I sat next to my friend Norma in the alto section of choir at Madam Russell UMC for 8 years. As choir friends do, we whispered during practice and shared fun times and frustrations. We would gift each other small homemade items. She would say to me, “Your mother is far away and I never had a daughter, only sons.”

She and her husband died in an early wave of COVID at a local nursing home. We never got to say goodbye. Hers was a senseless death fueled by misinformation and politics. I will never get over it.