One Good Thing: Woman’s mission is to honor COVID-19 victims
Associated PressST. LOUIS — It broke Jessica Murray’s heart that so many people in the St. Louis area were dying from the coronavirus and that they were being remembered less for who they were than as statistics of the pandemic, so she decided to do something about it. MaryCatherine Keene, a 94-year-old nursing home resident who died in May, worked as an airplane riveter during World War II and was “proud of being a woman that worked in her time allowing women to wear long pants.” Rheumatologist Edward Rose, 74, who died in September, “loved a noisy home with children running around playing,” Murray wrote. “It motivates me to keep on doing this whenever I feel like I’m just posting into the void.” Joyce “Lady J” Huston runs a Facebook page called Black Corona Lives Matter that commemorates Black victims of the pandemic in the St. Louis area and seeks to raise awareness about the racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths. “I don’t know what I would do with it because there’s nothing that I need now except more time to tell better stories or put more faces behind these numbers,” she said. ___ “One Good Thing” is a series that highlights individuals whose actions provide glimmers of joy in hard times — stories of people who find a way to make a difference, no matter how small.