COVID19 DEATHS NOT THE NORM TO ENDURE

Covid19 deaths will never be normal for anyone who has been with loved ones in their final moments.

My mother-in-law had a massive stroke the doctors called an unsurvivable brain bleed. It even sounds bad.

For two days she responded to conversation with closed eyes and a hand squeeze for yes or no.

Her last words before the silence:

“David made me tea.”

We never left her hospital room, stayed over night on mats, and she took a last, long, breath.

If history is important in the bigger picture, the importance starts in the small frame. It goes like this:

I did make a final cup of tea at home before the ambulance got there. We always had tea and a biscuit together.

But, she took her last breath while I was out of the room and my sons’ girlfriends stayed over night.

If you’ve experienced death in your family that includes hospitals, and ICU, and the aftermath, then you’ve felt the connections of hope and care you didn’t expect.

Hope And Care For Covid19 Deaths

News reports say covid19 deaths are climbing. The latest reference is a death rate equal to 9/11 every day.

“What we do now literally will be a matter of life and death for many of our citizens,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday as he extended restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, including a ban on indoor dining and drinking at restaurants and bars.

While the impending arrival of the vaccine is reason for hope, he said, “at the moment, we have to face reality, and the reality is that we are suffering a very dire situation with the pandemic.”

Is it time to recognize the circle getting smaller and smaller? Looking at you, Baby Boomers.

The world that magically unfolded at our feet, the world our parents brought us into full of joy and love and food and shelter and clothing and friends and brothers and sisters, is dying because of mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing doubts?

If that’s you, slap yourself. Now the other hand.

That’s the world of privilege and grace we entered, not the world a baby enters today.

Look at the ages represented at mask protests, the anti-mask rallies. They don’t look like people concerned about babies. Are you concerned about babies? I am.

My granddaughter is that baby. Through her eyes the world is normal. Her normal isn’t a ‘New Normal,’ it’s the only one she knows.

But she’s a baby, right, and things always get better?

Before his death Friday from complications of COVID-19, 78-year-old former Alabama state Sen. Larry Dixon asked his wife from his hospital bed to relay a warning. “Sweetheart, we messed up. We just dropped our guard. … We’ve got to tell people this is real,” his friend Dr. David Thrasher, a pulmonologist, quoted him as saying.

Although Dixon had been conscientious about masks and social distancing, he met up with friends at a restaurant for what they called a “prayer meeting,” and three of them fell ill, Thrasher said.

Whose job is it to make sure there’s a world to roll out, a world of awe and wonder and yearning for an even better world yet to come.

Civilizations across the bands of history stacked one upon the other like sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon have asked the same question.

From the earliest of early days, to Egypt, Greece, and finally North Bend Oregon, it’s the same answer: It starts with you, it starts with me, it really starts when we agree.

Wear a mask, wash hands, social distance.

Magic Mask Medicine

Wear a mask at your prayer meetings.

Wear a mask in a store.

Wear a mask when you’re greeting.

Keep a mask by the door.

Wear a mask around loved ones.

Wear one with baby, too.

Wear a mask for me, please,

And I’ll wear one for you.