Fundraising Touches Two Worlds

I was standing in the dining room one evening when my cousin called.

Bad news. His mother, my aunt, had just died. Unexpectedly.

After that moment when nothing you say can possibly make sense, he gave me the details. She'd been healthy, active, busy. Then she had a bad reaction to some medication. The kind of thing that when it's someone you don't know, you say, "It was just one of those things." I listened almost hungrily, as we do at times like that — not wanting the details, yet somehow anxious to know everything.