DEBORAH LEIBEL

On Thanksgiving morning, November 26, 2020, my mom passed away at the age of 61. My sisters, my dad, and I were by her side in the house we grew up in, and I held her hand through the whole process. I will also note, because it would be important to her, that her hair looked absolutely fantastic. if you knew Deborah, you knew thanksgiving was her favorite day of the entire year and I am thankful that we will continue to honor and remember her and our family's traditions.

Deborah Leibel was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1958 and grew up around BK and Queens in the 60s and 70s. She attended the high school of art and design in Manhattan, and later NYU for both undergrad and graduate school. She finished grad school with an MSW at the age of 21, and moved to Philadelphia to take a job as a social worker for the Philadelphia public defenders association, where she'd eventually meet my dad. They got married in the late '80s and waited a couple years before my dad finally convinced her to have kids, because "they would do all the cooking and cleaning." yeah right.

But my mom saw it as her number one duty to entertain the children: puppets that could only spew profanities, jumping in the Philadelphia art museum fountains on warm summer nights, and stealing gloves from the doctor only to blow them up and make us laugh while we were getting a shot were some of her specialties, among others. car rides were never boring, trips to grandma's house were accompanied by funny (and always just over the line of inappropriate) commentary, and her purse was always filled with snacks - and several times entire wrapped up slices of pizza.

My dad loved my mom more than just about anything on the planet, and I hope to have a relationship like my parents one day. they were together almost 40 years. on occasion, on a Friday or Saturday night when my parents would come home from the bar or from one of their friends' houses, and while my mom was upstairs getting ready for bed, my dad would sit on the couch with me downstairs. "the thing about your mom ..." he would say to me, a little drunk but nonetheless with a twinkle in his eye, "she's really f*****g funny." - something that he's repeated over and over again over the last several days.

As she battled cancer for nearly a decade, my dad was by her side. towards the end, Rachel, Molly, and myself watched from her bedside as they spoke in their own language, as my dad told her he loved her over and over and she smiled because even though she already knew, she loved to hear it.

Towards the end of her career, my mom began teaching at an inside-out program, where current college students were learning alongside incarcerated women inside of a prison in Philadelphia. the class was on mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline in America, and I like to think of this as the pinnacle of my mom's career because she was not only doing what she loved but she was making a real change in a system so broken. I spent the last couple weeks going through things leftover from her office, and after reading countless postcards, notes, and cards, it's beautiful to know how many people she touched. it's also funny to see the things she collected over the years, from posters trashing George W. in the early '00s, to a large button that has the word "cops" crossed out on it, to an NRA membership card that she stole from someone and kept as a trophy.

Deborah was the best parallel parker of anyone I've ever met. Her dream was to own a pickup truck so she could "haul things around" and maybe even help people move. she was also a big-hair icon, and when I was a kid people would stop her on the street just to tell her how much they liked her hair. she also hated authority, and my parents' friends have told us numerous stories of Deborah intentionally blocking police officers (or in one case, an FBI agent) from tracking down a suspect or making an arrest.

My mom, being from New York, never understood why I was out in "the suburbs," as she called Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, but nonetheless she supported it and helped me find a way to fight against the prison industrial complex while still remaining connected to parks and public lands. my heart breaks because we found a way to connect these two things and I was so looking forward to working with my mom on a project centered around re-entry and anti-recidivism work in parks.

Mom, you gave me a lifetime of lessons and I am ready to get to work. My heart is broken, but I am lucky we got to spend your last month together. I feel like I have your sense of what is right and wrong and how to stand up to the world so deeply ingrained in me, and I have always been so proud to be your son.

For myself, I set up recurring monthly donations to Inside-Out, the prison education program that she worked with. Deborah also really loved Mural Arts Philadelphia and donations can be made in memory of Deborah Leibel.