ONE COVID DEATH OUT OF 1,192 — IT’S PERSONAL
NOTE: I published this earlier today on Facebook (11/30/2020). I was asked to publish it elsewhere on the Internet to share across other networks. I’ve done so here.
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Yesterday morning we learned that my girlfriend’s cousin had died of Covid earlier that morning.(He is 1 of 1,192 for 11/28/2020). This was unexpected — shocking.
He died at home four days after he was diagnosed. He was 45 years old. He left a wife, a daughter, and a son. He left a sister and he left a mother who must face a grief that no parent should endure.
WARNING: Tread carefully on how you respond to this post. I’m in no mood to suffer fools. Prior to writing this I spoke to his mother. Even though I am being purposefully vague, I know she will see this. I have no wish to exacerbate the pain and unimaginable grief she and the family must face.
She gave her approval because she believes it is important that people know. Add to this, she is living a grief that is coupled with fear (and anger) as her daughter and only remaining child is also battling Covid at this moment. Her daughter contracted the disease separately, 300 miles apart, from her now deceased son.
I cannot imagine what the combination of those emotions must do to her already shattered heart.
As I watched her weeping and thought about the call we’d made a few minutes prior — hearing her granddaughter sob uncontrollably (“What do I do now? What do I do now?” — a lost and inconsolable response), I contemplated the unnecessary tragedy of this death and what will be hundreds of thousands of other deaths.
He had been an outspoken critic/skeptic of the efficacy of masks or that Covid was anything to worry about. He was, sadly, led astray by feckless and cowardly conservatives who feign rationality & patriotism while dismissing science and sound expert analysis in favor of recklessness.
They are led by a president who cares NOTHING about America, the American people, or even for the cult-like followers who laud his every asinine utterance. They do so in defense of a foolish callousness that attacks anything and everything that threatens his authoritarian push for power.
The president lied and conned his followers at the start of the pandemic, creating chaotic messaging that went against EVERY NOTED expert in the field of infectious disease.
Outright lies about how deaths are counted and the disastrous consequences of a ridiculous set of haphazard non-policies that have a single-purpose — protect the incompetent, lying, immoral buffoon sitting in the White House.
This is today’s Republican party. History will remember this caricature of leadership and utter abdication of responsibility.
Even when presented with the actual data about the disease and guidelines for counting deaths — guidelines I spoke about personally with two different infectious disease teams — they still cling to the lie. They have to. Not because the information warrants their skepticism but because the cult demands it. Their “thought leaders” are happy to let people die to further their power-grab and the followers have been conditioned to dutifully fall in line.
We only have to look at any number of other countries who have, on a per capita basis, had fewer deaths (same guidelines — look into it) and less severely shut down economies. Because science and good policy should go hand in hand. They are not antithetical, they are compatible and rational.
This is the second — and likely third — death of someone I know directly due to Covid.
And for what? Nothing! Nothing but grief perpetuated by bad thinking and a lock-stepped adherence to an ideology over information approach to public policy (and now election tampering — same cowardly bullshit).
And so another family gets to grieve the insurmountable loss: a wife losing her husband, a son & daughter losing their father, a mother losing her son, a family losing the bread-winner and extended family losing their cousin, their uncle, etc.
We’ve wasted four years in America allowing a narcissistic and self-absorbed criminal to run the country — mostly into the ground. We’ve allowed him to step over the dead to further his substance-less agenda and put our country and the world at risk for his bloviation and fragile ego. Privately, many Republican leaders agree with that assessment — but they are weak and cowardly. Don’t forget that.
I understand that even with the best, well-thought through, policies, he might still have contracted the disease and died. And that could be said for any ONE death.
But it is intellectually dishonest — no, it is blindly incoherent and irresponsible — to extend that “logic” to the thousands of deaths we’ve experienced to date and the thousands more we will experience through the winter.
As with any/every death, this man’s death is a tragedy. But tragedy is compounded when it and countless others could have been avoided.
I knew him through a few family gatherings. He was fun to talk to because he had a wicked sense of humor that allowed me to say things that shouldn’t be said to anyone. I appreciate that. It was obvious he cared deeply for his family.
I will grieve him none-the-less. I will grieve him by proxy, through his family — people I care about. I will do my best to share in and comfort their pain. I will grieve him in community with others in our country.
But, grief isn’t enough for me. I will double-down my resistance to bad ideas and those who foment them.
Life, at its best, is both fragile and precious. We need to ensure that those who would make life, unnecessarily, more fragile and who willingly cheapen what is precious, are defeated in the world of ideas and pushed back to the fringes where they belong.
There is no room for it here.
