Where We Belong (16 page)

At Rice, Kay was studying philosophy but, since age fourteen, had been interning in the field she saw as her career: public relations. Amelia had introduced Kay to a colleague, which led to an unpaid summer position at Colgate-Palmolive during high school. She learned to write speeches for the head of corporate communications and articles for the company newsletter. In college, Kay interned for two global communications firms.

“My mom was willing to help open a door, but it was very clear I was the one who had to walk through and do the work.”

During Kay’s sophomore year, the family experienced a scary and heartbreaking event. Harry suffered a series of mini strokes that led him to retire early as a doctor and surgeon.

“It was devastating for Dad and sad for me. He didn’t know what to do with his time,” Kay explains. “He went from being highly active to sitting around watching TV. He gained weight and became sluggish mentally and physically. He hadn’t planned for retirement and Mom was too busy to see what was happening.”

Now the sole provider, Amelia moved quickly to sell the Columns, their home for two decades. They downsized to an elegant home in the upscale village of Old Brookville.

In January 1983, Kay graduated from Rice. She could have joined Lobsenz-Stevens Incorporated (Amelia took on a partner in 1975), but she knew: not yet.

“I didn’t want to begin my career as the CEO’s daughter. I doubt if I would have been respected. I didn’t even know if I’d learn well. I needed to start at the bottom, develop my skills like everyone else, and work my way up.” As much as Amelia would have loved to have her daughter beside her, “she was a consummate professional and knew it was the right thing for me to do.”

Kay moved immediately to New York City for a job on Madison Avenue with Carl Byoir and Associates, the third-largest PR firm in the world. Amelia’s name got her noticed, but Kay had to apply for the job, go through an interview, and prove her skills on writing tests. She had a lot to prove as Amelia’s daughter, a woman, and a new college graduate in a firm full of older, experienced newspaper journalists.

Over the next three years, Kay worked sixteen-hour days, juggling ten clients. Her personal relationship with a young attorney working a similarly demanding schedule lasted a year.

“We’d come home—totally spent zombies—sit down, order Chinese food, and watch
Star Trek
.”

During this frenetic time in Kay’s life, in 1987, the family faced a second devastating medical development: sixty-five-year-old Amelia was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I wasn’t involved in her chemo or radiation treatments,” Kay recalls. “She didn’t talk about what she was going through and did not once ask for help. She was so independent.”

Thankfully, the treatments were effective and Amelia survived.

Kay worked for two well-respected Manhattan PR firms before joining her mother at Lobsenz-Stevens in 1989. The firm was thriving with a wide range of solid accounts, including banks, car manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and overseas countries; annual billings were in the tens of millions of dollars. Kay was well respected and was promoted quickly from managing accounts to acquiring new clients. She and her mom had dinner weekly and became closer as they shared time and work matters.

Sadly, in 1991, within two years of Kay’s joining the company, Amelia suffered a recurrence of cancer; it resurfaced in her spine. The prognosis was poor and she told Kay that she wanted the news kept quiet at work.

“She got so weak that she couldn’t even open the door to the New York office on Park Avenue,” says Kay. “She didn’t want anyone to know, so in the mornings I would meet her at the front door and open it for her to walk in.”

After her diagnosis, Amelia wanted to sell her thirty-five-year-old firm to give the family a financial cushion but couldn’t find the right buyer.

By late 1991, Amelia was enduring severe pain in her spine and was hospitalized in Lenox Hill Hospital, several blocks from Kay’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Kay’s father in recent years had experienced additional small strokes and spoke little. At thirty-one, Kay was about to enter the most challenging period of her life.

“I would go to work, check on my mom at Lenox Hill Hospital during lunch, go back to work, and then I would take the Long Island Rail Road home to make sure Dad was okay at the house in Old Brookville, where he had round-the-clock care,” she recalls. “I did that virtually every day for a year. It was sad and exhausting.”

Kay had little support. Her half brothers lived out of state. Home healthcare workers kept the Old Brookville home clean and cooked for her father. Working long hours compounded by the grief of watching her mother die and father decline completely drained Kay.

“One day I was walking in the hall that connected my mother’s apartment building and my building, and I remember just stopping and sobbing. I realized how incredibly exhausted I was and how I had completely given up my personal life. Like many kids of aging parents, my life was solely focused on work and taking care of my parents.”

On September 1, 1992, Amelia died. Kay was with her and received an unexpected gift from her seventy-year-old mother.

“A mom who is so hardworking and who was a perfectionist is critical by nature. It wasn’t until she was literally on her deathbed when I actually felt that she complimented me without a backhanded, ‘And you should do this now.’ A typical compliment from my mom was, ‘Oh, that’s a really nice outfit but you really need to use more makeup.’ But on the day before she died she simply said, ‘You’re doing wonderfully.’ It didn’t have anything attached to it or a recommendation for improvement. I needed that parting gift to feel that she loved me purely for who I was.”

Amelia had asked the family not to let the world know she was gravely ill. But a few days before passing away, she agreed to let Kay send notices to colleagues around the world sharing the unfortunate news of Amelia’s losing battle with cancer. Kay felt it was imperative to give the people who knew and admired Amelia a chance to send their love. Her amazing mother had broken new ground in the industry, was the first female president of the International Public Relations Association, and maintained relationships around the globe.

“The first bag of letters and telegrams and correspondence arrived the day
after
she died,” Kay says with sadness. “She didn’t get to know how much she mattered to people. It would have meant so much to her to hear how many people considered her a role model. How she broke through the glass ceiling and laid a path for other women to achieve at high levels in public relations. I sat by myself and read the letters out loud as I would have done for my mom if she were still alive.”

Amelia’s death took a toll on Harry, her husband of nearly thirty-five years. Kay watched her father essentially give up on living.

“He was in hospice; he was checking out. Mom had died, so what reason did he think he had to live? At one point he stopped eating, and I just said, ‘Dad, I’m here for you. Don’t die. Please don’t go. I can’t lose you and Mom at the same time.’ ”

Kay moved her father into what had been her mother’s nearby New York apartment and began the process of loving him back to life. At the same time she was tackling the mountain of paperwork that was her parents’ estate. There was also the sorting and selling of countless possessions from the Old Brookville house and additional properties. It was clear to Kay that the next few years would require focus and energy that could not be sustained while working at Lobsenz-Stevens. In 1993, she sold her shares of stock in the company.

“I felt that I have one father and he has to be more important than anything else at this point,” she explains. “When you look back at your life, it’s really who you loved and who loved you, and how you spent your time with those you’re close with. It’s not going to be how much money you made or how much real estate property you owned or possessions. Love is the value that matters most at the end of your life.”

Kay hired music and art therapists to help engage her father emotionally so he could process his grief from losing Amelia. She spent time with him sitting and talking, or pushing him in his wheelchair during neighborhood strolls through the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Kay also began the process of healing herself. Completely spent from the stress of the last few years, she took up yoga and soon after became a certified instructor. She then created a unique form of yoga that incorporated Judaism and led classes several times a week in Upper West Side synagogues. Faith provided comfort for Kay, and she became active in the local Jewish Renewal community. She volunteered as executive director for the P’nai Or of Manhattan and took turns with other members holding home-based Shabbat services.

As the next few years passed and matters of the estate lessened, Kay began to consider starting her own public relations company. In 1995, she founded Abraham and Associates. Her first client proved to be nearly eighteen hundred miles away in Colorado. Kay had flown from New York City to Fort Collins to participate in a Jewish Renewal conference. At the event, she met the chief executive officer of a Boulder-based company called Career Track, and he agreed to sign on with her new company.

In the months ahead, Kay flew back so often to Boulder that she rented a room in a house to stay in during her work trips. She loved the city’s reverence for and easy access to nature and its residents’ commitment to health and wellness.

“I would walk outside during the middle of the day and people would be jogging on trails and biking, and I thought,
Oh my gosh—you’re allowed to do this; you’re allowed to take time off to exercise and experience nature.
No one looks at you like,
Why aren’t you working right now?
”

The more she experienced the juxtaposition between the hiking trails in Boulder and the cement and skyscrapers of New York, the more she wondered whether a move west could reconnect her with her once active, healthy self. During one of her stays in Boulder, she walked to a nearby park next to a lake called Wonderland.

“I was sitting on the swings facing the mountains and I had this epiphany. I heard my inner voice:
You could live here. You don’t have to keep doing this commute. When you have children they could swing here, too, and grow up in Boulder and see the lake, and be connected to the mountains and nature
.”

In early 1996, thirty-six-year-old Kay decided to rent her New York apartment and experience what life would be like in Boulder. Kay’s to-do list for relocating was long and included getting a mammogram. In April, she went to her scheduled appointment. Following the procedure, the radiologist looked over the X-ray and requested one more. After the second X-ray, the radiologist asked for another.

“After the third one she said, ‘Look, this is exactly what cancer looks like. I’m sorry to tell you that you have breast cancer.’ ”

The same horrible words that were told to her mother.

But, fortunately, Kay’s cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes or bloodstream. Doctors explained to Kay that with her form of medium-grade breast cancer, radiation would lessen the chance of recurrence by 5 percent. She elected to undergo surgery but not radiation.

The already-scheduled movers arrived the day after Kay’s diagnosis to take her belongings to Colorado. Friends in Boulder kindly agreed to meet and unload the truck whenever it arrived.

Kay delayed leaving until June so she could have surgery and recover. Breast cancer scared both her and her father, but it also confirmed Kay’s decision to move them to a more peaceful, healing environment.

Once in Boulder, Kay rented town homes for herself and her dad in the same complex. She hired round-the-clock care for him and enlisted the help of a naturopathic physician to rejuvenate her body with herbs and other holistic treatments. Having visited often before the move, Kay had developed friendships within the Jewish Renewal Community of Boulder, a sister community to the group in New York where she served as executive director.

In August, two months after her move, Kay participated in a community event called the Dances of Universal Peace, where participants sing and enjoy dances from around the world. She arrived late to the event because she had been on a dinner date.

“I got this inner message of sorts that I needed to go to the dances.”

As was etiquette, when the last dance ended, people stood in silence and hugged those near them. Kay noticed a man whose name was Zev Paiss.

“He had a much-too-short haircut and a very warm smile,” Kay recalls.

Zev and Kay hugged with no words spoken.

“He was polite and had the right balance of
I noticed you . . . I’m interested in you . . . but this is as far as we can go in this setting since we’re silent
. But,” she says, “a spark was lit.”

One month later, a group from the Jewish Renewal Community gathered for a trip to Idaho Springs, where caves provided spring water for a ritual cleanse before Rosh Hashanah. Kay rode with friends; Zev rode with his dear friend Miriam, who had met Kay and liked her. During the thirty-five-minute ride, Zev asked Miriam questions about the new woman from New York City.

“She was obviously Jewish,” Zev says, “and I thought she was adorable, very attractive. She was a couple of inches shorter than me. She seemed very smart and articulate”—he laughs—“and she was single.”

Zev and Kay soaked in separate caves, and afterward, all the men and women sat down together to have an open conversation about the experience and to share their insights on faith.

The third meeting between Kay and Zev was not by chance. In October, several weeks after Idaho Springs, Zev made it a point to attend an event he was sure Kay would go to as well—the Simchat Torah celebration, a reenactment of Moses receiving the Torah from God. Everyone took turns dancing with the Torah and passing it on to the next person.

“At the end of my turn dancing with the Torah,” Kay says, “he came over and said, ‘Can we have tea?’ and I answered, ‘Well, how about dinner?’ ”