It was about an hour into a late-October Zoom call with six strangers that I looked from face to face—all of us smiling, some with tears in our eyes—and asked myself, is this truly the point of it all?
As part of training for a West Philadelphia group called Changing the Conversation for Progress, we’d been asked to share stories of people we loved. One woman described being in such a state that her child, age 4, reached up to her to offer a tissue. “That’s when I knew I needed to get over the death of my mother and be there for her.” Prompted by her recollection, I reminisced about the tenderness of listening from the doorway as my father read "Goodnight, Moon" to my sons, and how I missed the reassurance of his presence, this Navy officer who passed away five years ago.
