A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25 , 2021
CHRISTMAS FROM AILLUSTRATIONS BY BEYA REBAI FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTSave the date
B
y the time Dylan Isenberg got down on one
knee, five years had passed since he asked
his manager at a D.C. sports bar to put him
on more shifts with the pretty new hostess.
Five years since he and Molly Sadowsky spent
evenings talking on the red couch on his porch.
Five years since that fateful night at the
Wonderland Ballroom when feelings spilled out
and a relationship began.
Dylan and Molly were in no rush to get
married. But when the time came, they knew
what they wanted: the rooftop venue they had
fallen for, bright pink bougainvillea flowers and
their terrier mix, Olive, carrying their rings down
the aisle.
They set a date: May 23, 2020. Then, the world
stopped.
Emails flew back and forth with their vendors,
some of whom pressed them to move forward
with their 180-guest ceremony and reception. But
Molly and Dylan knew they needed to wait.On their original wedding date, they tried to
get married over the phone, even as the sound of
sirens ripped through city streets and people
huddled in their homes. Someone from the city
government returned their call while Molly was
in the shower, and Dylan brought the phone into
the bathroom.
“What do you want me to do — say, like, ‘Do you
take this man?’ ” the bureaucrat asked.
For such a momentous occasion, it felt all
wrong.
The couple hung up and rescheduled their big
event for August 2020 — and then for May 2021
when it became clear that the country was
nowhere near free from the pandemic’s grip.
Molly, a public-health professional, knew all too
well the dangers of hosting a party. Dylan agreed
it wasn’t worth the risk.
But the months that followed provided little
relief, and the couple eventually realized they
would have to postpone the wedding yet again.“It felt,” Molly said, “like a thing that might
never happen.”
A sadness washed over them, then a wave of
guilt. So many people were enduring worse, they
reminded themselves.
Still, they were tired of waiting. So on July 4 in
Philadelphia’s Love Park, as their newly vaccinat-
ed families watched, Molly and Dylan signed the
paperwork. They were legally wed.
They hope finally to hold their formal event
next May. The details don’t matter much any-
more, as long as they’re together and surrounded
by their loved ones.
On that late spring morning, Dylan will wake
up and get ready for one of the most important
days of his life. Before he walks out the door, he’ll
don the light gray suit that he has waited so long
to wear.
Stitched into the baby pink lining, hidden from
view, is the couple’s original wedding date.
— Marisa Iati‘Gracias a Dios’
F
or Christmas last year, Silvia set up the tree
but couldn’t bring herself to decorate it. She
and her son didn’t exchange presents. They
lay on the couch and watched movies. It was like
any other day that year, she said. Quiet, with a
sadness permeating each task, each passing
thought, as time flicked by.
She was used to spending every holiday — and
dozens of non-holidays — every year with her
74-year-old mother, Yolanda. Yolanda lives on the
other side of the border, in Mexico, and ever since
Silvia crossed the border 26 years ago and found a
home in El Paso, her mother would drive the four
hours north from Chihuahua’s capital city to visit
her. They say they’re each other’s best friends.
When the U.S.-Mexico border shut down except
for essential travel to prevent the spread of the
coronavirus, Silvia was unable to see her mother
— or her brothers, cousins, nieces and nephews.
“All of a sudden, you feel like you’re in this great
country but you’re so alone,” said Silvia, who is
undocumented and did not want her full name
published, for fear of deportation. “We lived like
prisoners in our own house.”
Silvia relied on patchy phone and video calls
through WhatsApp to stay in touch with her
mom. Eight of Silvia’s close friends died of
covid-19, and her son was diagnosed with heart
problems, all of which made her incredibly
fearful of leaving the house.
She struggled with what she called “problemas
de tristeza” — problems with sadness. Her mother
felt the same way. It was like that for 20 months.
Then, on Nov. 8, the Biden administrationreopened the border.
“Gracias a Dios,” Silvia whispered at the news.
Then, she called her mom.
Days later, Silvia drove up to the bridge that
connects El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and waited
for Yolanda to cross. Then, she saw her mother’s
car.
Her mother looked much thinner than Silvia
remembered. Paler. Her blood pressure was high-
er, and her diabetes had worsened.
Silvia knew she had changed, too. She had
gained weight over the months she spent cooped
up inside, hiding from the virus. She had also
developed high blood pressure and was diag-
nosed with arthritis.
They opened their arms to each other. They
stroked each other’s hair and squeezed each other
tight. Later, they cooked a fat turkey and put on
music. They went out shopping together several
mornings. Color began to return to Yolanda’s
cheeks.
Silvia’s mom left soon after Thanksgiving —
but that was just the start. In the days leading up
to Christmas, Yolanda is coming back, along with
Silvia’s brothers, nephews and nieces. They’ll roll
up to Silvia’s home. They’ll cook dozens of
tamales together, taking turns rolling out the
masa, adding the meat, folding it in corn husks.
They’ll blast cumbia and dance around the
kitchen before collapsing on the mattresses and
couches Silvia has put out for them.
And this year, Silvia said, she will decorate the
Christmas tree.
— Silvia Foster-FrauWhen the grief doesn’t sleep
T
he phone rang at 2:59 a.m., awakening the
owner of Precious Memories Funeral
Home, in bed next to his wife. Daniel Payne
scribbled notes in the dark as the caller said
she needed her mother’s body removed from a
nursing home out in Virginia’s Shenandoah Val-
ley.
The coronavirus, Payne would acknowledge
later, has been good for business. His caseload —
that’s mortician-speak for funerals — reached 61
in 2017, the year he and his wife, Manouchka,
opened their funeral home in Northwest D.C. By
Christmas week of 2021, they had handled 170
funerals, a bit more than half of which he
attributed to covid-19.
As much as he welcomes the chance to build his
brand, Payne is eager for funerals to resume their
pre-pandemic choreography, which didn’t in-
volve taking mourners’ temperatures or asking
them to stand six feet apart or refrain from
hugging a relative or friend.
That wish to facilitate communal grief is what
drew him to the business, first as a teenager, when
the sharpest dresser and most elegant man at his
family’s LeDroit Park church was a funeral
director.
“Tall and distinguished,” recalled Payne, now- “The coolest dude in the world.”
His attraction to the business deepened in the
early 1990s when his closest friend, Kevin Sayles,
then 22, was fatally shot.
In his grief, Payne found purpose and perhaps
distraction in attending to the needs of Sayles’s
family. Then, a month later, Payne’s uncle Rodney
died after a long illness, and again he felt himself
drawn to help arrange the funeral.
Another person’s end, he found, became for
him a kind of beginning.
Always, there are so many details to handle,
beginning with the first call, as when the woman
phoned about her mother in Shenandoah Valley.
“My condolences to you and your family. How
may we serve you?” Payne asks, in a tone he hopes
is calm and reassuring. Then more questions:
Name of the deceased, age, weight, time of death,
location, and were there any stairs at the entrance
where the body would be picked up?
On this night, Payne hung up and texted his
“transportation team,” the crew that would col-
lect the remains. He lay back down and closed his
eyes, his mind anxiously reviewing the details as
he faded into a dream about a house he and his
wife hope to build for themselves and their
children.
The phone rang again at 4 a.m.
“Precious Memories Funeral Home,” he an-
swered, reaching for his pen.
— Paul Schwartzman