So many knew her, visited her, befriended her—during both her better and more difficult times.

I met her when I had the pleasure of meeting her mother—my dear eshet chayil, Evelyn—shortly before she was niftar, 14 years ago.

On the last day of shiva, following Shabbat Parah, I spoke of what I thought was a message in

those verses that pertained to Sharona: Someone becomes tamei through contact with a meit, a dead body, and needs to become tahor again. Over and over the Chumash uses the simple term ish, a man, who, helping with the ashes, becomes tamei until evening simply by being involved in someone else’s plight … a total stranger perhaps.

A powerful lesson, I believe, about how we all sometimes need to think about the plight of someone else.

Sharona, Chaya Sharona bat Shraga Feivel, was someone who went beyond her comfort zone to help care for her fellow human beings. She truly cared for others, and I saw that firsthand the week before she was niftar, after Purim, while in a rehab facility. She was gifted with numerous mishloach manot, and her only concern was getting some of that to the other residents, even if it made her situation more difficult and painful.

It sometimes is uncomfortable, disruptive, inconvenient to break away from our routines. Hashem has given us a chance to merit a true rewarding mitzvah in this situation, and maybe the memory of Sharona will be a blessing to her mother, my dear wife Evelyn, her siblings and nieces and nephews, her father, and to all who knew her and were touched by her.