Everyone Who Has Died Of Covid-19 Mattered
When I think about them, I think about the unfinished projects. Maybe one of them had just started a Duolingo course. One of them delayed a long-awaited anniversary trip because of the illness, promising their partner they’d reschedule as soon as all this was over. The receipt to return a broken drill was in their wallet. One of them had just reconciled with a family member or a long-lost friend, and was looking forward to catching up. One had just made the decision to get sober. Maybe one was on the cusp of that decision, but they died of Covid-19 instead.
Right now, 1 in 2000 Americans are dead of Covid-19. That’s two from the population of my high school. I remember how a single student suicide rocked the entire population in freshman year. There were grief counselors and cancelled homework. Most of us had never even met them. Maybe you’re lucky and the 1 in 2000 hasn’t come in droplet distance of you yet. It’s the sirens outside in New York in April, carrying someone to the hospital, but all your friends are still safe, you checked. It’s thunder rolling in the distance, and you know the lightning will hit someone but hopefully, probably, not you.
My first understanding of death is a family legend. I was four years old, sitting on my mother’s lap in a park. She had on a necklace with an opal in it. I was twisting the stone gently, and I asked her, “Mom, if I strangled you, would you die?” She laughed and talked to me about death, and the story got added to the long list of lore. But the concepts behind that question in my tiny, macabre brain were profound: Do people die? Can we be responsible for another person’s death? Is a death attributable to careless or cruel actions worse than another kind? Could someone I cared about be subject to this awful thing called death? Someone who mattered to me?
The 165,000 people who are dead all mattered to someone. They were family, friend, lover, mom, child to someone. They didn’t want to die. They wanted to feel safe and loved if they did. When I have gotten really and truly sick in my adult life, I find myself longing for a place my brain calls “home.” I know where and when it is, it’s being eight years old, nestled in the sturdy walls of a home where I was loved, puking from the flu. The thing about pain is that it keeps you in the present, better than any meditation app in the world. When you have the flu your world is the flu, your universe the aches and the fever and the nightmares. And home was a place where my mother’s hand was on my forehead, when someone knew and could tell me if I was doing a little better, if my fever was down, if it was time to try a sip of 7Up or a Saltine. They could see the end of the flu even if I couldn’t, and they knew, unshakably, that I’d get better soon.
A few years ago over Christmas I got the flu while visiting my parents. I had always assumed that the longing for “home” was just about my mom being nearby, but I found out it, as I lay on the floor with my legs extended flat against the wall, because it was the only thing that would sooth the terrible aches in my thighs, that that longing was not just for my parents, but for my childhood. For a time before I understood the ephemeral nature of medical treatment, before I knew on a deep personal level that doctors trying their very hardest were still always operating from a guess. It is horrible to be sick when no one can tell you if you’ll ever get better. It is horrible to go to sleep in a hospital not knowing if you will wake up.
On Twitter, a doctor talked about how he always puts his hand on the head of a Covid patient undergoing the sedation for a ventilator. Just for human contact. Just because it may be the last touch they ever feel in the last moments they are consciously alive. That feeling of home is now only transmitted over FaceTime, the connection dependent on something as fickle as WiFi. For those families the thunderstorm is right overhead, they have given themselves up to the knowledge that the lightning is coming for them, and that it will sear them to the bone when it hits. That it will root in their bodies longer than even a virus can hang on. Their grief will not end with a vaccine.
165,000 people. If each had only ten people in the world who knew of their existence and cared for them, that’s .5% of the US population mired in the death of a loved one at once. But that’s not all. There are five million cases of Covid-19 in the US. Add in their ten friends and relatives, and that’s 15% of the US, living day to day, wondering if their loved one will die, will be left with permanent heart damage. Will never finish mastering Italian, or bake that delicious souffle again, or see the next World Series. And that’s not all. There are those with the additional grief and guilt of knowing they passed on the disease, by selfishness or carelessness or accident or intent. How many are suffering because we keep indulging the denial of the magnitude of this loss, rather than facing it?
I think again about that doctor, putting his hand on the forehead of a patient going somewhere that may be final. May that touch propel them back into their childhood beds, where they had no fear that they were not loved. May it shield them from those who see their deaths as a political inconvenience to be spun, or a government hoax, or a meaningless number. May it take them home, to a place where they matter.
