In March 2024, in a small hospice facility tucked into the rolling farmland outside a quiet town in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York
a ninety-one-year-old woman was dying. She had been a piano teacher for fifty-three years, teaching over four hundred students in the living room of the farmhouse she and her husband built in 1961. Her husband had passed in 2009, and her two sons lived too far away to arrive in time. She was alone in…