How Grief And A Drive To Help Guided A N.S. Entrepreneur Through The Pandemic
SHEET HARBOUR — The pandemic was hard on every small business owner. But for Rebecca Atkinson, the stress of keeping her business afloat was only part of a brutal year-and-a-half tainted by the tragic loss of her brother David.
For Atkinson, who owns Sober Island Brewing Company in Sheet Harbour, the pandemic has been a tumultuous mix of grieving for a brother who might have been one of the first people in the province lost to Covid-19 and running herself ragged trying to keep her business going.
Recently, she opened up to Huddle about the confounding grieving process, and how going through it fundamentally changed how she looks at her business.
A Tragic, And Mysterious, Loss
In March 2020, Atkinson’s brother David came home from a vacation to Mexico and started getting sick. About a week after he returned, he showed up in Atkinson’s taproom asking to go to the hospital.
Atkinson says she took him to the hospital on Friday. By Monday, he was having trouble breathing. David had signs of pneumonia and soon his organs began shutting down.
Eventually, he stopped breathing entirely and had to be resuscitated. But it wasn’t enough. A week later he was suffering from cardiomyopathy and his heart eventually stopped.
“It just didn’t work out,” Atkinson says. “They said some virus triggered it and just sent him over the top.”
This all happened days before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in Nova Scotia. At some point, Atkinson says David did get a Covid test, but testing was far less effective then and she’s unsure about the negative result.
In the end, she and her family never got definitive answers about what happened to David, other than he died from complications related to an unknown virus.
Channeling Grief Into Action
Atkinson came back from the hospital and was herself extremely ill. She and the rest of her sick family hunkered together in one house and tried to make sense of what happened.
“I’ve never had to grieve anyone like that before in my life, so I don’t know what’s the normal way I would grieve,” Atkinson says.
Her community is full of people who know and care about her. But with everyone isolated in their homes that community wasn’t necessarily accessible.
“It was just so bizarre, you know? We’re stuck at home pondering why did he die? And what caused all this? And then it’s oh my God there’s a pandemic,” she says.
“There’s just so much to take in all at once. You just don’t really think it’s real. I saw everything and it still doesn’t seem real. We seem to be very good at forgetting pain.”
Like most of her family, Atkinson has a “survival mode” that kicks in in a crisis: she gets super productive and looks for a problem to solve.
So she channeled that energy into helping her community through the pandemic.
“It was, what can we do for the community to bring some happiness?” she recalls.
Through Sober Island, Atkinson and her family started a campaign selling “Stay at home” t-shirts to help raise money for the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation.
Later, once she was allowed to re-open, she would continue trying to help her community through initiatives at Sober Island. But in June 2020, just as the first lockdown was about to end, she was mostly focused on keeping her business, and herself, afloat.
“I remember being most afraid that when things opened up [everything] was going to seem real and almost trying to avoid that feeling of reality, or the shock of, oh my God, he’s actually gone,’” she says.
That feeling persisted for Atkinson through August and into September, when they held a celebration of life for David in their beer garden: Cesar salad, bacon mac and cheese, his favourite band, friends and family—all the things he loved.
Grieving a lost loved one feels impossible. But doing it while also trying to keep a business afloat is another thing entirely.
“Everything was just so much work. All the while I’m sick and trying to run the company and grieve,” Atkinson remembers.
Sober Island partnered with local restaurants to provide beer and food delivery service—a first for the community.
She ramped up Sober Island’s delivery service, trucking product to the far corners of Sherbrooke, Mineville, Peggy’s Cove, and beyond.
Although Sober Island didn’t qualify for all of the federal support programs, Atkinson managed to keep all of her employees on. Atkinson wasn’t drawing a salary and says her goal was just to make enough to keep her employees and bills paid.
“I could definitely have made better financial decisions, but in the end, I value that I can provide jobs to people and that they have meaning and purpose. And so I don’t want to take that away from people,” she says.
Finding Success, And Time To Heal
Looking back now, Atkinson says she’s not sure she could have kept Sober Island going if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
“If my brother had passed and we didn’t go into a pandemic I don’t know that I would have kept doing the business,” she said.
“If David just passed things would have changed in my personal life, but the business would have kept running kind of the same. And I don’t think that I could handle that,” she says.
However, she looks back with a kind of shock at everything she’s accomplished in the last 18 months.
After a plea to customers during the third lockdown boosted business, Sober Island even recently opened a new location.
Eventually, she says she hopes the brewery becomes successful enough that it becomes the centre of the Eastern Shore as a tourist destination.
“I thrive off change and entrepreneurship and the community and stuff like that. [Sober Island] either needs to be viable or I need to put my efforts somewhere else that I can make the impact, but also impact my life in a positive way,” she says.
Atkinson says it’s always been her dream to start a small fund that she can use to seed other businesses that want to start in the area.
Part of that might be inspired by her brother David, who Atkinson says was incredibly kindhearted and would take to heart the bad things that happened in the world.
As she works toward those goals, Atkinson says she’s started sneaking some time for herself to reflect and recover from all she went through during the pandemic.
She recently bought a 1987 Bonaire camper and a piece of land she’s had her eyes on for years.
“I go there for a night or an afternoon and it’s quiet. I see no one. It’s nice,” she says.
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