Amy Von Senden, 56, posted a sorrowful Reddit request recently about her dying mom.

She shared that her mother, Sharon Von Senden, the mosaic artist at the City Museum in St. Louis, was receiving hospice care. No one had known that Sharon, 83, had been diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure. She didn’t want dialysis. The doctors said she might survive a few months.

For three weeks, Amy had camped out on the floor in Sharon’s two-bedroom frame house to care for her. A nurse showed up for 15 minutes a day to give Sharon pain medication, but Amy took on the rest of her mother's constant daily care -- from bathing to feeding.

She felt exhausted and overwhelmed and alone.

“I was wondering if people who appreciated her work could send her cards that I could read to her,” Amy wrote on Reddit. “To know she’s not alone.”

Few people knew Sharon’s name. But her artwork is instantly recognizable to the millions of visitors who have walked into the City Museum, an immersive art space adorned with Sharon’s fantastical tile and mirror mosaic work: sea creatures at the entrance and first floor, and reptiles climbing up the columns on the mezzanine.

A friend shared Amy’s post on Facebook, and it sparked an avalanche of memories and tributes.

“That mosaic work has always been what made the place magical, to me. From the first step it’s like a portal into a land of whimsy,” Chase Sartell wrote.

Sharon’s journey to creating those murals was just as unpredictable as her art. She was born in Oklahoma City. From first to 12th grade, she attended 22 schools in various states.

“There are some things I don’t know about her,” Amy said. But she knew her mom’s upbringing was rough. Sharon converted to Catholicism and tried to join a Benedictine monastery. It didn’t work out. She served in the U.S. Army for a couple of years, where she met her husband, Michael. They married on Thanksgiving in 1967.

Her husband served two tours in Vietnam. He died in 1973 after being struck by a train while on duty in Texas. Sharon moved to St. Louis more than 40 years ago because she wanted to join a church there.

She and Amy scraped by on survivor benefits from the Veterans Administration. When Amy turned 19, she got a job at Venice Cafe. Sharon took on a cleaning job at the cafe to make extra money. Every night as Sharon mopped the floors, she noticed the unfinished stained glass mosaic panels on the side of the staircase.

“I can’t stand to look at this anymore,” she finally said to the owner. “Do you have any glass?”

She decided to figure out how to finish it. She bought a tool to score the back of the glass so she could snap it. (“We don’t call it 'broken,' because that’s seven years of bad luck,” Amy says.) Sharon put some mastic on the back of the pieces and placed them on the wall.

Something broken making something new.

“It’s almost like doing a puzzle,” Amy said. Her mom’s creativity was striking. It caught the eye of Bob and Gail Cassilly, who were preparing to open the City Museum in 1997. They were dining at the cafe and asked Sharon if she would like to decorate five concrete columns in their new space.

She came on board and asked Amy to join her.

Together, they created designs that covered tens of thousands of square feet. Amy tried to get her mom to wear safety goggles and gloves, but she refused.

“I have to be able to touch it,” she said. She needed to feel the glass, the tile, the mirrors, even if a wrong move could slice her hands.

Amy saw how the lye from the grout damaged her mother’s hands. Spending endless hours on the concrete floors meant her body hurt all the time. But she would put her headphones on, listen to Joan Baez sing folk songs, and tune out the thousands of children running around the museum while she worked.

Once, as she was trying to apply mirror work inside the aquarium, she lost her balance and fell in. That’s when the museum created a place for her in Art City, where she could create crafts with the young visitors, one of whom might start their own wayward journey to art.

Sharon retired in 2019 after 22 years.

She never made much money, Amy said, always undercharging for her work. The 1909 house Sharon lived in for more than four decades has siding falling off one side and the bedroom floor is patched Masonite.

It didn’t bother her.

“She was a martyr of mosaics and giving,” Amy said.

In those last weeks, when her mom had moments of clarity, Amy read some of the messages from her fans. Four days after Amy had posted, Sharon said goodbye.

Her daughter, who had crouched next to her mom on the museum floor at the very beginning, was sitting right by her side at the very end.

Joseph Kosednar, a retired engineer, spent five years developing a speed-control pedal for a large jewelry-making machine.

Kosednar, 73, had previously sold jewelry -- handmade wire-wrapped pendants and crystals -- on Etsy and at local flea markets. When the fees on Etsy became too high, he focused on building a customer base and audience on Instagram and Facebook. By the end of April, he was ready to start advertising his new pedal, named The Armadillo, in earnest.

He purchased ads on his Facebook page, Joe’s Jems Creations. Within days, he received a notification that unusual activity was detected on his account, making it unusable for him.

Kosednar, who lives in University City, Missouri, had no idea what had happened.

“I kept trying to reinstate my account,” he said. “I sent letters and emails to everyone at Facebook. Anything I sent to them was like sending them to a black hole.”

No one from Meta ever responded.

Kosednar is part of a much bigger trend of people whose accounts have been locked or shut down by Meta, without any apparent violation and no recourse to reclaim their social media identities, personal histories or business platforms.

Jill Lee, director of operations for 100th Monkey, a digital marketing firm in St. Louis, says that over the past year and a half, they have taken on at least a dozen cases from clients in similar situations trying to get relief from Meta.

Most of the company's clients do business on Facebook, and losing that platform can be disastrous for their livelihoods. The company has spent months working with their ad representatives, trying to get some accounts restored.

“(Meta) can’t give a solid reason for things like this happening,” Lee said. From her perspective, it looks like they are using AI to shut down a proliferation of hackers, and many innocent people are getting caught in the dragnet. Other accounts were shut down because they were hacked.

Meta did not respond to inquiries for this column.

In August, Kosednar thought his troubles were finally over. He received a notification on his Instagram and Facebook accounts that they had been suspended erroneously, and that he would be able to use them again.

His relief was short-lived.

He placed a new ad for his pedal. Again, it led to his account being shut down. Desperate for answers and unable to sell the products he had already ordered, he filed a suit against Meta in small-claims court in St. Louis County. He is seeking $5,000 in damages.

A 2024 report on the tech site Engadget explained that many similarly affected Meta users have been forced to turn to small-claims courts as a de facto customer service hotline. Since you can’t call or email any customer service department at Meta, ordinary users have taken the $1.7 trillion tech behemoth to court to try to get their accounts restored and recoup some damages.

Out of the five individuals highlighted in the Engadget report, three recovered their accounts, one received financial damages and another won a cash settlement from Meta. Other legal service startups have reportedly seen significant increases in cases like this against Meta.

Some people who have lost their platforms have appealed to their state attorneys general for help. The sheer volume of these requests prompted a coalition of 41 state AGs to write a letter to the company stating: “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company.”

It’s outrageous that small business owners and ordinary folks have to square up against a trillion-dollar company that refuses to invest in customer service. When a consumer product wrongly targets its users and causes material harm, it needs to be held accountable. Meta encourages small businesses and creators to conduct business using its sites, but the fine print of the terms of service states that Meta can arbitrarily shut accounts down and leave creators without recourse.

As for Kosednar, he is giving up on his dream of selling his invention to jewelry makers.

“I’m closing up shop,” he said. “I have nothing.”

We all know how wrong polls and pundits can be. They underestimated the popularity of the current president’s first successful run for office in 2016. Pundits were dead wrong about a “Red Wave” of GOP voters that never materialized in the 2022 midterms. In the last presidential election, several polls of swing states were off base.

That recent history is partly why I remained so cautiously hesitant about the possibility of Zohran Mamdani -- a Muslim of South Asian heritage; a 34-year-old immigrant from Uganda; a former state assemblyman -- winning the New York City mayoral election. He was an unlikely candidate running against a political dynasty, with billionaires wildly throwing millions against him and with barely any support from the Democratic establishment and leadership.

But my doubts were rooted in something bigger than the power brokers lined up against him. Unlike Mamdani, a millennial who was 10 years old in 2001, I was in my late 20s when the horror of 9/11 changed us all and the world around us.

I can viscerally remember the trauma of that day as both an American, fearing for my relatives and fellow Americans who worked in the Twin Towers, and as a Muslim, fearing the backlash against our entire community. A brief moment of unity in the immediate aftermath was followed by years of hateful attacks and targeted policies and harassment. It opened the floodgates for the GOP to use Muslims as their scary bogeyman, especially during an election year, which is when the fears of impending “Shariah law” cynically reappear.

When the anti-Muslim attacks against Mamdani ramped up -- disgusting and dishonest smears that he would cheer another 9/11, that he was a terrorist who should be deported, that he was a threat simply because of his faith -- it tapped into a familiar anxiety among American Muslims in my generation. The bigotry was so open and oddly nonsensical. They called him a radical Islamo-Marxist Communist who would implement Shariah law, even though communism rejects religion and Mamdani has always been openly progressive and liberal.

But I had seen this show before, and I internalized the message: Racist political attacks don’t have to make sense or be connected to reality. They just have to provoke primal emotions of fear and anger to work. Trumpism ascended on the politics of grievance, fear, division and exclusion.

Could this relentlessly positive, charismatic young man talking about compassion and unity and affordability overcome that?

Clearly, he did, and with a mandate that was a stunning rebuke to the fearmongers.

The first Muslim mayor of NYC was elected by a diverse coalition of native-born Americans and immigrants, across religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds. In fact, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, a self-described “liberal Zionist” Jew, who grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, was critical to Mamdani’s success in the primary.

Mamdani’s victory required hundreds of thousands of Jewish voters rejecting the idea that criticism of Israel’s war crimes is antisemitic. It took NYC’s affluent voters recognizing that the city can’t thrive unless its workers can afford to live there. It took New Yorkers who have lived in the city for generations embracing the belief that immigrants make us stronger, and that together we can stand up against an aspiring authoritarian. More than 2 million New Yorkers cast ballots and picked a different vision for the city than it’s ever had.

I don’t know if Mamdani will be able to deliver on all his policy proposals, but I know that running free buses in Kansas City since 2020 hasn’t turned it into a communist hellscape. I know that 50 years of trickle-down economics giving tax cuts and corporate welfare to the wealthiest hasn’t helped the middle class in America. And I can see that sending troops and masked federal agents into American cities against its own citizenry looks like tyranny, not democracy.

I don’t pray as much as I should, but I woke up before dawn on Election Day to say a special prayer. I prayed for better leaders who wanted to serve all their constituents; who believed in the worth and dignity of all people; who wanted to better the lives of the most vulnerable and stand up for justice. I prayed that a majority of New Yorkers would see through the tsunami of lies and bigotry.

When Mamdani was declared the winner with more than 50% of the vote, I felt a kind of hope and optimism that has felt out of reach for years. In his acceptance speech, he said: "I am young ... I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this."

In that moment, I saw a different future of possibilities in this country.

New Yorkers took a chance on a young, untested Muslim man to lead them during these divisive, difficult times, and it healed something deep inside of me.

It felt like a prayer answered, a hope ignited.