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Laura Weiss, RN, stays positive. A retired nurse who teamed up with the Boulder County Public Health department in February for their vaccine effort, Weiss remembers moments like vaccinating the parents of a man who had flown them from Venezuela to Colorado, determined to get them the shots.

Weiss recounts how one woman, tearing up as she got the vaccine that would allow her to celebrate her upcoming marriage, said to her: "You're now part of my wedding, because you're letting this happen."

"It's moments like that, that just were beautiful," Weiss said. She's channeled a little bit of that beauty into an impromptu art piece that went viral when Boulder County Public Health posted it to their . It's a chandelier made of 271 vials that held vaccine doses, mostly Moderna's.

Weiss dubbed it the Light of Appreciation, "to represent the hard work of all these nurses and volunteers and healthcare workers and the people that got vaccinated."

"I just noticed all these empty vials and thought they were pretty. They were beautiful, and I wanted to do something creative with them if I could," she said.

Of course, the process wasn't without its hurdles. Weiss, a nurse for 33 years, said, "I had to ask permission, and of course that had to go through a couple of different people, to use the vials and to clarify what I was going to do with them."

But once her supervisor approved (in an email to Weiss, the supervisor wrote that she did not believe the vials "posed any communicable disease threat"), Weiss found a gold chandelier frame on Craigslist for $20 and got to work.

She washed out each vial, drilled holes in the bottoms, and strung them upside down with glass beads and crystals in a creation that wouldn't be out of place at Versailles. It glitters with little light bulbs, and red beads match the red type on the carefully hung vials.

But then there were the comments. When Boulder County Public Health posted about the chandelier on their Facebook page, the inevitable trolls and skeptics rolled in.

"It's a positive piece for me and for many others," Weiss said, "and the positive comments certainly outweigh the negative ones. The negative ones are just really disturbing and unexpected."

At over 3,000 comments and counting, it was a lot for Weiss to wrap her head around: "I stopped reading them because it's just too much."

Weiss' own pandemic experience hasn't been without challenges, either. She couldn't see her newly born granddaughter for the first 6 months of her life. She gave up seeing her husband's parents, too. "It was hard," she said, although she's quick to note that it wasn't much compared to the suffering of others.

Weiss made another COVID-related art piece before this one, stringing together 20,000 tiny American flags in August 2020 in an effort to wrap her mind around the number of American lives lost to the pandemic after she heard 200,000 people had died.

"Every flag I touched was 10 lives lost ... loss like that was so overwhelming," she said. "It definitely helped me sort of understand a little bit more of the magnitude and what we were looking at here."

She wrapped the chain around a kiosk at the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder.

The act of constructing the flag chain and the chandelier, and the physical handling of the vials was, Weiss says, also a way for her to personally process both the pandemic's human toll and the vaccine's lifeline.

"Each one of those vials, most likely, they held 10 vaccines each," she said. "I like to think, you know, that's saved the life of whatever half of that is because everyone got two doses, so it feels good to know that at least it represents lives saved and hope for the future."

As a result of her practice in contemplative craft, Weiss says she now has a small platform, which she intends to use. Boulder Community Hospital wanted to display the light, she said, and so did the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.

But the biggest opportunity, she said, may come from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Moderna has been in talks with the museum about displaying the chandelier.

Weiss has a request, though: that the company that made millions off the vaccine start a scholarship program for nurses.

"If I can get Moderna to start a scholarship fund, that would just seal the deal," Weiss said. "I'll be one happy nurse."

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