It took the funeral home eight hours to retrieve the body.

For those eight agonizing hours Elizabeth Adamis sat in her living room with a police officer at the door and a blanket sprawled over the man who just an hour prior laughed on a Zoom call with his brother in Athens.

“How do I tell my daughter that her father just died and she’s never going to see him again?” Adamis said.

All this was during the COVID-19 pandemic, in January 2021.

It was supposed to be a normal day inside their Manhattan Beach apartment where Adamis’ daughter, Niamh, upstairs in her virtual cello class; her husband, Yorgos, in the living room teaching music; and Adamis downstairs teaching dance in the garage.

At the time, Yorgos was teaching his fourth-graders how to play the recorder. He was a composer, the kind that could play any instrument he picked up. Toward the end of the class he called for Adamis.

He wasn’t feeling well. He felt nauseated and sweaty, he told her. By the end of his sentence his eyes rolled back and he fell to the ground.

Adamis called 9-1-1.

Paramedics tried for about half an hour to resuscitate him. In the commotion, her neighbor took the 10-year-old Niamh next door to protect her from the situation.

“I knew even when [the paramedics] got there that he was already dead,” Adamis said.

Best foot forward

Despite her loss, Adamis kept going. The now single mother, and sole breadwinner, is a full-time dance instructor at El Camino College teaching courses including ballet and modern dance.

Adamis said she didn’t feel that the school did enough to support her during the months following her husband’s passing.

Months after the incident took place she discovered that she could have used what is called catastrophic leave. Despite a decade of teaching at ECC, the school gave her three days off of work which she used to get away on a trip with her daughter, according to her Instagram page.

“Human resources … became not about protecting faculty, but protecting the school. … When your husband dies and you are in a state of shock, you ask people that you think are in the know,” Adamis said.

She said it was a dark four months. At some points she was barely functioning and suicidal, but her daughter kept her going.

Eventually Adamis got help.

She utilized the school’s Ease program which offers confidential consulting for employees, dealing with personal or professional issues.

And, she and Niamh sought out a grief support group in West Los Angeles on Sepulveda Boulevard called the Our House Grief Support Center.

The center builds communities through small eight to 12 people groups that come together to speak about their experiences. The organization offers grief camps, youth groups, family support programs, adult groups in Spanish and English and more, at the rate that people can afford at the time.

“We believe in the universality of grief…We don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to grieve, ” Executive Director of Our House Julia Miele said.

Sometimes you’ll hear laughter in the sessions and sometimes you’ll hear crying, Miele said.

Niamh initially rejected therapy.

For the first year, Adamis made sure Niamh was coping properly and often put her own needs second, or sometimes last. .

Niamh is a gracious, kind, well-behaved girl. Though it was out of character for her to act out, there was one instance Adamis could recall where she lashed out.

She cried and screamed, shouting “I don’t want to. I don’t want to,” repetitively.

She refused to join a therapy Zoom call.

Adamis’ response: She pressed the “join meeting” button on Zoom, and closed the door behind her.

Little one

Niamh is a cellist like her dad. She is like her dad in a lot of other ways too, in the way they both love soccer and swimming and Harry Potter.

“She was very joyful as a child, and when Yorgos died, it took a while to get back to that joy,’ Adamis said. Even today she said that joy isn’t fully there.

The situation made her mature too quickly.

After he passed, they were situated close enough to the school to where her daughter started walking to her school on her own. Since Adamis didn’t have anyone to look after Niamh, the mother and daughter became tethered to the hip.

They had no choice but to be close.

Adamis went back and forth from Torrance to Manhattan Beach almost daily, dropping Niamh off at school at 7 a.m. then coming back at 3 p.m. to pick her up. From there they went to the Marsee Auditorium where Adamis choreographed the musical or did dance rehearsals.

“It is really hard balancing what your child needs versus what you have to do for your job,” Adamis said, “you end up feeling like you’re doing everything poorly.”

Sacrifice worth making

Adamis’ good friend reached out to see if she’d be interested in touring California with their dance group, after one of the dancers got injured.

She agreed.

Yet, Adamis soon realized that she needed to give up her performing.

Niamh joined her on the tour.

She saw as her daughter sat curled beneath the costumes rack reading her book while half-naked dancers would run past her. The image made Adamis realize this was not the environment to be bringing a young girl.

“It did feel like a sacrifice, because I was a performer. I was a great performer, and I loved performing, but I was like, I can’t perform anymore,” Adamis said.

The trash, the laundry, the cleaning doesn’t take care of itself. For the last five years, Adamis has done the cooking, cleaning, washing and shopping all by herself, which used to be the job of two.

“Usually people don’t lose their spouses in their 40s,” Adamis said.

It got to the point where she injured her back.

She borrowed her friend’s stick shift—she had to because her own car broke down—and she drove back home with six bags of groceries sitting patiently in the back seat.

As she got out of the parked car to bring the bags up, she threw her back out reaching for them. She couldn’t lift the bags.

Adamis waited for a stranger to walk past her, to ask them for help bringing them up.

“It’s moments like that that you’re like, ‘Okay, there’s really nobody but me’,” she said.

Any time she had previously to lounge or to call a friend no longer exists. She has lost friends, she said, because she doesn’t have time or the energy to stay in touch.

Adamis is from Jamaica Queens, New York. Her husband was from Greece. She has no family in California to help her. Instead, Adamis’ support system are her colleagues in the dance department, Daniel Berney and Johnathan Bryant.

Calling the lifeline

Bryant was a newer faculty when he joined ECC, so he said he was excited to get to know Yorgos.

The three full-time faculty, Adamis, Berney and Bryant are close. They go to each other’s houses for dinner. Bryant’s children, who are 9 and 6 year old now, used to play with Yorgos’ instruments when they came over.

Even today they show up for each other and cover for each other, especially when Adamis is trying to make it to her daughter’s cello performance or one of her soccer games.

Students and faculty in dance all agree that the community is tight knit. You have to be because it’s what the art form calls for. It’s communal, Adamis said.

Bryant and Berney were among the few to attend her husband’s funeral. Due to COVID-19, many could not attend, and those who did stood distanced from each other.

“She’s a very unique, strong individual in many ways, but also fragile from an experience like that, who wouldn’t be,” Berney said, “She knows that at any moment she can rely on me and John.”

Healing

Over two years after Yorgos’ death, Adamis prepared a 30-minute solo performance for the Marsee Auditorium titled Nobody Died. It was a reflection of all the emotions she processed until then.

The piece began with voices projected from the auditorium speakers which, through context, the audience discovers are voicemails left to her from friends and relatives who checked in on them following the incident, and even a voicemail from her late husband.

Bryant said that there was not a dry eye in the audience.

The piece brought a lot of closure to those in attendance. It was a full house, full of family, friends, current and former colleagues.

“I was really hoping that it brought the catharsis that she needed,” Bryant said. “ I think [it] kind of helped for us to also have a way to contribute,” he said.

Bryant said that they all found ways to help make it a good show. He filmed.

Adamis finished off the performance with her daughter Niamh who came out to sing.

Adamis prepared the sentimental solo to process the trauma her and her daughter experienced isolated in the quarantine and grieving a loved one.

“He’s still with me because she [Niamh] is him.”