I sold my 92-year-old mother’s home on Long Island this week, the home that she’d lived in since 1955 — but I should not have had to.

My mother wanted to stay in her home but no longer could since her son, who always lived with her and was her caretaker, died of Covid in April 2020. Loss of a child may be the worst trauma a parent can experience. No parent should ever outlive their child. My mother has a big open wound that never heals and it is a pain she has to try and live with.

Johnny was in short term rehab in a nursing home following surgery and was due to come home and should have. Instead, he caught Covid because of New York Governor Cuomo’s decision to require nursing homes to accept Covid-19-positive patients when New York’s hospitals were overflowing in the beginning of the Pandemic. Then the data was hidden about the deaths of nursing home residents.

My mother and I have to live with deep grief and outrage that such very poor judgment resulted in so many needless losses. My brother was only 65 and hopefully had many years left. My mother is still sharp and constantly asks me — where is the accountability and justice in all this? I tell her we are still working on it, which is true.