Omnibus

 By Courtney Heaton

Christine Fay and Cohen Cox have been engaged for two months. Cohen says the wedding will be “sometime in the fall.” Christine can list the time, date and location. Cohen hasn’t decided on groomsmen yet. Christine has already asked her five closest friends to be bridesmaids. They’ve picked out dresses, and she already has her gown. Beyond dress shopping, Christine is brainstorming ways to save her wedding if the COVID-19 pandemic is still going strong on her special day.

Wedding plans

Cohen is adamant that there hasn’t been much planning. The two of them are so busy as homeowners, graduate students and dog owners. There hasn’t been any time.

Cohen doesn’t know Christine has been planning this wedding her entire life.

“The color scheme is rose and gold. It’s going to be a mountain wedding in Asheville in the fall. I’ve had my dress picked out for a while. It’s an A-line cut with lace and tulle all over,” Christine said eagerly while scrolling through her Pinterest board of wedding ideas.

As excited as Christine is about her wedding, she’s concerned about the pandemic’s impact. She said she hopes an efficient vaccine rollout will make her dream wedding possible.

With the pandemic, Christine must plan around many unanswered questions. What will the state’s restrictions be? Will long-distance travel be allowed? Will her high-risk guests be safe? Christine said if COVID-19 is still rampant come the fall, virtual accommodations will be made to include everyone safely.

“As much as I want everyone to come to the wedding, I don’t want it to be considered dangerous or a high-risk situation to put people in,” Christine said. “That’s why I’m really banking on vaccine rollouts and to flatten the curve by fall.”

Cohen’s eagerly relinquished the wedding planning reins to Christine, to the benefit of both of them. Christine has made it very clear that Cohen’s responsibilities are selecting groomsmen and making sure they come to the ceremony sober or can at least pretend to be.  Christine also expects him to behave at his bachelor party.

“Someone mentioned taking Cohen to Vegas for his last night of being a bachelor,” Christine said. “I’m hesitant to let Cohen and his friends loose in Sin City. We’ll just have to talk about it, but to be fair he hasn’t even selected groomsmen, so how is he going to plan a Vegas trip?”

Proposal long coming

“I mean, I’ll wear a tux, probably black, maybe a different color, whatever she wants,” Cohen said when imagining his wedding wardrobe. “It’s her day. My day was proposing to her.”

Cohen proposed last Christmas, six years into their relationship, after Christine pushed for an engagement.

The two met in undergrad at East Carolina University in 2012. They were introduced to one another by a mutual friend, Christine’s then-boyfriend, Cameron Page. Cohen knew Cameron from his hometown, Rockingham, North Carolina. The demise of Cameron and Christine benefited Cohen. He quickly became the counselor, consoler and “ya know, from a certain angle he’s kind of cute” prince charming in Christine’s life.

Christine explained Cohen’s reluctance to propose simply: “He’s just Cohen.”

Possible culprits are Cohen’s constant procrastination that flourishes in his school, work and daily household tasks or his hesitancy to get off his pocketbook for an engagement ring Christine liked.

Christine said the two have reached every relationship milestone other than marriage, even adopting two dogs.

“We have lived together for four years which I’m happy about,” Christine said. “You don’t truly know someone until you’ve lived with them. We are homeowners and have been for a year and a half now. We adopted Miska and Sammy together, furthered our education together. All that’s left is marriage and babies, and I’m not ready for kids just yet.”

That being said, Christine is ready for her wedding day.

Banking on the vaccine

The wedding party will be made-up of ten people, pending Cohen’s groomsmen selection. Then add the plus ones, Christine and Cohen’s family, friends and coworkers. The size of the wedding is “standard,” as Christine put it, if the pandemic is under control.

“We are waiting until the fall in hopes that things will be better, and vaccines will have been given to a larger population,” Christine said.

Christine is a behavioral therapist for children with Autism. She hopes that she will be included in the phase of vaccines being distributed to teachers in North Carolina because she works closely with students.

Christine is considering some COVID-friendly techniques like individually wrapped snacks such as chip bags, mini desserts and other appetizers between the wedding and the reception cocktail hour. Another tactic is to have the dinner served by a catering company that will serve the guests instead of a buffet. This will reduce guests from touching utensils and those serving will be able to wear masks, gloves and any other protection necessary. Christine is also planning socially distant seating.

“If the wedding does have to be small, we’ll just save a lot of money and go on a great honeymoon, but I’ve been planning this wedding for a long time,” Christine said. “I really don’t want to put it off any longer.”

Edited by Megan Suggs

By Macy Meyer

A call from his best friend woke Jordan Williams.

“Dude, check your phone right now!”

After hanging up, Jordan scrolled through the dozens of text messages that littered his phone’s home screen. “This better be good,” he thought. Jordan, a notorious night owl, stayed up into the morning hours to work on his music the previous night. He unlocked his phone, opened his messages and his heart jumped. He stood up straight from his bed, heart pounding against his chest like a drum.

There, Jordan saw his stage name, Sonny Miles, sandwiched between J. Cole and Migos on former President Barack Obama’s “Favorite Music of 2019” playlist posted on Twitter that morning.

Jordan was stunned. The song, “Raleighwood Hills,” only had a few hundred streams on Spotify. He was just a kid from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was on a list with some of his idols. He could not fathom how Obama had found the song.

“It was very much insane because I was like, ‘I’m the only person on this list I don’t know,’” Jordan said.

The day was filled with phone calls, congratulatory texts and delighted screams. It felt like recognition that was well-overdue. It felt like an affirmation of his dream to be a musician.

Planting his roots

Normally, elementary-aged kids in church on a Sunday morning would be zoning out, or even trying to sneak a quick nap. Not Jordan. He couldn’t help but stare at the church’s drummer — it mesmerized him.

Jordan’s dad, Stephen, sang for the choir at the Christ Cathedral Church of Deliverance in Winston-Salem, which meant Jordan was expected to be present every Wednesday and Sunday, and sometimes days in between. While Jordan appreciated the choir’s performances each week, it was the rhythms and the syncopation of the drummer that made the boy sit up a little straighter in the pew.

Music was always around for him. As a 5-year-old, Jordan would grab his father’s Walkman, pop in Fred Hammond’s “Purpose By Design” and ride his bike to the tune of the gospel track for hours around his garage. He’d listen to the rhythms of the drum on the tape and then analyze the choir drummer the next day at church. “I always studied music before I even practiced it,” Jordan said.

One day, he approached the church’s drummer after the sermon, hoping to get his hands on the wooden drum sticks and a tutorial. Usually, he was told no, but sometimes he wasn’t. It didn’t matter because Jordan was already hooked on drums.

“That was the root,” Jordan said. “I would be nothing without religion or at least without the faction of church.”

Sophomore year of high school, those roots grew. Jordan’s mom, Calya, would go to bed early for her job as a teacher. With the house silent, Jordan would grab his mom’s laptop and his newly acquired iPod Classic and download music until 2 or 3 a.m.

Night after night Jordan would research his favorite musicians and their favorite musicians, and study old Rolling Stone magazine articles to learn more about the retro artists who soundtracked his youth.

As a student of music, his next assignment was a live performance. It was in the auditorium of Mount Tabor High School during a live performance of the musical “Godspell” when his fate was sealed.

“I just felt like I could do it,” Jordan said. So, he headed to a pawn shop to buy a guitar and learned to sing.

Stepping from stone to stone

Years later in 2016, when critically acclaimed rapper and singer T.I. dapped him up after a performance, Jordan knew he was onto something.

After performing a 30-minute set for PackHOWL, N.C. State University’s annual homecoming concert, Jordan didn’t expect the three-time Grammy Award winner to approach him backstage at Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh. He especially didn’t expect T.I. to say he enjoyed Jordan’s performance.

“He really tore the stage up that night,” Daniel Maxwell, longtime friend and bassist, said. “I was in awe of how he handled the situation. This was probably one of the biggest performances we had done in that time in our lives.

“The shock and nervousness was there, but once we got on stage, I could see he was right at home.”

T.I.’s compliment is still what stands out for Jordan. It stands out as the moment the college junior realized his music could get noticed by charting artists.

“It was definitely the stepping stone,” Jordan said.

Jordan was practicing twice a week for three hours and performing three times a week with his a cappella group, The Grains of Time.

As an undergraduate student, communications was his major, but music was his love and his devotion. In between class and practice, he was producing his own music, gaining attention across campus from the student body, booking slots at shows and honing his craft — despite being a self-taught music producer.

Kai McNeil, a close friend of Jordan’s, said he was always walking around N.C. State’s campus with a guitar — he said music is always present when Jordan is around.

In those days, Jordan was just becoming who he is now: Sonny Miles.

He knew he wanted to be soulful like the jazz records his grandfather, Cleave, played. He knew he wanted to have a timeless sound like artists Sonny Stitt and Miles Davis, who inspired his stage name. He was developing his distinct sound and working to become Sonny Miles.

“‘It’s about damn time'”

Shakilya Lawrence almost dropped her phone when Jordan said he had been recognized by former President Obama.

Jordan’s longtime partner always knew the song — a collaboration with LesTheGenius and Jaxson Free — was good, but for the independent, N.C.-based artists to get presidential recognition was what she called an “unexpected blessing.”

“I was over the moon for them,” Lawrence said. “I knew Jordan’s recognition would come at some point and I’m just glad it came from that level.”

After begging to be taught drums; dedicating a summer to learning guitar; spending hours learning to mix music; studying music instead of sleeping and dreaming of recognition like this since childhood: this was the break Jordan needed.

Jordan’s closest supporters believe the recognition was not just needed, but earned.

“I felt a combination of giddiness and ‘it’s about damn time,’” Maxwell said.

And they know it’s only the beginning for him.

“Jordan is very ahead of his time and the music industry has to catch up to him,” Lawrence said. “I know he’s always had a very progressive sound, a very forward-thinking, dynamic sound.”

“I’ve been telling him this since I met him that it’ll happen soon. I know it will,” she added.

There is a strangeness to being around someone right on the brink of greatness and knowing deep down that person could one day walk the red carpet at the Grammy Awards, but that’s how fans of Sonny Miles feel.

“That was just the beginning cusp of what he’s able to do and will do as an artist,” McNeil said. “If you want to be ahead of the curve, know him now.”

 

Edited By Brandon Standley

By Gabriel Lima

 Nestled between Sup Dogs and an alleyway on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill sits Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews. Outwardly unassuming, it is a picture of coziness inside with books lining the walls and covering tables. Many have notes and reviews attached, each one carefully handwritten and thoughtful. A painting of Frida Kahlo adorns one wall. Potted plants hang from the ceiling. Latin-influenced treats, such as churros and buñuelos, fill a glass display at the counter, and the air smells of coffee and chocolate. There is a welcoming aura to the place: a warmth that feels intentional, carefully curated.

Epilogue is the passion project of owner Jaime Sanchez and his wife and co-owner Miranda. The Sanchezs’ attribute their idea to the closing of The Bookshop — their favorite bookstore in Chapel Hill that closed in July 2017.

“A big part of why we moved to Chapel Hill in 2015 was because it had a bookstore downtown,” Jaime said. “[When] The Bookshop closed, we knew we couldn’t let that stand.” 

The Sanchezs’ spent long hours researching and building a plan that could survive in the competitive downtown Chapel Hill rent market. After working through many iterations, they found a business model that could sustain them, pay living wages to their employees (a critical factor, Jaime noted) and allow them to pursue their dream.

Epilogue enjoys immense support and patronage from Chapel Hill locals and UNC students alike. Jaime attributes this to a “deep understanding” from the community that art, especially books, is important. 

“The desire to keep Chapel Hill weird and full of interesting places is deep rooted in our history,” Jaime remarked. “Chapel Hill is a special place, and if you can set up a business that can connect so well with the community, then the community will respond accordingly.”

Latin American roots

Intrinsic to the charm of Epilogue is its Latin influence. Jaime and his wife have taken great pains to ensure his Mexican heritage shines through in the food and drinks.

“My favorite item on the menu is our vanilla concha,” he said. “The panaderia (bakery) back home in Tijuana that I love has a very specific way to make them.” 

An avid baker, Jaime worked hard to bring those flavors into his food. 

“When I take a bite, I am immediately transported back home to 6:00 p.m. in the panaderia, when the second run of bread is made and people buy it fresh out of the oven on their way home from work,” he said.

The selection of literature available reflects the couple’s Latin roots as well. Jaime and his wife are careful to display works by people of color and LGBTQ writers in an effort to raise visibility for these communities.

Adapting through COVID-19 pandemic

Jaime himself is a humble figure, dressed in a baker’s apron and an Epilogue-branded shirt. He is genial and witty — his love for what he does is apparent in the care he puts in. 

His favorite novel is Franz Kafka’s “The Castle.”

“Kafka may not be known for happy endings,” he laughed, aware of the juxtaposition between the often depressing subject matter and his own optimistic personality. “I appreciate the complexity of his storytelling and the ‘true to life’ feel his stories have. Life is not simple, and he mastered an artistic take on the reality of life.”

One such complexity of life for Jaime has been dealing with the pandemic. His tone shifted from light-hearted to serious as he discussed it.

“We’ve been holding up as well as one can,” he reflected. “I feel like I failed to protect our employees. I wish I could do more to keep all employees working and safe.” 

He pointed to his role as the oldest in his family as the source of his caring nature. 

“I’m kind of that person that is unofficially assigned to protect and keep an eye on the whole family.”

“We did have to make a lot of changes during COVID,” Jaime noted. “We were so successful with the core business [before the pandemic] that we’d never had to think about an online site or delivery. The pandemic had us scrambling to move everything online.”

Jaime emphasized how careful Epilogue has been to keep their employees and customers safe.

“From a safety perspective, we had to make sure the idea of ‘safe space’ was at the core of our decision making, so we ensured we were two steps behind any further reopening steps the state government allowed us to have,” he said. “We never made a decision to reopen further without staff input, and we made it our mission to provide masks and gloves to anybody that needs it.”

 Epilogue is especially important, Jaime reasoned, because it is positioned between two major bus stops, which creates a constant demand for personal protective equipment.

 “Protecting our community continues to be our moral responsibility,” he said.

Looking forward

Once Epilogue was again stable and adapting to the new normal, Jaime turned his sights back toward helping people in his community.

“Once we were set up online, I had to figure out how to further help our community of vendors and artists,” Jaime said, referring to local writers, jewelry makers, potters and the like, all of whom have been given space to promote their work within Epilogue.

 “We came up with ‘surprise boxes,’ which included goods from local vendors and books that you might have otherwise missed because they came up during a pandemic,” he said.

Despite the challenges, Jaime said he remains positive in his outlook.

“My hope for the future is to exist, to be here for alumni. I know all the students have to leave at some point and that makes me sad,” he lamented. “But such is life, right? The thought of seeing students again in 10 years, maybe sooner, and being here for them is what keeps me going.”

Edited by Elizabeth Egan and Jennifer Tran

 

By Maddie Ellis

 Dancers, artists and actors surrounded Kathleen Monegan in her masters of art education program at The Ohio State University. Kathleen was in her 40s, born in Akron, Ohio, a mother of three, and was married for 27 years. Even though she never finished the program, she still thinks about those classmates. Hearing what they had done, what these people had accomplished, she found herself at a juncture. 

 New Beginnings 

 Kathleen met Laszlo — who went by Louis, the Americanized version of his traditional Hungarian name — at age 22. They lived in the same neighborhood by their college, The University of Akron. After Louis finished his accounting major, seven months after they met, the two were married.

After they walked down the aisle, Kathleen and Louis moved to Cleveland, Ohio, the home of Louis’s family.  

 Louis got a prestigious job working for a large accounting firm in the city. Kathleen got a job working as a secretary for the Standard Oil of Ohio. But she didn’t know anybody in the city, outside of her husband and her in-laws. 

 “That was a very kind of strange, lonely time for me,” she said. 

 She had her first child, a daughter named Beth, in 1966 — eighteen months after she was married. 

 “And I did know about birth control,” she said with a laugh. 

 She had her second daughter, Julie, four years later. Then a son, Dana, four years after that. This timing wasn’t planned, rather an example of her “knee-jerk living,” she said.

 Marriage wasn’t everything to Kathleen. But her husband’s job working in college administration did offer her the opportunity to find her own passion: learning. As her family moved around Ohio, she took classes at local colleges. Some at Ohio Wesleyan University, some at Ohio State, some at Kenyon College. 

 She was still taking classes at local universities into her 40s. Then, she went to New York City. 

 Living in a house off of a highway in Chelsea, she worked as an administrative assistant in the arts through an internship program. She spent three months doing the work behind-the-scenes. But through all the calls, emails and tasks, she studied the operations of a nonprofit organization supporting artists. 

 The Cinderella Hoax 

Her exposure to these mentors, the city, and then choosing to pursue her masters in arts education all converged around the time that Kathleen thought about ending her marriage. 

 After looking at her situation for so long, she realized she just had to do it. 

 “To me, it was like getting on top of a high dive and heading down towards a cold pool,” she said. 

 Once she made the decision, she didn’t go back. 

“It wasn’t that Cinderella myth that I had grown up with in the ‘50s, that I had bought into,” she said. 

 Her first marriage wasn’t her happy ending.

 “Have you seen Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Into The Woods?’” she asked. 

 In finding the strength to make one choice, one choice to leave her traditional marriage and family life, Kathleen let any semblance of her faithfulness to the Cinderella myth shatter, like  broken glass over a marble staircase. 

 Kathleen’s granddaughter Rowan McDonald, 18, said above all, her grandmother has taught her that change is OK. 

 “You could have a bunch of different careers and still be successful, and you can live a bunch of different places and still be successful, and you can stay in one place and still be successful,” Rowan said.

 Sending Postcards

 Violet Kehoe, 19, grew up in Medina, Ohio. Many of her early memories with Kathleen revolved around the question, “Where’s grandma now?” 

 When she wasn’t there for family gatherings, Kathleen always sent a cardboard box with gift bags inside for each grandchild, meticulously labeled. Violet still remembers receiving a small backpack in the shape of a black bear, sent with love from New Mexico. Years later, she spotted a matching backpack hanging in her grandmother’s room. 

 The backpack is one of many remnants of all the times Kathleen traveled the world. In finding the strength to leave her former marriage, she gave herself the opportunity to make endless choices — all visible in the stamps on a creased and worn passport. 

 After she retired, Kathleen lived at Yellowstone National Park for seven months, working in lodging and campground reservations. She spent her days in a cubbyhole, staring at a screen, on the phone speaking with customers. 

 “It was a pretty crappy job,” she said. 

 When Violet was 10, she visited while her grandmother was working at Yellowstone. They drove throughout the park in Kathleen’s blue Nissan. At one point, Kathleen slammed on the brakes as a herd of buffalo passed in front of them through the road. 

 “I just remember it being so beautiful in the air, when I looked out the window,” Violet said. “Like that’s the first time I had ever seen mountains before.” 

 No Regrets

 Kathleen admits she’s made mistakes in her life. But this decision, to leave her feelings of dependency and her life in Ohio, is one she doesn’t regret. She actually describes it as one of her life’s successes. 

 “It modeled a lot to my children, who had grown up in a pretty confusing household, because their mother was not happy pretty consistently,” she said. 

 Kathleen lives in Carrboro now, close to Violet, and they get brunch almost weekly. Over Violet’s winter break, they watched the Netflix show “Bridgerton” together. 

 “What I thought was funny was Violet’s reaction,” she said. “I wasn’t embarrassed, I think she was just embarrassed that I was there.” 

 She doesn’t anticipate traveling as much anymore. Instead of choosing places on a map, she browses the magazine racks at Barnes and Noble. 

 “I may keep a section of the paper for two weeks, reading through the obituaries,” she said. “It’s really crazy, nobody would do that, you know?”

 She looks through the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal. She likes to skip around, to have options. 

 

Edited by Kyle Mehlman & Makayla Williams 

By Sasha Schroeder

A pregnant woman arrived by helicopter alone at UNC Hospitals in February 2020. She was in labor, 15 weeks earlier than expected.

Medics rushed the woman inside, where Hannaneh Mirmozaffari was in the middle of her doula shift. Not realizing the woman was only 24 weeks pregnant, Mirmozaffari reassured her everything was going to be okay.

At just 21 years old, Mirmozaffari is used to being at the bedsides of strangers on the most intense days of their lives; as a volunteer doula, she provides physical, educational and emotional support for mothers before, during and after childbirth. She holds their hands, gets them water, massages their backs and helps them breathe through their contractions. In the dizzying commotion that labor and delivery rooms can be, she is a source of steady comfort.

Mirmozaffari worried she’d given the woman false hope when she discovered the baby’s due date was months away. She had already helped one mother give birth earlier in the day, but it had gone smoothly and the baby had been ready. This baby wasn’t.

Out of nowhere, the woman’s family flooded the room. They had been driving to Chapel Hill behind the helicopter as fast as they could. Mirmozaffari remembered the husband having a slow, sweet southern drawl that stood in sharp contrast to the chaos around her.

Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks while the obstetrician told her there was a possibility the baby would die. She offered to take a video of the fetal monitor so the woman would be able to have the heartbeat as a memory.

As she watched a nurse record the heartbeat, Mirmozaffari thought about how she was trained to witness birth. She wasn’t sure she was ready to witness death.

She took a deep breath, swallowed and tried to help the woman slow down her pushing while the doctors explained what was about to happen. She wasn’t going to let her emotions cloud her judgment.

“It’s not about me,” Mirmozaffari said. “If the baby lives or dies, it’s my job to help Mom. It’s not my sadness to feel.”

Someone called out, saying the neonatal intensive care unit was ready to receive the baby. By that time, eight doctors had gathered in the room — six for the baby and two for the soon-to-be mother.

A job full of life

Mirmozaffari never gets tired of witnessing childbirth.

“It’s a very monumental moment,” she said. “It’s an honor to be there.”

The baby girl arrived in the world weighing less than a pound. Her father quickly cut her umbilical cord and doctors whisked her away.

“We were all so scared for a few minutes,” Mirmozaffari said. “I held the mom’s hand and her husband held her other. They prayed, and I prayed too.”

For a few minutes, the baby’s heartbeat was too low. The doctors placed her on a ventilator, wrapped her in plastic to trap her body heat and gave her oxygen. The sight was jarring.

Mirmozaffari couldn’t help but hope the woman would be able to watch the baby girl’s already thick, dark hair grow for years to come.

Her hopes weren’t in vain. 

“Alhamdulillah, she lived,” Mirmozaffari said. 

Two cultures in one

Alhamdulillah is an Arabic phrase that Muslims — regardless of whether they speak Arabic — use to thank God.

Mirmozaffari speaks English and Farsi. She switches seamlessly between the two when speaking to her family on the phone and routinely drops “y’all” into conversations with a grin. She is both an American and an Iranian, and for her, these identities do not conflict. 

She thinks of herself as “100 percent North Carolinian and 100 percent Persian,” which, when added together, explains her endless zest. She is a doula, a gardener, a barista, a rock climber, a mountain biker, a reader and a writer.

Ornate, jewel-toned Persian rugs carpet Mirmozaffari’s bedroom and topographical maps of the Blue Ridge Mountains cover her walls. Nestled in those mountains are her favorite climbing routes, bike trails and hikes. Photos taken at concerts in Carrboro are collaged above her desk along with photos taken during teatime in Tehran, Persepolis and Isfahan. 

Her desk is stacked with books of all kinds. Fittingly, Mirmozaffari is studying medical anthropology as a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, with minors in chemistry and creative writing. She can often be found reading Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, studying anatomy or scribbling furiously in the margins of one of her favorite books, “All the King’s Men.”  

One photo above her books shows her in a UNC t-shirt and a hijab, standing in the middle of a river in the mountains surrounding Tehran three summers ago. Since 1983, women in Iran have been required to wear a headscarf and loose-fitting clothing, meaning they can’t determine what to wear in public for themselves.

Mirmozaffari chooses to wear a hijab no matter where she is. She thinks a lot about the assumptions people have about her simply because she chooses to cover her hair; she thinks a lot about how people always point out how outgoing and outspoken she is. She wonders if they would say anything if she didn’t wear a hijab.

“People assume I am certain in my faith, or that I’ve figured something out that other people haven’t because I wear hijab,” Mirmozaffari said.

She hasn’t. Wearing a hijab is a deeply personal choice, just like anything else.

Everything that Mirmozaffari does — for school, work or fun — is personal. It is not in her nature to stop short of throwing herself fully into everything she does.

Her next great adventure, she hopes, will be medical school. She wants to practice rural family medicine so she can increase access to care for families who need it most while being surrounded by her beloved mountains. Her interest in medicine stems from her love of people and family, blood or otherwise.

She recalled how the woman who gave birth prematurely kept thanking her. “We’re family now,” the woman said, over and over. 

Mirmozaffari’s family grows all the time.

Edited by Parker Brown

By Suzanne Blake

When Lucy Hill learned her grandmother Diane Ulrich had gone to the hospital in mid-March 2020, she didn’t expect the worst. 

Ulrich wasn’t feeling well, but the Hill family could never have imagined that the strong matriarch of the family would end up dying in the hospital. Until it happened, and suddenly they were placed in the impossible situation of planning a funeral amid a burgeoning pandemic.

It was after Hill, a UNC-Chapel Hill student, had returned home to Mooresville from college. COVID-19 cases were soaring and UNC had extended its spring break before eventually turning all classes remote when Hill heard the news.

Looking up at her mother Meredith, Hill thought to herself how strong it was that even as she told her gently that her grandmother had passed, her mother did not cry. 

 

The planning process

The family had to wait what felt like an endless period of time to hear back about if and how they could plan a funeral as the hospital had to ensure Ulrich did not die from COVID-19.

It was determined she had not. But the virus still dramatically impacted the way those who knew Ulrich could celebrate her life.

“It just feels incomplete,” Hill said. “There’s just a disconnect, and it kind of doesn’t feel real almost.”

Ulrich was a devout Catholic who had helped build the Saint Elizabeth’s of Hungary Church in Wyckoff, New Jersey. So, even with the looming safety concerns of holding an in-person funeral, Hill said they needed to have a concrete ceremony with a priest.

Only 10 family members could attend the event. Hill was one of them, but the pandemic’s restrictions made it so her brothers couldn’t mourn their grandmother alongside her. 

To Hill, the 10 people were not enough to demonstrate Ulrich’s legacy.

“I wish COVID didn’t happen because she really did deserve a lot more people being there,” Hill said. “She touched so many people’s lives, and 10 people were not representative of the impact she made.”

Other family members and friends could only watch the service broadcasted over Facebook.

 

Safe grieving

Grieving families are being put into the difficult situation of navigating how to mourn their loved ones throughout the pandemic, said Stephen Mitchell, the funeral director of Walker’s Funeral Home in Chapel Hill.

Many families don’t want to risk their friends coming out to a formal funeral, and many people aren’t showing up when the services do take place, he said. 

There have been more requests for outdoor ceremonies, and families often bring their own streaming equipment.

In the rare case that the families in grief want to have excessively large gatherings that do not heed COVID-19 warnings, Stephen has to force himself to have that difficult conversation. No one wants to hear that their mother or father’s life can’t be celebrated properly.

“That discussion slowly turns to look, as much as we hate to say this, you do have to realize that we are in the middle of a pandemic,” Mitchell said. “There are a lot of things that we can’t control.”

Mitchell knows from his line of work that the virtual events aren’t the same. There’s something to be said for coming together and receiving a hug. 

When people inevitably do hug each other at in-person funerals, Mitchell said it’s not his place to say anything. The funeral home encourages everyone to wear masks, but if people feel safe to handshake or hug, which is a natural reaction to grief at a funeral, that’s on them, he said.

 

Digital disconnect 

Still, many are bypassing in-person funerals altogether.

UNC senior Laura Traugot remembers her grandmother Marilyn Liden as an even-tempered, kind woman who she could always count on for the best back rub. Traugot took Liden to get Wendy’s before the spring break known as the last “before” COVID-19 time.

In July, Liden was having trouble breathing. Scans revealed the worst: lung cancer. By late August, Liden was in hospice. A few days later, she died. Traugot’s last goodbye for Liden was recorded over her phone. 

For the Traugot family, an in-person funeral wasn’t an option.

“For us, it wasn’t even a question,” Traugot said.

Many of Liden’s friends were in Illinois. Because of Traugot’s parents’ high-risk conditions, Traugot didn’t want people traveling for the event or risk of COVID-19 exposure. 

She used her UNC Zoom account to commemorate Liden’s life in the small way they could. They put together a slideshow of Liden’s life, full of quotes from people who knew her and songs she would have liked.

Laying on her bed after the Zoom funeral, hearing how her grandmother had talked about Traugot and her brother, Traugot cried for two hours. Maybe it would have been different if someone had been there to hug her.

With Zoom, you log on and off, minimizing the closure and support we often receive from attending a funeral with other people who knew the person. Traugot knows that if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, they would have had a proper ceremony.

“It’s difficult for these families because of what they’re going through, and then you throw into the mix, they can’t do what they really want to do to honor their loved one because everybody’s hands are tied,” Mitchell said. “That just brings the emotions to it to a whole new level. It’s things that I’ve never seen in 30 plus years of doing this.”

 

Difficult decisions 

People knew Eileen Boone as playful and sweet, but she also acted like a queen. UNC senior Taylor Edmonds recalls playing nail salon with her grandmother.

After Boone had a stroke in early 2020, the family prepared their goodbyes. Miraculously, she took a turn for the better. 

In the summer, Boone tested positive for COVID-19 after likely contracting the virus from her home nurse. The goodbyes were excruciatingly difficult. Edmonds’ mother said goodbye in full PPE gear while Edmonds had to say her last words over FaceTime.

Like many, the family could not have an immediate funeral to remember Boone’s life. Come October, they did host a small, outdoor “celebration of life.” 

They made the difficult decision to choose this type of event over a virtual funeral because of how close-knit the family is; they needed that quality time together to commemorate Boone.

“It just felt like it wasn’t enough to do something online in terms of being able to support one another and just be with each other,” Edmonds said. “It just didn’t feel enough to celebrate everything that my grandmother was.”

 

Moving forward

No matter what type of event a family chooses to say goodbye to a loved one, the grieving process has been radically impacted. So many cannot seek solace in the comfort of their family’s support or the warmth from holding hands through the tears.

Traugot had to let herself grieve and be mad at the whole unimaginable situation of planning a Zoom funeral, two words that should never go together.

“Let yourself be mad at it, but let yourself grieve and do your best to recreate those close connections,” Traugot said.

Edited by Mikayla Goss

By PJ Morales

What began as a scratchy throat and nagging cough turned out to be something far worse.

 

It was official: Peter Paulsen had COVID-19.

 

Off Peter went to the oak-walled basement of his Great Falls, Virginia home, where he wouldn’t have a chance of infecting the rest of his high-risk family members. But it was too late — the basement wouldn’t be a lonely place for long.

 

A few days later came his youngest daughter, Maddie, and his eldest, Amelia, who both have asthma and thought the coughs were just normal parts of their condition. But after a pair of positive tests, to the basement they went.

 

Their mother and Peter’s wife, Margaret, came a few days later with the same symptoms. It was getting cramped down there, but they didn’t want to risk the only healthy person left: their teenage son, Spencer.

 

How to be a happy camper

Down in the bowels of their house, surrounded by wooden walls, the Paulsens formed their own small community. They ate every meal together, marathoned movies on the couch that was just big enough to fit the four of them and constantly kept tabs on each other’s health. It was like a summer camp and emergency ward, all rolled into one.

 

“Camp Covid,” Amelia called it.

 

Of course, this camp had no counselors, jamborees, lakes to swim in or weekend camping trips. Instead, this two-week-ish, all-inclusive experience would be confined to a 1,500 square-foot room where the most exercise a camper could get was their morning stretches, or maybe a brisk 10-step walk, if they weren’t short of breath.

 

The cramped conditions did come with some upsides. For two weeks straight, the Paulsens didn’t cook a single meal. Friends, friends-of-friends, family and neighbors all volunteered to cook meals for the isolated family.

 

One night, Amelia’s childhood best friend Timothy made the whole family enchiladas, with each person’s meal packaged separately according to their food preferences and a little note accompanying each box. It warmed her heart, even if it didn’t warm her palate.

 

“Ironically, couldn’t taste a thing,” she said.

 

Is there a doctor in the house?

For everything it didn’t have, though, Camp Covid did have one thing that any summer camp needs: a dedicated nurse. Specifically, the Paulsens had Campbell Virdin, Peter’s niece and a nurse at the emergency ward of Inova Hospital in nearby Alexandria.

 

Thankfully, for the first week or so, the campers didn’t have to pay a visit to the nurse’s office — or rather, the nurse didn’t have to pay a visit to the camp.

 

Because of the Paulsens’ penchants for pre-existing conditions, the family was already well-stocked on pulse oximeters that allowed them to check up on their bodies’ oxygen levels. Sure, the symptoms could change from day-to-day, but Campbell knew that as long as the numbers on the pulse ox were in a healthy range, everything would be fine.

 

However, Campbell also knew that her uncle suffered from high blood pressure, which might make his bout with the disease particularly nasty.

 

“I figured my uncle wasn’t going to have the best run of it,” Campbell said. “I thought he would be okay, like I didn’t think it was going to kill him.”

 

But eight days into Camp Covid, Peter’s symptoms were only getting worse, particularly in his chest. Campbell, knowing this might be the start of a more severe pneumonia, paid a visit to the ailing camper.

 

She knew it wouldn’t be possible to get him into the hospital yet — his symptoms just weren’t bad enough to warrant taking up a bed. A trip to an urgent care center the next day yielded the expected answer: “come back if you feel worse.”

 

By then, Peter’s pulse ox numbers had begun to trend downwards. One hour, the machine might say 95 — healthy — before falling to 90 a few hours later — not so healthy. When the numbers started dipping into the 80s, Campbell knew there was a problem.

 

Even over FaceTime, she noticed it. Peter couldn’t even finish a sentence.

 

Campbell has been working in the emergency ward since the pandemic began. She’s seen death every day she can remember, helped remove freshly-deceased bodies from beds before putting new patients in them an hour later. In a way, she was numb to it all.

 

Whether that numbness was for better or worse, it taught her one thing: the worse you get, the less likely you are to recover. And so Campbell sprang into action.

 

“Campbell probably saved my dad’s life,” Amelia said.

 

First, she sent a young doctor from her hospital, Dr. Morales, to Camp Covid to make sure her instincts were correct. When he saw Peter’s condition, he not only agreed with her, but was able to secure for him something most people would have to wait weeks for:

 

A hospital bed.

 

“Why don’t we just give him everything we can,” Campbell remembers saying.

 

Over the next five days, Peter was put on a full course of treatments, including three liters of oxygen, specific vitamins and foods and periodic doses of the antiviral medication Remdesivir.

 

Finally, with proper treatment, his lungs began to improve. His symptoms were subsiding.

And on the fifth day, Peter was cleared to return home.

 

A new normal

At that point, Camp Covid was winding down. Amelia had recovered and gone off to college, not wanting to risk either her or her father’s health by seeing him before she left.

 

Maddie and Margaret were also at the end of their infectious periods, and their son Spencer, who didn’t have the pleasure of a prolonged basement stay, would later test positive for COVID-19 antibodies in his blood.

 

Then, slowly but surely, things started to return to normal. Granted, it’s a new kind of normal.

 

Amelia isn’t cleared to exercise yet because of her decreased lung capacity, and Peter still can’t finish a full work day, hitting a wall of exhaustion around 5:30 p.m.

 

By and large, though, they’re just grateful to have made it through.

 

“I couldn’t move more than five steps ,” Peter said. “And if you get into that situation and there’s nobody to help you the way they helped me, it could easily get too bad and you get really sick, and there might be serious consequences to that.”

 

Before he went to the hospital, Amelia noticed something different about her dad. Looking back on it, maybe the reason he’s so grateful now is that, just for a second, he didn’t think he’d make it.

 

Camp Covid came to an end, and boy, was Peter glad to see it.

 

“He would all of a sudden start talking about how appreciative he was of us, and how much he loved us,” Amelia said. “It didn’t go over my head what that meant.”

Edited by: Robert Curtis

By Korie Dean

Artie Barksdale puts his can of royal blue spray paint in the pocket of his khaki work pants and climbs down from his ladder.

He walks five paces away from the building, turning around to give him a broad view of his handiwork.

Six days ago, the side of Muffin’s Ice Cream Shoppe on Fourth Street in Mebane was a plain red brick wall. Now, it’s an almost-finished mural of a serene pasture with amber-colored prairie grass under a bright blue sky that nearly blends into the real sky above it.

Under the blanket of last night’s stars, Barksdale used sidewalk chalk and an overhead projector propped up on the hood of his custom woodgrain-painted Ford F-150 to trace the ice cream store’s logo onto the pastoral mural.

Twelve hours later, with the spotlight of the early October sun beating down on him, he’s filling in the logo as if it’s the biggest paint-by-numbers kit a little kid could dream of.

“I think the ‘M’ needs to be a little rounder, don’t you?” he asks his wife, Nicole, who’s sitting at a weathered picnic table to his right.

He doesn’t just think the letter needs to be a little rounder. He knows it.

And before his wife can even answer, he’s walking five paces back to his ladder, climbing up and getting back to work.

Perfecting those little details is an itch that Barksdale, 44, can’t help but scratch. They nag at him, begging for his attention before he can move on to the next brushstroke.

That’s especially the case with this mural.

He’s waited years to paint in Mebane. In some ways, it’s a homecoming, but in others, it’s an introduction.

Most teenagers swear they’ll never be like their parents when they grow up.

Not Barksdale—he was going to be an artist, like his mom.

Where the Artistic Itch Came From

As soon as he could hold a pencil, he was at his mom’s side, copying every line she drew. He couldn’t imagine life without the blank canvases and paintbrushes that filled their small home in Newark, New Jersey. And, more than anything, he dreamed of being a graffiti artist, like the ones he saw when his mom took him across the Hudson River to New York City.

It’s easy to find inspiration with the bustle of city life providing ceaseless muses.

When his mom grounded him one weekend, he locked himself in his room and sketched his own reality. His blank sketchpad turned into a lively cityscape, inspired by the skyscrapers he saw in the city, and he fell asleep wishing he was old enough to take the train across the Hudson on his own.

His Newark neighborhood soon turned into a warzone because of crack cocaine. And when a job opened up for Barksdale’s stepdad in Mebane, the family packed up their lives and headed south in 1988.

Barksdale was 12 years old and Mebane was little more than a dying furniture town. There were no towering buildings like the ones that Barksdale had drawn on his sketchpad. But, there were trees.

As he sat in the woods behind his house on Shambley Road, Barksdale found his new muse: nature.

Over the years, it became a common thread to his portfolio. All around him, he found possibility—in the sap from a tree, in the slow movement of the clouds above, in the orange clay soil below.

He honed his skills at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, studying theatrical set design until he ran out of money for tuition in 1999.

Then, he just kept painting.

His Jesus Mural in Durham

Old, beat-up trucks turned into a mobile art show of velvety smooth camouflage scenes. Weathered buildings around the state turned into vibrant murals. The trees that towered over Barksdale when he was a kid turned into characters with lively faces.

He saw Mebane’s downtown as a blank canvas and pitched dozens of murals to city leaders.

They declined, so he went to Durham.

One night in 2007, he painted a mural of Jesus under a bridge on Alston Avenue. No one had commissioned the work, and working under the midnight sky until 5 a.m., no one saw him paint it. Barksdale disappeared into the early morning, leaving the mural unsigned.

When Durham awoke that morning, the city exploded with chatter and excitement over the mysterious mural.

For 10 years, it remained untouched.

But, in 2017, Barksdale heard that the bridge was set to be demolished. The area was being gentrified and the mural was the latest casualty.

Heartbroken for the fate of his mural and the city he had come to love so deeply, he revealed on social media that the mural was his creation. The post was shared by more than 1,000 people and Barksdale’s inbox flooded with messages of support and personal anecdotes about how the mural had impacted their lives.

Two days before the demolition date, Barksdale went to the mural to touch it up one last time. Unlike when he first painted it, he went in the light of day and invited the community to watch him work, giving them all a chance to mourn the art that had been a gift to so many.

No one joined him that day.

Maybe they felt powerless. Maybe they didn’t know how to help. Maybe they didn’t really care. As he painted in solitude, Barksdale felt his heart leave Durham.

He still continued his passion for painting and creating.

Coming Full Circle with Vibrant Colors

Barksdale and his wife moved to Prospect Hill, just down the road from Mebane. In 2019, he painted one of his most popular works to date: a mural of rapper Nipsey Hussle on North Church Street in Burlington.

Word of Barksdale’s homegrown talent quickly spread to Mebane—and this September, he got the call he’d dreamed of for so long, asking him to paint a mural downtown.

The town that fed his soul as a young boy was beckoning him home.

And now he’s up on his ladder at Muffin’s, filling the Mebane community with vibrant colors and electric energy.

As he’s finishing up the ‘M’ in the Muffin’s logo, a woman in a red Jeep Wrangler drives down Fourth Street.

“It’s gonna be gorgeous!” she yells as she drives by with the windows down.

Seconds later, a father and son walk down the sidewalk.

“Hey brother, looks great!” the father shouts.

Every few minutes, there’s a new audience giving Barksdale praise as he works.

He was gone for close to 20 years, but now he’s back where his heart always wanted to be.

Mebane is his personal blank canvas. He wants to fill every wall with art that energizes the town. And maybe one day, a kid will stop in awe, mesmerized by his work, and he’ll inspire the next generation of artists—like the New York graffiti artists that once inspired him.

Yes, Artie Barksdale has big dreams. He always has.

But for now, he paints.

Edited by Jackie Sizing 

By Molly Weisner

The diagnosis 

Valerie Tú-Uyên Nguyen is a survivor of childhood cancer.

She was not diagnosed with osteosarcoma, but her 13-year-old sister was. Valerie never went through rounds of chemotherapy, but Cecilia did. Accepting IVs and injecting blood thinners – and marveling at the posy of bruises that bloomed – was never part of Valerie’s routine, but it was for Cecilia.

When her sister got diagnosed in March 2013, Valerie was in high school in Northern Virginia. However, instead of homecoming dances and football games, she had doctor visits and coaxed meals through nausea. It was sifting through treatment plans for what science considered a rare form of cancer, but Valerie and her family knew it too well.

Four years later, at 2 a.m. on a school night, Valerie heard a rapt knock on her bedroom door. It was Valerie’s mother saying curtly, “it’s time.” It was the sleep in her eyes that’d be washed out by tears, and Valerie’s “calloused feet [touching] the cold, midnight floor.”

Departing from Cecilia 

When Cecilia died that morning, Valerie would be on the list of the family who survived her.

What, then, did she survive? Maybe it was seeing her sister – who she said was bright and sassy – fade colorlessly into a girl who had too few sips of Ensure. Maybe it was losing an entire future of memories together or never getting blue Slurpees from 7-Eleven again.

“It was chaotic,” Nguyen said. While applying to colleges and preparing to graduate high school, supporting her sister was something few other teenagers had to juggle.

Nevertheless, as a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, Valerie said she is not concerned with the “what ifs.” The 20-year-old biology student uses her platform in Chapel Hill to advocate for cancer research and the loved ones of those diagnosed with cancer.

—

The lost story 

“Often the story of childhood cancer is one of smiling bald children in sappy television commercials or wrenchingly painful memorials for those who died,” Nguyen said. The story of caretakers and families who fight cancer alongside those diagnosed are often lost. In the medical field, too, the search for the cure is sometimes muddled by ambition. 

“A lot of times in research, people get caught up in really catty things, like who’s first author on the paper, or ‘Is this published in the most prestigious journal?'” Nguyen said. “But it really doesn’t matter. It matters who’s benefitting.”

Nguyen said she remembers sifting through treatment plans for her sister, getting a crash course bedside manner, and hospital etiquette by merely observing. Her intimate experience with healthcare motivates her to be empathetic and keep the patient-centered in every aspect, she said. 

Part of that mindfulness comes from the moments in hospitals that were emotional instead of clinical. In her college admissions essay, Nguyen wrote about being the designated barf-bucket holder. Her sister derided her doctors for letting her parents feed her turmeric pills while more potent stuff was coursing through her veins.

“I think about it a lot,” Nguyen said. “And it’s something I want to make sure no one else feels. It lights a fire within me that won’t be put out.”

According to the American Cancer Society, about 11,050 children in the U.S. under age 15 will be diagnosed with cancer in 2020.

Those are odds Nguyen is willing to fight. Whether it is volunteering at pediatric oncology wards or researching at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Nguyen said she finds strength in working directly with people.

Much of her philosophy on healthcare also comes from lessons Cecilia taught her.

“When my sister was sick, she would always make sure I was included,” Nguyen said. “As a sibling, everyone thinks you’re normal and keep it together for your family. But you’re also a kid; it’s not like you’re supposed to have it together.”

Never forgotten 

Even today, in the quiet moments between reading her favorite Vietnamese poet or getting ready to attend Zoom class, Valerie thinks of Cecilia.

She thinks of her favorite color, blue, and how maybe she would have been a Tar Heel, too.

She thinks of their matching shaved heads after Cecilia cried because she could not style her weakening hair for school dances.

She thinks of the bird feather that drifted into her mother’s car window the day after Cecilia died and how it is preserved forever on her skin as a tattoo with her sister’s fingerprint.

And then it is back to work with equations and solutions, volunteer hours, and cold calls.

“It’s a lot of hard days and good days,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen said knowing the sacrifices made by her family remind her to look toward the future instead of the past. She calls herself the daughter of Vietnamese boat people. Her parents arrived as refugees in the U.S. to escape the war. Instead of one that she loved, her mother settled for a job to provide for her family.

“Literally, being here in the U.S. right where I am now is a complete chance of luck,” Nguyen said.

Being outspoken about her life’s challenges to advocating for others is something Nguyen said she had to learn. Asking for help and leaning on others for support — which she said is not often encouraged in the Vietnamese culture — came down to having friends and family she could talk to. 

Finding support

Jeremiah Holloway met Nguyen during their first-year at UNC-CH. The two bonded simply from talking about the things college students manage on a day-to-day basis. 

“I admire how honest and open Valerie is,” Holloway said. “She lets you know her thoughts on things and how she honestly feels.”

Ruth Samuel, a senior at UNC-CH and friend of Nguyen’s, said being able to talk about the burdens students carry is crucial because they are not always visible. Samuel also lost a sibling to cancer, and though she and Nguyen find healing in their academics and passions, the grieving process never truly ends. 

“It’s not just a one-and-done,” Samuel said. “It’s a journey, and it’s a never-ending one.”

However, when Nguyen suddenly became the only sibling, she doubled down in her passions, plodding a way up and out of the grief that could bring her parents with her.  

That is why, Nguyen said, even in high school, she was working internships at the National Institutes of Health and lobbying politicians on Capitol Hill for increased cancer research funding.

“It’s tragic, but I’ve been given a unique experience [to] compassionately care for people in a way that not many people can because they just haven’t been in those shoes,” Nguyen said. “It’s a motivating force for me.”

The academic rigor and competitiveness at UNC-CH do not always acknowledge the purely social challenges that bring its students to campus. Nguyen says she is pursuing a healthy future as a woman in medicine, but it is not about the resume padding.

“I care deeply,” Nguyen said. “It’s not always clear from the universe that I should be doing what I’m doing, but I want to do it.”

Edited by Aashna Shah

By: Paige Masten

“Do you want to get your citizenship today?”

Today? Deepak Venkatasubramanian blinks, taken aback by the officer’s question. When he arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Charlotte, North Carolina, that morning, it was for the naturalization interview — one of the final hurdles in the naturalization process.

Many applicants experience an additional waiting period between the interview and naturalization ceremony. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, USCIS has largely shifted to same-day naturalization ceremonies in an attempt to minimize the flow of people entering and exiting the facility.

It’s Aug. 18, 2020 — a day Venkatasubramanian, 20, has been waiting for. A day he’ll now remember forever.

Today, he will become a U.S. citizen.

Venkatasubramanian, who studies economics and statistics at UNC-Chapel Hill, is one of the lucky ones. The coronavirus pandemic has created an enormous backlog of naturalization applications, interviews and ceremonies — preventing hundreds of thousands of would-be citizens from registering in time to vote on Election Day.

USCIS, the federal agency in charge of adjudicating citizenship, has said it expects to naturalize 600,000 people in the 2020 fiscal year. But in fiscal year 2019, the agency naturalized 834,000 — about 30 percent more people.

Venkatasubramanian has already passed the English and civics examination, wedged inside a cubicle, separated from the officer by a Plexiglas divider.

From behind the glass, the officer asked him a series of questions, ranging from “What is the capital of your state?” to “What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?”

Now, he stands face-to-face with a tablet, videoconferencing with another officer to review his application — another one of the agency’s COVID-19 precautions.

“Were you ever a communist?” the officer asked.

“No,” Venkatasubramanian replied.

“Have you ever committed a war crime?”

“Um. No.”

But the officer’s most recent question — “Do you want to get your citizenship today?” — is the most unexpected one of all.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I would love to get my citizenship today.”

So, that afternoon, Venkatasubramanian takes the Oath of Allegiance, relinquishing his ties to other countries and giving up his green card forever.

It’s bittersweet. He’d hoped to be surrounded by family and friends on this day — after all, they’re the ones who got him here — but the pandemic doesn’t allow it. Instead, he finds himself alone, accompanied only by 12 strangers who share his same dream: to become a United States citizen.

Afterward, he asks one of his fellow newly sworn-in citizens to take his photo, so that he’d have something to remember it by.

In the photo, Venkatasubramanian is smiling from ear to ear, holding a miniature American flag. Pieces of red, white and blue electrical tape mark a spot on the floor where he’s meant to stand to enforce social distancing guidelines.

As he drives home, he listens to one of his favorite songs: “American Boy” by Estelle featuring Kanye West. But today, the lyrics have a new meaning.

Walking that walk, talk that slick talk

I’m liking this American boy, American boy

 

A Vote With a Backstory 

Venkatasubramanian, his parents and his older sister moved to the U.S. from India in 2013. They settled in Charlotte, where Venkatasubramanian would begin high school, and then, college.

They moved to the U.S. once before, in 2006. They lived in New Jersey for two years, until the recession hit, and his father, who worked in the mortgage industry, was sent back to India by his employer.

The Venkatasubramanians became lawful permanent residents in 2015. This time around, they knew the move would be more permanent. With a 16-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son, it was time to settle down. They wanted their children to attend high school and college in America, sparing them the pressure of the fiercely competitive education system in their native India.

Once becoming a lawful permanent resident, you have to wait five years before you’re eligible to apply for citizenship. So, in January 2020 — as soon as they were eligible —Venkatasubramanians submitted their application for citizenship.

In June, they received notice that their applications were accepted. It was a quick turnaround — most people who apply for citizenship wait much longer.

“My story is one of the easiest stories,” Venkatasubramanian says. “It’s what people think everyone goes through when trying to become a citizen.”

 

A Vote That’s Unprecedented 

Nearly two months later, Venkatasubramanian casts his vote for the very first time. He remembers the exact date: Oct. 10.

It was much different than what he’d always pictured. He chose to vote by mail, filling out his ballot at his girlfriend’s kitchen table rather than in a voting booth. His girlfriend, Marine, serves as his witness.

On the first day of early voting in North Carolina, Venkatasubramanian drives to the closest early voting site to drop off his absentee ballot in person — it’s the closest he’ll get to the experience he’s always dreamed of. He boasts his “I Voted” sticker proudly.

When 2020 began, he wasn’t sure if he’d get the chance to vote. Now, he’s finishing out the year having done so for the first time.

Venkatasubramanian is evidence of a changing electorate. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, a record 1 in 10 eligible voters in the 2020 election will be immigrants.

Venkatasubramanian spent most of college volunteering for and organizing voter registration drives with NCPIRG, an advocacy group at UNC-Chapel Hill that promotes civic engagement. Since he couldn’t vote himself, it was his way of being involved in American democracy.

For a long time, it was his signature line: “You should register to vote, because I can’t!” Now, the line no longer applies.

 

A Vote That Matters 

It’s a surreal time to become a U.S. citizen — amid a pandemic, a racial reckoning and a contentious presidential election, when just 19 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the current state of the nation.

It’s a thought that’s crossed Venkatasubramanian’s mind many times. There was a moment of hesitation when he submitted his application, he admits, but deep down, he knows he did the right thing.

“This is the best thing for my future, but can I really say I’m proud to be an American?” Venkatasubramanian says.

If anything, though, it makes it all the more meaningful. Now, he has a say, a vote, that matters. It’s something he’ll never take for granted.

He keeps his certificate of citizenship tucked proudly inside a plastic page protector. After years of anticipation and waiting, it’s earned a spot among his most prized possessions.

“For a long time,” Venkatasubramanian says, “I was looking through the glass. But now? Now, I’m inside the club.”

Edited By Ryan Heller