Our COVID Hero Scholarship
Last month, Garden State Smiles began a $1,000 Scholarship competition for any student entering the Fall Semester in 2020. To be eligible, the student, their parent or guardian must have worked to serve or protect our community through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. To enter, students were required to submit an essay, piece of artwork (in any form) or any other type of contribution that showed their talent.
After numerous entries and careful consideration, the Garden State Smiles team is pleased to announce that the official 2020 COVID Hero Scholarship winner is Mary Mehalick. Mary submitted an outstanding and very moving essay which we’d like to share with all of you! We’d like to congratulate Mary, thank her for serving her community, and wish her the best of luck this Fall at Rutgers University!
Mary’s Winning Essay
I never expected to be considered an essential worker. I’d been working this casual part-time job at Edible Arrangements since high school, but overnight, when my friends had their jobs taken away, I became essential. I laughed with them when we found out that I was considered essential. I shrugged when each person would ask me the same question of who could possibly be ordering an arrangement at this time. But as March slipped into April and the virus continued to ravage the state, our purpose, originally unintended, became clear. In the midst of tragedy, people were turning to Edible Arrangements to fulfill the unprecedented need for comfort and connection.
As the death count in New Jersey continues to rise, our number of daily orders rise too. As of May 1st, New Jersey has had 7,500 deaths and counting. Typically, we would have around 30-40 daily orders, these numbers now soaring to 80 orders, throwing us into the most dense period of chaos we’ve ever experienced. Well over half our orders are for sympathy. We have never been so swamped and surrounded by death. Not by the dead themselves, but by those mourning them. I am not a healthcare worker and yet I am working on the “emotional frontlines” of the COVID19 outbreak. I have had to proofread messages containing “I’m sorry for your loss” more times than I thought possible at 21 years old. On the news we all see the numbers of the thousands of people who have died, but for every one person, there are many others mourning them. Those are the people I speak with at work. At a time of social distancing, I’m suddenly just a phone call away from other people’s grief. Many times a day. Every day.
I’m grappling with messages from aunts and uncles to their nieces and nephews whose mother has passed from the virus, heartbroken to think they can’t even be comforted by family in the time that it’s needed most. A fruit basket is supposed to suffice as a substitute for the affection of family members in the time of a mother’s passing? It feels woefully inadequate. I feel the heavy weight of being the one who is the go-between for these mourning families, attempting to bring healing to their doorsteps. This fruit is all I have to offer. Though I don’t see the people who are sending or receiving arrangements, I am mourning with them. Having a piece of their pain has simply become part of my job. From every “sorry for your loss”, I take a piece of it’s grief and I carry it home with me in my apron pocket. I am stuck in a difficult position of second-hand mourning for an immense number of people, its weight held in my heart and in my mind: an unmournable mourning. I mourn with our customers for a Jewish man whose wife has passed and must sit shivah alone in isolation, or the three kids my age whose mother, only in her 50’s, has passed. This grief is overwhelming.
I’m working overtime to the radio playing today’s hits, interrupted by reminders to stay home, stay home, stay home. I’ve had a continuous, prickling fear of what if today is the day that I get sick? but I put on my mask and gloves and continue on. The work isn’t the hard part. It’s coming home afterwards, processing, taking the pieces of grief I’ve collected out of my pockets. I think about the girl who I went to school with whose father passed, which I found out from wrapping an arrangement to be delivered to a name I recognized. I think about the friend whose sympathy arrangement I wrapped for the passing of his great-grandmother. I think about all the people who are hurting, and I want them to know that I feel it too.
I am lucky in that I have an income and am young enough to be on my father’s healthcare benefits, which is something that not all workers have. Healthcare workers and grocery store employees are at the core of this crisis and I too am grateful to them. Yet there are also other “essential” jobs, invisible jobs, being forgotten. Every essential worker right now is faced with the realities of life during this pandemic. I am looking at the death count personified. I am scared, tired, and grieving, but I continue to work, carried by the thought that I might bring comfort at a very lonely time. I haven’t quit, hoping to look back on this time knowing that I helped people in the ways I could. The sympathy arrangements I make, as carefully as possible, can reach those in grief when friends and family cannot.
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