Completely unexpectedly and tragically, Mona passed away less than two years after the above Facebook post. It was January of 2017 when the flu was wreaking havoc around the country. Mona, the strongest woman I knew at the time, was also diabetic; her health was too vulnerable to survive the flu. To say I was grief-stricken is an understatement. Mona made everyone, including me, feel as if he/she was the most important person in the world.

No one … absolutely no one … had a photo of just Mona that could be enlarged without becoming pixelated/blurry. Numerous photos of Mona at her art shows and out in nature were viewable on social media. But in the immediacy of Mona's impending memorial service, no one had the necessary passwords to access the original images. And social media images had lost a lot of their quality from being uploaded/downloaded.

Her family decided to use the above photo downloaded from Facebook. It showed Mona in nature, which everyone knew she loved.

Using Photoshop to make this image look less pixelated, I was able to enlarge and brighten it (see below and think "heavens shining from above") and have it printed and mounted for Mona's service. (How ironic that Mona had done exactly the same thing for my family when my dad passed away only a few years prior.) Even so, since we were using a download that had been compressed by Facebook, in a 16"-24" print for her memorial service, from head-to-toe Mona was only about 7” tall. That's about the length from your wrist bone to finger tips.