Every Friday at 6 p.m. my daughter called me without fail, and the one week my phone stayed silent I drove to her house and heard a sound from upstairs that turned our quiet Tennessee life into something I still can’t fully talk about

and said she wanted to help people in a different way. I couldn’t argue with that. Allison had a gift for caring, for making folks feel safe when they were at their most vulnerable. That’s what good nurses do. That’s what she did.

Our Friday calls usually lasted an hour, sometimes longer. She’d tell me about her shifts at Regional Hospital: the long continue reading …