my conversations with God are as if I'm talking to a best friend because God is my best friend.

And so my conversations with him are very like, what, like, what are you doing?

You know, I don't get it. I don't get you. What are you doing?

This is death, sex, and money.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

I'm in a sale.

As we were hitting this one-year mark of the pandemic, I wanted to talk to Donna Perry because I had been thinking about her all year.

This is Yasmin Khan, producer at Death, Sex, and Money, who a year ago was reporting on COVID in New York City in the WNYC newsroom.

I first spoke with Donna almost exactly a year ago. This was a time when I was reporting from home, calling around to different neighborhood groups, you know, to try to get a sense

of how people were doing on the ground. I got Donna's number through an organization called East Brooklyn

Congregations. It's this coalition of mostly black activist churches. And they told me about

one of their churches, Brown Memorial Baptist Church, that was experiencing a wave of infections.

And they asked if I would like to speak with a woman named Donna Perry, who I had just recovered from COVID.

So you get this name and this phone number of a woman named Donna, and you call her up and you

are saying, like, right as she's in the middle of all this, and you say, I'm a reporter who you don't

know, tell me what's going on in your life? Yeah, pretty much.

And she was very open.

She was like, sure, I'll talk to you.

Actually, first, I got her on the phone when she was out delivering meals with her husband.

You know, she had made it through COVID, and I think it was her first day, really out and about.

And she was accompanying her husband delivering meals to people who needed them. You know, we chatted first about the meal delivery,

and I learned that she and I were the same age, 41. That was last year, 41, we're now 42.

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