STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Nina Forbes was a nurse at a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She got sick on Easter Sunday and found it was coronavirus. She died a week later. Jenn Forbes says her mom Nina worked for many years as a nursing assistant and always dreamed of becoming a nurse - a dream she was able to realize five years ago.
JENN FORBES: She just loved helping people. And at 50, she decided, like, she wanted to go back to school and become a nurse so that she could help people in a different way and to improve the quality of her life, you know? Like, she was a single mom of three kids, went through bouts of homelessness. And to become a nurse and to have that kind of happen to her after she worked so hard all of her life - I don't know - it's something that, like, makes me happy that she got to experience that and to enjoy some of that but also very sad because it was for such a short amount of time in the span of her life. Like, I just wish she could have enjoyed more of what she worked so hard to achieve.
And something that I'm going to remember about my mom and kind of embody that in my own life is just having an appreciation for the small stuff. I feel like my mom was one of those people. And like, the smallest thing she would be excited about. I'm just going to remember that.
And there are so many little joys in life, and you don't need all of this stuff. And you don't need a ton of money, and you don't need a lot of material stuff. You just need your family, and you just need, you know, little things. And so that's something I'm going to remember - all the good times that we are just from nothing. You know? We are devastated. We are heartbroken. She's gone too soon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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