In the days following the shooting, Renee Nicole Good’s life has been flattened into fragments: a shaky video clip, a police statement, a headline traded back and forth like a weapon. But before her name was spoken by officials or chanted by protesters, Renee was a 37-year-old woman who lived an ordinary, complicated, quietly generous life—one that ended in a burst of gunfire just blocks from her home.
To those who loved her, Renee was never a symbol. She was a daughter who called her mother late at night just to talk. She was a woman who filled notebooks with poems she never thought were good enough to show anyone. She played guitar badly, she joked, but played anyway, because music made the apartment feel alive. She was the kind of person who chose care work not because it paid well—it didn’t—but because she believed that tending to people mattered more than climbing ladders. Continue reading…
