Health Glance
On Feb. 29, hundreds of people packed into the Pullman Christian Reformed Church, a squat, beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. An attendee began the ceremonies by blasting a shofar, the trumpet made out of a ram’s horn. Somebody played keyboard. And a long line of people waited to speak into a microphone about their memories of Angeli Demus.
The lifelong Chicagoan, who had died a month earlier at age 59, insisted she didn’t want it called a funeral. “Donate, cremate, celebrate,” had been her credo to her family near the end of a gutting battle with lung cancer, and with her eyes donated and her body cremated, all that was left was this party.
Her husband, Earl Demus, billed it as “Angeli’s Joyous Celebration,” and thought that the crowd it gathered spoke to his wife’s beloved nature. “Standing room only,” recounted Demus, who estimated there were more than 450 people there. "I stopped counting after a while.”
America’s coronavirus surge showed no sign of abating over the Thanksgiving holiday, which saw over 100,000 new cases and hospitalizations continue to break records.
