The Text I Can’t Stop Thinking About.

In 2008, a 32-year-old mom of three received a call from Jersey City Medical Center. Her husband, she found out upon arrival at the hospital, had been stabbed to death on his way to work. She was, in an instant, a widow raising their three kids alone.

When I met her on my road trip, she told me all about the community that raised her back up after her husband’s tragic death. She told me how people came to clean her home, cook her dinners, and help her with her children. They created a 5K to raise money for her and the kids, naming it after her husband’s nickname, Fuce. The “Fuce 5K” helped her the first year, and then she turned around and became part of it, helping others in the community who went through tragedies.

I met Nancy in August of 2019 to collect her story for my book.

Seven months later, COVID hit.

I was, luckily, off the road and finished with my 50-state trip by March of 2020. Nancy sent me a text out of the blue one day, and I have thought about it every single day since. It is a text I bring up whenever people mention how lucky I was to have finished the trip before COVID, because “no one would have probably taken me in.”

Turns out, it wasn’t true. Nancy would have.

Here is to all of the Nancys out there this Thanksgiving. The ones going through tragedies we may not fathom, but still opening their doors and hearts to the rest of us.

May you be one. May you find one. May you be thankful they exist at all.