About the Author
Amber Carter is a religious education coordinator at Fort Sill Oklahoma's Catholic Military Chapel and likes to substitute teach at her children's school in her free time. She also loves to spend time with her other children and grandson (another one is on the way!) She is the wife of a retired US Marine and they spent over 20 years in the military moving all over. From North Carolina to Oklahoma to Okinawa, Japan. She never imagined herself as an author but she also never imagined the loss of her child. So Amber used this as an outlet to cope with that loss and hopefully help children who have lost someone close deal with the loss of their loved ones too.
Finding Purpose
Amber was lost, confused, and depressed after the loss of her sweet Anna and needed some meaningful purpose in it all. So with the generous outpour of financial support after Anna died she was able to start a 501c3 foundation to give educational scholarships to youth with Scleroderma. It is hard to travel to multiple medical specialists, afford numerous medication, and pursue educational dreams at the same time. This scholarship allows three young people the opportunity to carry a little less burden in that area.
Her board also approved the giving of three local scholarships to passions of Anna. One to her dance studio to award a lucky youth $500 towards their dance classes for the year, and two $500 to two senior music and band students at her high school.
Amber also created a Covid loss group on facebook for other parents who lost children to Covid. It seemed so rare to lose young children to Covid and she needed to know she wasn't alone. The group is small but very close and she has became good friends with many strangers because of the tragedy they all endured.
How she met her Illustrator
Amber quickly became part of a much larger grief community of Covid loss family members. She joined the Covid Loss and Support Group on Facebook and met Hannah and her mother Karen there. Hannah was already creating these amazing faceless portraits of the Covid victims and unbeknownst to her had already created Anna's. Hannah lost her grandfather Cal Schoenfeld to Covid very early in the pandemic as well. She found comfort in creating these digital images to show people that these were human lives lost not just numbers. Amber grew a bond with her family over the last few years and is so thankful she did. Amber was over the moon when Hannah agreed even though she was about to enter College to illustrate her new series of books.