Photo Courtesy of Al-Jazeera
A moment of silence on Monday by lawmakers for those lost to COVID-19 led to an emotional moment for Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who teary-eyed a year after her father died of complications from the virus.
According to People Magazine, a bipartisan group of members of Congress gathered on the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol building to grieve the loss of approximately 600,000 people who died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Among those lost is Nur Omar Mohamed, Omar’s father, whose death she announced in June 2020.
In a tweet last year expressing her loss, she wrote, “tremendous sadness and pain … to say goodbye.”
Omar also quoted the Quran: “Surely we belong to God and to Him shall we return.”
“No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew and loved him,” the 38-year-old Democrat said at the time.
Omar fled the Somali civil war as a child, and her family spent the next three years in a camp in Kenya before arriving in the U.S. in 1995.
She recounted her journey and her childhood in her 2020 memoir, “This Is What America Looks Like.”
On Monday night, she was seen wiping tears from her face as she stood with her colleagues for the moment of silence, followed by a rendition of “God Bless America” sung by a member of the Air Force Band.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer touched on the “grim reality” of those who lost their lives just as “Americans were on the verge of getting the vaccine.”
“So, as our fellow Americans are taking their masks off, going back to work, seeing families and friends, and returning as they should to life, let us remember those who cannot,” Schumer said.
“Let us hold them in our hearts a little while longer,” he added.