PAPILLION, Neb. — After contracting covid on a cruise to New Zealand in March 2020, Ming Wang was hospitalized for 74 days before he died on June 8. He was 71 years old.
Afterward, his adult children draped black mourning cloth over the restaurant’s exterior. His wife, Lu Wang, dressed in black and pinned a white cloth flower to her lapel. In the year after his death, she barely left the house. She didn’t want to go out in public, where everyone seemed to know her husband, whom she’d met in kindergarten in their native Taiwan. At Target, at AutoZone, everyone stopped to give their condolences.
In Ming’s absence, his family learned to believe in signs, in the pennies found on the sidewalk and the cardinals that alighted outside Lu’s living room window. Maybe it was Ming trying to communicate with them.