Paula Morhardt started writing when she was a child. She’s had poems published in various small magazines but in 2017, her life changed. On the morning of
February 26, 2021
When Wallace Willis created his mournful song, “Steal Away to Jesus,” he voiced his suffering in slavery with a lament that has evoked a powerful response through the ages and across the world. “Steal Away” has touched poets, presidents, queens, composers, and blind street musicians.
The song speaks to brokenness and sorrow across ages. It has spoken to a blind street singer in Macon, Georgia in the 1950s trying to make a living singing “slave songs” with a collection cup tacked to his guitar, and to an English composer who heard in it the suffering of the Nazi pogroms against Jews in World War II.
Stacy Brick, The New York Times
Published: 13 Dec 2020 05:51 PM BdST
Updated: 13 Dec 2020 05:51 PM BdST Todd and Lisanne Trcka, with their three children in suburban San Antonio, Texas, watching TV, June 29, 2006. The New York Times
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has plunged the world into a crisis of grief. It has caused the deaths of more than 290,000 people in the United States, many of them grandparents and parents. In New York state alone, 4,200 children lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 between March and July, according to a study from the United Hospital Fund. (These were the most recent figures available on parental death from COVID.)