ST. LOUIS -- Cynthia Changyit Levin first noticed her mom’s political views shifting in 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidency.

Levin lived in Chicago at the time, while her mother, Lazette, lived in Oklahoma. The change surprised Levin. She had grown up in Minnesota, where her mom voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, the only state the Democratic presidential candidate carried in his landslide loss.

Then Lazette began sending her daughter emails about Obama that conservative friends had forwarded to her. At first, she asked Levin questions about the claims, which Levin diligently debunked. But gradually, the emails included more horrific lies that the hard right circulated about the country’s first Black president.

“My mom was absorbing the political ideas around her,” Levin said. It confused her because it conflicted with how she had viewed her mom’s values and ran contrary to her mother’s lifetime of work and closest family relationships.

Lazette met Rudolph Chang-Yit when they were both studying at the University of Oklahoma. He earned his doctorate in psychology. They got married and moved when he got a job as a professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead. She was a registered nurse and worked as the head of the county health department, eventually earning her doctorate in educational administration.

Levin’s father died suddenly in 1983. Her mother raised her and her sister as a single parent. In the ’90s, Lazette moved back to Oklahoma to take care of her aging parents. Levin, 54, had moved to the St. Louis area, where her husband had grown up, and where they were raising their own children.

Over the years, her mother’s shifting political views and social circle led her to Donald Trump, whom she voted for three times.

Levin, an author and speaker who works in advocacy for global health, tried to point out the contradictions she saw in her mother’s political beliefs and life.

Her father had been an immigrant, ethnically Chinese.

“You know if dad was still alive, he would be in danger,” she said, referring to ICE and the administration’s immigration policies. Her mom replied that he had been a citizen. “She felt his PhD and passport would have protected him,” Levin said.

But how could her mom support the cuts in public and global health? Levin asked. Her mother had worked with migrant populations and led efforts in public health.

“I would have hoped that it would have resulted in increased compassion,” she said. Instead, she heard her mother repeating talking points about “illegals” by conservative pundits on Fox News. Levin’s two children identify as queer, another group targeted by the current Administration. Levin ended up blocking her mother on Facebook because of the comments she posted.

Sometimes, she would tell her mom that the things she was supporting were detrimental to the things and people she valued.

“It would get tense,” Levin said.

Levin and her children were finding it harder to relate with Lazette. So, in 2015, Levin decided they would all get together to make a quilt. Her mother was an avid quilter and had taught the craft to her daughters. Making an entire quilt in a couple of days is challenging.

They stayed focused on the task, watched movies and retold family stories.

“It became the only way we could relate to each other,” Levin said. The quilting retreats became a biannual tradition.

“That really helped the kids focus on the love part of their relationship,” Levin said.

It was a way to maintain family bonds roiled by political tumult.

Last year, in July, Levin received a call that her mother was in the hospital because she was having trouble swallowing and eating. Levin and her sister went to be with her. Doctors hypothesized that Lazette may have developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a neurological condition that can be a post-infection complication of food poisoning.

A month later, shortly after her 86th birthday, Lazette Bevers Chang-Yit Nichols died.

She had started a quilt at the beginning of 2025 and had been working on it for about six months before she got sick. Over Christmas break, Levin, her sister and children gathered to work on it. It was a “Hero’s Star” pattern Lazette was making for her second husband, an Army veteran.

“We spent hours bent over the project thinking about what it means to us in an almost meditative way,” Levin said.

She could see the stitches her mother had sewn and the spot where she made her last stitch.

The needle was left, still attached, where she stopped.

Levin finished the quilt. She plans to bring it to the memorial in Minnesota in a few weeks, when they bury her mother’s ashes.

Her mother had fallen for so much misinformation and voted for leaders who would dismantle global and federal health programs she might have fought for in a different stage of life. But Lazette had maintained her faith and belief in vaccinations.

She made sure she and her husband received their COVID vaccines.

Levin wrote her mother’s obituary. She chose Shot@Life, an advocacy group dedicated to promoting access to immunizations for childhood diseases like polio and measles, for memorial donations.

They would have agreed on that.

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