The covid pandemic of 2020-21 has taken its toll. It has forced us to make decisions and sacrifices that we did not welcome but we did what we had to do.

Two women I admire have been caring for their aging mother in her home a few blocks from the county courthouse. They are doing it when it would have been easier to find her a place in a nursing home.

Giving up your home has to be a great challenge. Home and family come only 2nd to faith for most of us. Our ideas of home are comforting. Home is an essential part of who we are and how we feel.

ALYSIA KEHOE had called to tell me her mother Queenie Torigian wanted to give me one of her paintings.

Could I join her at her mother’s home?

Queenie had turned age 100 a few days before and we had celebrated that milestone in the Chronicle with a photo of her and her family in front of her home.

Queenie was in a wheelchair but she stood to hug and welcome me.

Alysia showed me around her home. Paintings covered every wall, a lifetime’s work on splendid display.

Alysia showed me Queenie’s studio, a brightly lit room with paintings hung closely together on every wall. I could imagine the artist at work there, painting from memory the south of France where she once lived and the Acropolis in Athens.

QUEENIE TOLD me she had painted the ruins of the Acropolis from a photograph she had seen in National Geographic magazine.

The photographer must have shot it in early morning or late afternoon because the light on the columns was brilliant.

Queenie said she had trouble figuring out the angle of the light to get it right. Only a true artist would think that way.

We sat down in Queenie’s living room. Alysia’s sister Claudia had come in and we all had cocoa, Queenie’s favorite.

WE TALKED about her life, growing up in Constantinople before it became Istanbul, her family departng in the night, most of their possessions abandoned, fleeing to France when she was not quite 3 years old.

We talked about her family coming to America, her father building a business in Queens, her teacher who had encouraged her to pursue her artistic talent and her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the oldest art school and museum in the country.

The painting Queenie wanted to give me she painted at the academy 74 years ago.. It pictures an ornamental pot belly stove, the room’s only heat in 1947, and a chair models used for life study classes.

This is a blessing. Every time I look at her painting, I will think of Queenie smiling and sipping her cocoa.

YEARS FROM NOW, we will look back on this pandemic and understand the lessons it taught us. We will begin to appreciate the sacrifices each of us had to make.

Many of us lost loved ones yet most of us survived. With all its fierce strength, covid and its variants did not kill us.

It made us stronger.