I lost my American dream — then coronavirus gave it back

It seemed like everything was falling apart. Then the pandemic hit, and gave me an unexpected reprieve

To stay in Long Island, or to return to the city? (istock )

How do you shelter in place when your shelter is being taken away? That was my dilemma. A 65-year-old, married, Jewish artist, my treasured Long Island house went into foreclosure on the cusp of the pandemic. As our nation and day-to-day life disintegrated, my private life mirrored that chaos.

When Hershel, my husband of 30 years, was challenged by as-yet-undiagnosed dementia, he ravaged our finances. The week before we lost our home, he was terminated without benefits from a professional position he'd held for 40 years. Long-planned art shows of mine were cancelled due to the growing concern about the virus, including a highly anticipated show with Judy Chicago at the Museum of Sonoma. Mortified, I couldn't bear to share this shame with friends or relatives. As a childless, transplanted New Yorker estranged from my only brother, I felt alone.

I prepared for the worst, feeling pressured to quickly pack and move. Being a collage artist and an avid collector of memorabilia as cluttered as the Collier brothers, I quickly realized the task would be overwhelming. I had only recently gone through the arduous task of packing up my parents’ home in West Hempstead after the death of my father two years before. Closing down the family home of more than half a century was a tough task filled with endless decisions: to sell or save, donate or discard all the reminders of their lives that lay in front of me — the tangible reminders of lives well-lived, of hopes and expectations, some realized and some that were not.

Now I would have to make all of these same decisions for myself. Trying to plan our future with a cognitively challenged spouse felt futile.

Shell-shocked as strangers traipsed through our beloved home hoping to score a short sale, I raced frantically to get into the city to look at less expensive apartments just as viewings were being shut down. Then the coronavirus struck with a vengeance and everything came to a screeching halt. Trying to make any plans at all during the shutdown was impossible. How would I be able to find a new home and movers to get me there?

The white picket fence that once surrounded my well-cared-for property was forlorn, pickets splintered and in need of a fresh coat of paint, the perfect metaphor for this fall from grace. This was not the future, God forbid, my greatest-generation parents would have hoped for their nice Jewish daughter. In my family we establish roots and stay put. My parents lived in the same ranch house on Long Island for more than 63 years. Unlike many of their peers, they’d never transplanted elsewhere. While many seniors headed south, they preferred the South Shore of Long Island, where I grew up.

But a home in suburbia — once the symbol of the attainable American dream — was never really my dream. It was my parents’ postwar vision of a better life. I was an urban creature at heart. Now, as frantic New Yorkers fled to the suburbs, I needed to exit.

Despite a happy boomer childhood, my dreams took me beyond those confines. My role model was more That Girl than June Cleaver. I'd wanted to be a single gal living in Manhattan years before Sex and the City.

Just as my parents had fled the city in the mid-1950s as it began to decline, I rushed headfirst into mid-1970s NYC just about the time of its alleged demise. Despite President Ford’s snide comment telling the city to “Drop Dead,” it was anything but dying to me. There was no other place for a 22-year-old artist to be. It was heady. And affordable. I paid $300 for a third-floor walkup in a charming brownstone on East 18^th Street.

While Long Island was never my promised land, in 2001 I moved back there to be close to my family. Along with caring for my ageing parents, I wanted to be closer to my brother and his young children, who lived there too.

My house became inextricably tied to my family. It was where we now held our seders, using the same wine-stained Maxwell House Haggadahs we had used throughout my childhood. It was where every Sunday we all gathered in the summer offering the respite of my pool and gardens which always elicited a boisterous “It’s a Mechaye”(pleasure) from my appreciative mother. It’s where my barbecue-enthusiast father passed the Weber baton onto his son-in-law Hersh, who now manned the grill. And it would be eventually be the house where I sat shiva for each of my parents, nearly 10 years apart.

My house too would become the final resting place of much of their belongings. Just as their home had become the final destination of my long-deceased extended family’s cherished belongings, so now would mine. Their basement, cluttered with dusty cardboard boxes, lay untouched, unsealed, from when they first landed there with each member’s death.

For Hersh, the house held other meanings. As a Holocaust survivor who spent the first four years of his life in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, a house with land seemed primal. I created an oasis, a place that would be his and never taken away. We’d thrived here.

Hersh became a “Dashing Dan,” commuting into the city to be a public defender, working 50 hours a week. In my isolation, I turned to my art. With the luxury of space, my work evolved and I began creating 9ft collages filled with thousands of hand-cut images. I showed my work nationally. The place I was so hesitant about living in wormed its way into my heart. It became my sanctuary from all the tumult in the world. But now it was being taken away. As frantic New Yorkers fled to the suburbs, I needed to exit.

Suddenly in the midst of tragedy, there was a ray of unexpected light as a result of the pandemic. A coronavirus moratorium was granted for all New York foreclosures for the next five months. The pause button was pressed. My home now morphed from a place of pandemonium into a place of peace to ride out the illness. The virus gave me a chance to think.

As unthinkable adversity became a part of all our lives, I felt less shame in mine. I can exhale a little bit. For now. As long as it was six feet away from anyone else.