12/22/2025
Rest in peace, mom. 🤍🙏🪽
Services will be held on Tuesday, December 23rd from 9:30-11:00 AM at Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted Church in Waltham for all who would like to come honor and remember her life.
I’ve rewritten this post a dozen times in my head. What to share? What not to share? When to share? Who to tell first?
The past 2 weeks have been some of the most challenging I’ve navigated in my life.
The word that comes to mind is: Duality.
3:00 AM in Dubai on Dec 6th, I receive a voicemail from my dad. “Nik, you gotta call me, you have to call me, something’s going on, it’s bad, call me.”
I had just fallen asleep after 24 hours traveling across the world to Dubai for a 2-week onsite with a dream client. (You can’t make phone calls from Dubai, so I had no way of calling him back).
Waking up to this, my heart sunk. I already knew what had happened. After talking with my family, we pushed the funeral back until this week.
I was halfway around the world, thousands of miles away from my family, about to start one of the most exciting opportunities of my life, while simultaneously feeling the crushing grief of losing my mom.
Duality.
I decided to stay. It’s what she would have wanted. I could feel her so proud of me and her having done so much in the earlier part of my life to support me in getting here.
For 2 weeks, I spent 9 hours a day working intensely to help scale this new client whose mission in health and wellness is truly going to change the world. I’d end the day at the office, to my USA team waking up to start theirs, working 6 PM-midnight as Fractional COO across several other businesses.
All the while group texting with my dad and brother, arranging for her funeral and picking out the color of her urn to hold her ashes.
Duality.
Taking the weekend to explore Dubai’s Arabian dessert, adventuring on an ATV, riding camels, watching a fire show, while crying myself to sleep wishing I had one more chance to call my mom, and knowing she would love seeing that I was still choosing to live life to the fullest.
Duality.
The part that’s most difficult to share…
I want to remember my mom for the fun, loving, kind-hearted, free-spirited woman that she was. She was always the life of the party. Silly, the spirit of a kid at heart. Caring for everyone around her. The childhood memories I have are nothing short of unconditional love.
The past decade, my mom has suffered greatly from mental illness, alcoholism, and addiction, and although I lost my mom this month, it feels like I slowly began to lose her over a decade ago.
The pain myself and my family have experienced trying to help her the past 10 years, and slowly seeing the version of her I loved and cherished slipped away. Our relationship distanced, I took space, I could hardly go home to visit for being around her in that state was too much for me to bear.
How to explain the pain of losing someone, who you’ve already lost?
Duality.
I’ll be honoring my mom and remembering the version of her who loved her daughter unconditionally. I’ll show up and remember all of the ways she was a great mom, and I pray she’s now at peace from the battle no one could help her overcome.
May God bless her soul and I hope she’s up there with her dad and sister, smiling down and back to the version of herself I’ll hold in my heart forever.
