It was a year and a day ago. New Years' eve, bringing in 2020. America was booming, people seemed generally content and social, while on the other side of the globe an unknown virus was stealthily beginning to make its way out of a farmers' market in some city in China most of us had never heard of. Times Square was a sea of faces, as per tradition. All in all, life in America was pretty good. Not for me; it was anything but. Fresh off a breakup of a relationship I thought  was going to last forever, I arrived that evening home from my emergency department shift around 11:30pm alone and full of rage and self-pity. I anguished over the now perennial grief of  my children not in my life, a feeling so built into my daily existence that it had almost become background noise....that is, except, for that evening, where it torpedoed any semblance of serenity. On previous NYEs  Cassie had been with me, at my side, with her soothing presence. I remember being in her home exa...