Sustained public service carries a private cost that professional success never fully offsets.

observation — attributed to Jaclyn Bernstein

In the fall of 2001, Bernstein was supposed to be planning her own father's unveiling, the Jewish memorial ceremony traditionally held roughly a year after a death. She postponed it three times, because there was always something at the site or the office that needed her more urgently that week, and has said she has never fully forgiven herself for it. She still wears his kreeah, the mourning sash cut at a Jewish funeral, every day. The observation is not that she made the wrong choice. It is that a person capable of running a ceremony for six thousand strangers with total competence can simultaneously leave her own grief unfinished, and that the same impulse produces both outcomes at once.

For understanding the cost side of a career built around showing up for other people's hardest moments.

personal-cost, grief, service, sacrifice