Day 4: Palas de Rei to Melide (9.5 miles)
As I embarked on the fourth day of my Camino journey, walking from Palas de Rei to Melide (~10 miles), which brought us to the halfway point to Santiago! My reflections for the day focused on a few very impactful years of 2016-2021. My boss and mentor retired, and I was promoted to replace him as the Vice President of Strategy, Planning, & Business Development. My biggest accomplishment during this period professionally was the fact that I was able to carry the work of the team forward without any hiccups.
Working alongside the best leadership team ever, I was truly thriving at work, reaping the benefits of building a high-performing team, and readily embraced the challenge of extending our Enterprise Strategic Planning process to our Brooklyn and Long Island hubs. I started singing again at the urging of a mentor of mine and began serving at a cantor for Mass at my Parish. The ratio of joy to time made it immensely worth it. I felt plugged into my kiddos and was able to put them first even working at the VP-level in a large academic health system.
As a parent, there is no instruction manual and when your children have medical conditions you need to figure out and stay on top of it gets even harder. My husband and I were very proud of the fact that we were getting our kids the necessary medical care, testing, and support that they needed and were learning how to be the best parents we could to our two high-energy, brilliant, and twice exceptional children. My Dad was unbelievably proud and vocal about how devoted I was as a mom, especially to Zachary as we peeled back the layers of what was going on with him as a toddler. It felt really wonderful to be praised for that.
In a fun and unexpected surprise at work, I was selected as the “Working Mother of the Year” and served as the poster child of someone at the company who had figured out the crazy mix of balancing a high-powered career and being the best Mom I could on the home front. Healthwise, I was at peak fitness, my lightest weight of my adult life, and relished the theme song “Defying Gravity” from the musical “Wicked.” I felt on top of the world, and I had worked my tuchus off to get there!
My shirt of the day today reads “How are you? I’m FINE” in large letters. Up close the letters of “FINE” are comprised of more honest and authentic statements that recognize the struggle that was happening internally. In early 2020, working parents lost their childcare safety net overnight and were expected to homeschool their children as public schools were shuttered first for two weeks, then indefinitely, and eventually for the remainder of the school year. Any professional image of having it all together balancing work-life demands felt like a distant memory. That being said, between my duty as a leader and my responsibilities as a mom, I had no choice but to hold on and do the very best I could at whatever I was focused on in that moment, be it supporting our emergency response or educating my elementary school-aged children. The balance of which shifted daily based on urgency and weekends ceased to exist.
It’s hard to believe that we just passed the five-year anniversary of the diagnosis and hospitalization of the first NYC COVID patient. In March 2020, I found myself in a powerful leadership role at the epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic serving to support our emergency management efforts as our health system surged to 200% capacity almost overnight. With no testing, no known treatments, and no vaccines, it was a war-like experience, especially in the early days. I am incredibly proud of my former health system which set the standard of care, maintained amongst the lowest mortality rates in the nation, and helped quickly promulgate our early learnings to other healthcare providers across the country as the virus spread.
I’ve always tried to be a caring, people-first leader of my team. It was clear to me immediately that I was not the only one struggling through this time. Formally and informally, I needed to step up and be there for my team as we all tried to hold on. Looking back on it, I am really proud of how I showed up for each of them and how we all came together to contribute to something so much bigger than any one of our efforts.
Through an incredibly generous act of kindness, when NYC public schools still remained closed and a virtual learning model was rolled out with the expectation of 1:1 adult support, my husband’s parents flew out and moved to an apartment nearby for the first four months of the school year to help keep us from sinking.
Because when it rains, sometimes it pours. This chapter also contained a myriad of other difficult situations, big and small, that reigned upon our household. My daughter had a life-threatening accident. A tree crashed through our roof during a hurricane. And the silver lining (although hard to see at the time) of me teaching my son kindergarten and the second half of first grade was that we figured out very early on that he has dyslexia and needed to attend a private school with a very specific curriculum to learn how to read, write, and spell.
Weary of holding on and trying to be everything for everybody, I bottomed out emotionally and the toll it was all taking on my health was significant. In many ways, the relief my in-laws provided allowed me to shift from being on hair-trigger alert fighting a war on two fronts to begin to emotionally process what had just happened and what was happening with my father’s rapid decline.
While I worked for arguably the best health system in the United States, in rural America my father did not even have continuity of care with ongoing access to a cardiologist or nephrologist despite being in end-stage heart and renal failure. I am very grateful to the VA where he received the bulk of his care, and due to physician specialty shortages most patients who need a specialist meet a new MD via telehealth each time a consult is called.
Control is important to me and in sharp contrast to how I had been able to orchestrate access to world-class care when other close family members needed urgent attention, I was powerless and needed to accept that in this situation, the only role I could play was daughter. In the end, this was the most important role, and I was blessed to have an incredible visit with him a year before he died celebrating his last birthday. His last few months, I sent him expressions of love through food which was always the way to my Dad’s heart. I had the sincere privilege of sitting with him and holding his hand at the moment of his death. Listening to the voice memo recordings of my Dad retelling the story of his life was an incredible way to feel him with me as I walked the Camino.
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” – Dolly Parton
My reflections for today continued through the end of 2021 when I made the decision to leave NYU Langone once things had stabilized about two years following the NYC surges. For me and many others, COVID had broken the inertia and left some significant scars from the moral injury resulting from doing our jobs. I put a lot of myself into building an incredible team and ensuring smooth succession planning if I needed to pivot.
When a recruiter from Yale called with the promise of being able to unequivocally put my family first in what was described as a “Midwest culture,” I bittersweetly said goodbye to my dear colleagues and professional “home” of the past 15 years to take a leap and try something new. The end result was not at all what I had imagined with many lessons to be harvested. I also learned that you should question the accuracy of a descriptor like a “Midwest culture” from someone who is not from the Midwest. Unpacking this chapter will be the focus for tomorrow’s walk.
Along the Camino today, I walked the majority of the way alone, given the emotional work I wanted to do. I revisited the rosary, starting first with the Luminous mysteries and later in the day with the Sorrowful mysteries. As I walked the “Way of St. James,” I was struck by how James is mentioned as being present for the vast majority of the “mysteries” from the Transfiguration through Jesus’s Crucifixion. He was one of Jesus’s best friends while he was alive. Knowing I was ending at the place where his physical remains are held reminded me of the very physical life of Jesus in a way that I hadn’t thought about recently. It made the sacred mysteries come alive for me with new eyes to try see and understand what happened amongst these friends and what it must have been like for James.
When we arrived in Melide, we stopped at a restaurant that was famous for the local speciality ‘Pulpo a feira,’ octopus usually served boiled and sprinkled with sweet and spicy paprika. Everyone at the table devoured this local delicacy. Given I have a shellfish allergy to mollusks, I opted for a ‘tabla mixta’ charcuterie board. It felt a little bit fitting that after a day focused on profound mourning, I got violently sick that evening from cross-contamination and needed to take it easy alone in my room. My theme song during the chapter described above was “Hold On” from the “Secret Garden” (lyrics below). As it’s opening line reminds us, “All you’ve got to do is finish what we have begun, I don’t know just how, but it’s not over till you’ve won!” While my stomach was a bit sore the next morning, I was well enough to continue the Camino and another day of adventure and self-discovery!
Flower of the Day: The Poppy
Poppy flowers represent consolation, remembrance and death. Dating back to ancient times, poppies placed on tombstones represent eternal sleep. During our coffee stop today, there was the most beautiful garden and in it, I smiled upon seeing these beautiful purple poppies growing. Shortly thereafter by the riverside, I planted my poppy seed. In our yard in NY, we planted them around a Magnolia tree we planted in honor of my grandpa, Harley Kingsbury.
Hold On
from “The Secret Garden”
What you′ve got to do is
Finish what you have begun,
I don’t know just how,
But it′s not over ’til you’ve won!
When you see the storm is coming,
See the lightning part the skies,
It′s too late to run-
There′s terror in your eyes!
What you do then is remember
This old thing you heard me say:
“It’s the storm, not you,
That′s bound to blow away.”
Hold on,
Hold on to someone standing by.
Hold on.
Don’t even ask how long or why!
Child, hold on to what you know is true,
Hold on ′til you get through.
Child, oh child!
Hold on!
When you feel your heart is poundin’,
Fear a devil′s at your door.
There’s no place to hide-
You’re frozen to the floor!
What you do then is you force yourself
To wake up, and you say:
“It′s this dream, not me,
that′s bound to go away.”
Hold on,
Hold on, the night will soon be by.
Hold on,
Until there’s nothing left to try.
Child, hold on, There′s angels on their way!
Hold on and hear them say,
“Child, oh child!”
And it doesn’t even matter
If the danger and the doom
Come from up above or down below,
Or just come flying
At you from across the room!
When you see a man who′s raging,
And he’s jealous and he fears
That you′ve walked through walls
He’s hid behind for years.
What you do then is you tell yourself to wait it out
And say it’s this day, not me,
That′s bound to go away.
Child, oh hold on.
It′s this day, not you,
That’s bound to go away!
Writer(s): Marsha Norman, Lucy Simon Levine
