Grief always shows up extra hard at life cycle events: birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations.
For Jake Reiner, whose parents renowned director Rob Reiner and photographer and producer Michele Reiner were killed in their home on Dec. 14 of last year, that feels especially true with his 34th birthday just a week away. It is the first one he will celebrate without his parents.
In a moving Substack post, which opens with a picture of him as a baby with his loving parents, the actor, producer and writer reflected on his grief and his relationship with his parents. Reiner revealed that he was actually at a celebration of life for a recently deceased friend when his sister Romy, who found their parents’ bodies in their home, called to deliver the news.
“The 45-minute Lyft ride from downtown to the west side was unendurable. My world, as I knew it, had collapsed. I was in a trance. The only thing I could focus on was that I needed to get to my childhood home. I needed to get to my sister. I needed to figure out what the hell just happened,” he recalled.
Like many people dealing with fresh grief, Reiner shared that he still wakes up every morning thinking that what he experienced was just a nightmare, acclimating himself every day to his unimaginable loss. He called the situation a living nightmare, saying he can’t stop reflecting on how frightened his parents must have been that night, and how they were the last people who deserved to experience such horrors.
He called Rob and Michele the best parents one could ever have, the center of his life and his guiding lights. He wrote about how easy to talk to they both were, and how they made no subject taboo and gave their children all the attention and advice they could.
“The love they have for me, my brother, and my sister is truly unconditional. And the love they have for each other in their marriage is something I always looked up to as the standard of what a successful relationship looks like,” he shared.
Reiner recalled the magical experiences he was privileged to share with his parents: going to see Broadway shows with his mom, going on vacations, going to Dodgers games and events with his dad, who passed on to him the love of baseball he inherited from his father, comedian Carl Reiner. But he said he would happily give all of those experiences up for just one hour with his parents, to be able to say his proper goodbyes.
His recollections about his mother, Michele, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, are familiar to many of us with Jewish moms and balaboostas in our lives. He called her “the engine, the backbone, and the heart of our entire family,” and shared she would be the one who organized all holiday dinners with their extended family — vowing never to host again each year only to inevitably do it all over again the next year — and family holidays. He wrote that she always planned things perfectly.
On Instagram, Reiner credited David Kessler, who has written multiple books about grief, for helping him and his sister deal with their grief, and thanked their aunt, Martine Singer, Michele’s sister, for taking care of them.
When reflecting on what people can say to him to help in the wake of this tragedy, he divulged that in truth, there really is nothing to say to ease his pain. “I just ask for love and compassion,” he wrote. “The same principles my parents lived by.”
Our hearts are with Jake, Romy and their loved ones. May the memories of Rob and Michele Reiner be for a blessing.
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