Jennifer Forbes
Jennifer Forbes is her mother’s daughter. She’s a planner—just like her mom, Nina, always was. They loved getting together and eating wings with family on Sunday nights. Both worked long hours to secure their futures.
But Nina’s future ended suddenly on April 25, after a bout with Covid-19 took a brief and shocking turn. She was 56.
“She said she wasn’t feeling well,” recalls Jennifer, 29. “A week later, she went to the hospital. She wasn’t there two hours before they put her on a ventilator. Six days later, she died.”
Nina’s passing left the family stunned. It also left Jennifer’s sister, Jessica, 33, and Jessica’s 5-year-old daughter without a place to live. They had been sharing a place with Nina. Without Mom, Jessica couldn’t afford the rent.
So—what else?—“We moved in together,” Jennifer says.
Before the pandemic, Jennifer had been juggling the nonstop, work-centric life of a single, driven woman, holding down three jobs. In addition to working as a shelter case manager for the Arlington nonprofit A-SPAN (which strives to end homelessness), she waited tables at Gordon Biersch in Tysons and coached the JV girls’ volleyball team at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria.
She had lived alone ever since college, but always within walking distance of her family—an emotional safety net—in the Lincolnia section of Alexandria. “We were all so close,” Jennifer says. “It didn’t feel like I was living alone.”
After their mom died, the sisters pooled their resources and moved to a three-bedroom, two-floor apartment in Alexandria’s Foxchase complex.
“We moved in together on May 26,” Jennifer says, recalling the bittersweet date the way people remember where they were on Sept. 11. “It’s been a major change.”
Now down to one job (at A-SPAN), Jennifer works from home, supervising her niece’s online kindergarten education three days a week while her sister goes to work at a nursing home. They’re careful to isolate from friends, knowing just how deadly Covid can be. “You can’t go anywhere. You see the same people over and over,” Jennifer says. “I guess I’m a little stir-crazy. But it’s a necessary precaution.”
Their financial situation might be worse if not for their mom’s meticulous planning. No matter what job she had—or didn’t have—Nina always kept up with life insurance payments, which have helped her daughters survive Covid’s economic turmoil. She left notes on where she parked her money, making it easy for Jennifer to manage her estate. She filed for worker’s comp as soon as she fell ill; she’d been working as an LPN at a nursing home (the same one where Jessica works) when she contracted the disease.
Nina’s dutiful planning also had a downside—it gave her less time and money to live in the moment. She and Jennifer always talked about cruising somewhere together, but it never happened. Nina wanted to return to Martha’s Vineyard, which she’d visited as a girl, and travel to Seattle, because she loved the movie Sleepless in Seattle.
Jennifer says she will scatter Nina’s ashes in some of the places her mom only dreamed of going.
“We all think we have more time than we do,” Jennifer says. “If this has taught me anything, it’s to do what you want to do today, to live with intention.”