When Maria Peluso’s father died in April 2014, her family directed all donations to one place: a memorial brick, to be laid in his honor on a pathway near the Duke Hospice Unicorn Bereavement Center in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Peluso, a former staff nurse in the Duke University Health System, formally dedicated the brick to her father that December, surrounded by the warm light of luminaries beside the bereavement center where she herself received counseling and the hospice facility where her father was cared for.
Over the ensuing years, the brick became a place of solace and learning for Peluso’s family. Before she died, Peluso’s mother often visited the site, and Peluso said she brings her children and grandchildren — who never met her father — to the brick to teach them about his legacy…