Amid pandemic, death is all-too-familiar to Dawson

Andre Dawson got his nickname as a young boy growing up in Miami. An uncle would hit him ground balls. Said most kids his age would be afraid of the baseball, but that Andre would “attack it like a hawk.”

And there it is today, in bronze, on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown, New York.: Andrew Nolan Dawson.

“The Hawk.”

Around that same time, as a child, sometimes Andre would be made to dress up and attend the funeral of a relative or family friend. He hated that.

“I was frightened by the sight of death,” Dawson, now 65, said Thursday, by telephone. “Didn’t like seeing someone laying in a casket. It was like a teenager watching a horror movie. You can’t sleep. As a kid growing up the funeral home was my fear factor.”

Strange how life sometimes turns out, right?

Today Dawson owns and runs the Paradise Memorial Funeral Home in Richmond Heights, a small city in southwest Miami-Dade County. He has been in the business for 12 years, when

Dawson and his wife took it over from relatives.

Once, Dawson accompanied three employees to a home in Liberty City to oversee the removal of a deceased body of an older man. The grieving son kept staring at the tall gentleman in the dark suit. Through tears he finally spoke two words.

Yes it was.

We haven’t had much occasion to speak with Dawson since he retired from baseball as a Florida Marlin in 1996 and was inducted into Cooperstown in 2010, but the spring of 2020 — a time like no other — seemed the right time to catch up.

The coronavirus/CO