Help Us Keep Our Home After Mom's Passing

Dear friends, family, and supporters,

We are starting this fund to help the Segal family (Talia & Gidon) after the sudden passing of their mother, Barbara, who solely supported her disabled eldest child with her social security check.

The money raised will go towards paying the mortgage and bills for the house in Metro Atlanta that Talia and Barbara lived in together.

The following is a letter to supporters from Talia Segal:

"My mom, Barbara, was the best. She was adventurous, loved dogs, and treated everyone with respect. It was a joy to make her laugh, and my brother Gidon and I were good at it. On January 23, she was torn from our lives - we didn't even get a chance to say our goodbyes. Now, my one priority is to make sure I do not lose our house.

My mother came to live with me after I became disabled and my spouse had to move away because of their disability. She didn't just do chores, she became my adventuring buddy. When I couldn't work anymore, she offered to pay for me to get my bachelor's degree. I've now been working on it for 2+ years. Just after New Year's, we got sick. Really, really sick. Fevers of 103°, coughing fits that didn't stop, barely able to eat. And I got better. And she didn't. She struggled to breathe for days, went to Piedmont Hospital in an ambulance, and got sent home with cough syrup.

On January 16, Mom called an ambulance to take her to Emory. In the emergency department, her heart stopped. They performed CPR, but during the cardiac arrest, her kidneys had stopped working. At this point, she was on a ventilator and was sedated. By the time they started her on a dialysis machine, I had already spoken to her for the last time and didn't know it. A day later, she coded twice in 90 minutes. I had just gotten home, and I turned around and went back to the hospital, not leaving again until I had been awake for 30 hours. She looked awful, like a doll that had been thrown, legs flung out and eyes unblinking. In a panic, I called my brother Gidon from out of the country and my spouse from across the country and begged them both to come. They arrived in the next two days. Gidon and I sat with her and talked to her and loved her. My aunts arrived to support us. I wasn't alone in my terror anymore. They found a bleed in her stomach. They did surgery to close it. One of her lungs collapsed. They inserted a tube to reinflate it. But all the while, her potassium levels were rising dangerously. One of the doctors told me that organs release potassium as they die. Her organs were shutting down. Gidon and I talked about what to do and decided that if one more CPR would already be life-threatening, we would agree to a DNR. We decided that we would begin comfort care the following day, Friday. She died that night. In her last act on Earth, she made sure her children didn't need to face the decision to pull the plug. We are now, as my aunt called us, motherless children.

My mom supported me with some retirement savings and her social security check. I didn't realize how dire our financial situation was, even though I knew she was looking for a job. She got one, too. Basically her dream job, and she never got to start because she had just gotten this horrible flu. I helped her put together a classy office wardrobe. She never got to use it. I can't describe what living through this nightmare has been like. For someone with massive anxiety around money, to be in charge of every bill and to see that there's zero safety net, it's terror on top of agony.

My only consolation has been the outpouring of love from friends and family. Food, company, flowers, and even money, slipped into our hands on the worst days of our lives. Our mom believed in our dreams with a fierce pride. She didn't push, she listened and encouraged. My brother and I, and the entire world, are poorer for having lost her. Thank you for reading this. I wish you had known her."