that takes up a ton of time during the week, so Shabbat is the one time I get to really just relax and hang out with my friends and family. I really love Shabbat, and planning for these communal meals is often what gets me through the craziness of the week.
Then when COVID-19 broke out, there were no more Shabbat meals. There were no more community gatherings. There was no more planning. It really hit me hard when I realized how different our lives were starting to look. My family was fine, but I felt a sense of emptiness.
In the middle of that feeling of helplessness, my friend Taylor reached out and told me about a group of volunteers that were getting together to create a virtual space for Jews to gather together during COVID to do Jewish things. I hopped on an early planning call, and I got energized by the idea of using my design skills to help build this virtual Jewish JCC. This was something I could do to help others at a time when I desperately needed a project outside of work as a distraction and a way to feel like I was contributing to the community.
It was a casual side project until I started getting the phone calls from my mother-in-law in New Jersey. Every day, multiple people in her community were dying. It quickly got to the point that she avoided checking her phone. It was just so, so many deaths; there were even waiting lists at the funeral homes and cemeteries. By this point, Kristin had suggested to our team that we narrow down our Jewish JCC idea to focus just on shiva, and I realized this was a tool the Jewish world needed now. We needed it yesterday.
Thank G!d, everyone in my immediate family has stayed healthy during this crisis, and I haven’t personally needed to sit shiva before. But I remembered back to the time that my mom lost her dad, and how the practice of sitting shiva really helped her process the death. Shiva provided a structure for her to share the pain of her father’s death with the community and it allowed her friends to take care of her. Death can be awkward and shiva provides a framework for inviting people into that awkwardness with you. And so I realized that many of these people in New Jersey were now experiencing a double trauma: the loss of their loved one and the loss of their community.
My hope is that the design work I’m putting into RemoteShiva will help ease the pain of that second trauma. If someone dies, I want their community to be able to say, “Hey, there’s this tool, RemoteShiva, I’ll set it up for you,” and the mourner can just focus on their grief and nothing else. I hope that my design helps them feel comforted and taken care of.
This post was transcribed and edited by Gene Goldstein-Plesser, RemoteShiva Operations Manager