My friend Amy texted me on March 2 to say "Hi. I need to talk to you. Extremely important." I called her back as soon as I could, of course, and she said, "I'm so sorry to have to tell you that--" Her voice broke. "I'm sorry," she said, "I thought I was more in control of myself than that. I'm so horribly sorry to have to tell you that David died last night."
It was the weirdest thing, or so it seemed at the beginning of March. He had been feeling a little crummy, like maybe he was coming down with a cold or something. But suddenly that evening the situation deteriorated rapidly. He couldn't breathe. His wife called 911. The EMTs came. His heart stopped. He was dead at 51.
In hindsight it seems most likely that the culprit was COVID-19. This is a pattern we're familiar with now: some people compensate surprisingly well for dangerously low oxygen saturation levels, until suddenly they don't. Some people's hearts are hit hard by the virus, for reasons we don't entirely understand. But on March 2 it was still astonishing for a healthy middle-aged man to be felled like that, to go from mildly under the weather to dead in a 12-hour period.
I think about David all the time. Almost every day he flits across my mind: I remember something we did together in college, or a funny thing he said, or a book he liked. And then the reality jolts me again: David is gone. He won't make any more jokes. He won't read any more books.
We weren't close friends after college, but he was Amy's husband's best friend and so we stayed in touch. I don't want you to read this post as if I myself am suffering deeply, because it's not a post about me. But when I think of him I try to pray for the people who were closer to him: his widow, his mother, his sisters, Amy's husband. I think about how much more often they feel that same jolt, how frequently they have had to say to themselves, "David is gone. He won't make any more jokes. He won't read any more books."
We are getting numb to the COVID-19 death toll these days. It's not just the folks who said blatantly callous things, like, "Those nursing home folks didn't have much time left anyway," or "We all have to die sometime." It's all of us, I think; we can't really wrap our minds around that number. As of today more than 160,000 people are gone. All of them, like David, leave behind people who loved them. How many people are living with that jolt day after day, struck again and again by the magnitude of their loss?
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