Herald reader reaches out to help mother who struggled to overcome the coronavirus and feed her children

A Herald story about a woman who found herself on line at a food pantry for the first time in her life after she lost her job and her husband and then contracted the coronavirus moved a reader to send her and her children a gift.

“I remember the times in my life when I had nothing and no one willing to help me,” Richard Marinick, 69, of South Boston, wrote in an email to the Herald. “Part of the reason? I was too embarrassed to ask for help. Your story brought me back to that time.”

Diana Perry had never been to a food pantry before last July, when she found herself embarrassed to be in line at the one The Salvation Army runs in Lynn.

In November 2019, she was laid off from her job as a dispatcher at a Danvers plumbing company. But she and her three children — her 5-year-old son and 7-year-old twin daughters — managed to get by on her husband’s salary as a painter and carpenter until he was diagnosed with renal cancer and died of kidney failure on June 27.

By the beginning of last November, she was diagnosed with the coronavirus. Doctors told her to go home, rest and take lots of fluids.

It was hard to rest, though, when she didn’t know how she was going to pay her $1,300 in rent. So she combed the web for jobs and stumbled across a listing for a part-time receptionist at The Salvation Army.

Toward the end of November, she tested negative for the virus, interviewed for the job and got it.

Now, she’s among the staff and volunteers who distribute food to the hundreds of people who wait in line.

“I am doing OK now, so my wife, Elaine, and I would like to send Diana Perry a gift to help with her and her kids,” Marinick said. “We aren’t rich but do have enough to share because God has been very good to us.”

Perry, 44, said she was “very surprised and very, very, very grateful” for the $200 Marinick sent.

“To me, the amount doesn’t matter,” she said. “The fact is he doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. He’s very kind.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3oz89uv