When COVID-19 was first impacting the world last year, I wasn’t sure what to think. I moved to North Dakota in 2008 for many reasons. It sounded like the place to be, and I think it still is. I moved here from a broken family that, in 2020, I was just starting to reconnect in other parts of the country. I got a call on April 16th of 2020, while laid off from work because of pandemic-related shutdowns. The call was to let me know that the father I’d not spoken to for 15 years, except only a handful of times, had caught this new virus. This was the 16th. I called him and talked a few times, much longer than normal because of course we had our differences on many topics. By the 19th, I was informed at noon that he’d passed away at 5 a.m. ET.