#185) Guest post from a Covid widow

The following was emailed to me in response to this post. It was written by the widow of an unvaccinated man who, like “Travis” of the above mentioned post, died from Covid. She requested that her experiences and thoughts be shared.

Yeah, I wish he’d just taken the damn vaccine.

But it’s not quite that simple, at least I don’t think it is.

Deep down, yes, my husband was worried about the Coronavirus. But he was also worried about injecting himself with an unknown substance, one that at the best would probably have made him sick for a day or two and at worst might have killed him. Even more so, he feared the power of a government that would require him to inject himself with this unknown substance. In the early days of the pandemic, as celebrities told us to stay home from the comfort of their mansions and the mainstream media did everything they could to monger fear, divisiveness and hysteria, we watched many of our friends and neighbors lose their livelihoods because the powers that were didn’t consider them essential. Suddenly, government bureaucrats who have never had to face the challenges and worries that small business owners across America do every day were making decisions about who stayed open and who didn’t. THAT was what truly scared my husband, and when he saw the power that the government was wielding from leveraging vaccine mandates, it started all over again.

Yeah, I wish he’d just taken the damn vaccine, but it’s easy to look back in hindsight. When you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s hard not to get swept up. When everyone around you is taking up arms, it’s hard not to do the same. Did the people who, when they heard us being refused entrance to a restaurant because we didn’t have proof of vaccination, said, “The Klan meeting’s two doors down” think they were going to change our minds? What about the person who spit on a friend of ours who was holding a “Block the mandates” sign at a local rally? (The spitter, incidentally, spat out the passenger side window of a car that had a “Coexist” bumper sticker, but you didn’t hear that from me.)

In addition to strangers turning up their nose at us, we have been shunned by friends we’d known for years. Some have flat out told us we are not welcome; others have expressed surprise when we have reached out, as if because we had differing opinions about one issue, we had completely incompatible values altogether. In our experience, many people who complain about how the Oscars don’t have enough diversity refused to engage with us – or anyone else who had a differing opinion. We were judged for “not believing the science” of masks and vaccines by people who think that someone with a penis should be allowed to compete against girls.

My husband honestly never cared if other people got vaccinated or wore a mask. He never chewed anyone out for their views, rarely even brought up his own opinions without being asked and didn’t even complain about having to wear a mask or socially distance, even when the goalposts kept being moved and government agencies backpedaled when their findings were proven inaccurate. When the people who had ostracized him for not getting vaccinated had bad reactions to their jabs, or ended up getting Covid even after taking the booster (who knows, he may have gotten the virus from someone who was fully vaxxed), he didn’t rub it in. Out of the people who walked out on us, exactly one apologized and my husband welcomed that individual back with open arms.

The response to his death among our community was muted. I did get a few cursory condolences, as if they were acknowledging the death of a former co-worker’s grandparent’s veterinarian’s cousin, not someone with whom they had regularly been social until just recently. I feel grateful that there were no truly nasty comments, but is that what we want? To live in a world where animosity is so common that it seems like a blessing when people don’t tear apart someone who’s not alive to defend themselves?

Yeah, I wish he’d taken the vaccine, but I think we need to look at ourselves and ask how we got to this point. If someone who never told others what to do and only asked that he be allowed the same privacy can be vilified, it begs the question of who will become the next sacrificial lamb and how they will be punished when their opinions become unfashionable.

#178) Remembering an unvaccinated Trumper

If it had happened a year or even a month ago, I would have laughed like Nelson Muntz. Even today, it’s hard to feel too much of a lump in my throat. Still, my inevitable shrug at the news that a proudly unvaccinated person has died from Covid is tempered with a touch of sadness. The word “miss” might be a little generous to describe how I feel about the deceased, but like the expulsion of a school bully, the firing of an asshole boss or an ex going through an ugly divorce with the person for whom they left you, the aftermath can be weird. You were waiting with such anticipation to be able to gloat and now that you can, it somehow doesn’t seem so exciting.

I had a semi-professional relationship with “Travis” for five months. When we had a job to do, we worked well together. We had different backgrounds and upbringings, different long-term goals and, in case the title of this post didn’t make it clear, different political views, but we also shared an appreciation of dry humor, obscure trivia and random cultural references. Both of us had grown up in the northeast, left for warmer climates and returned. Like the circles on the Mastercard logo, there was enough overlap between us to make me think that our differences wouldn’t be too big a problem.

The down time, however, was tough. When there wasn’t a task before us, politics would creep in. While soft spoken and physically unassuming, Travis was set in his ways. He would politely listen to what you had to say before patiently itemizing the reasons you were wrong. He spoke of his “racist” father as someone from whom he wanted to distance himself, but also talked about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in a way that would make one think they had personally caused him grievous harm. He and the others in our group rhapsodized of a day when Trump would be elected to the senate in his new home state of Florida, be named speaker of the house after the Red Wave of ’22 and then become president after both Biden and Harris were impeached. When the Rittenhouse verdict was announced, Travis and the others celebrated as if they themselves had just been acquitted. By this point it was obvious that I had to leave. I was deciding how to orchestrate my exit when science did it for me.

As an overweight smoker in his 50s, Travis was a pretty easy box for Covid to check. He started feeling symptoms the day before Thanksgiving and tested positive the day after. Whether he took the test willingly or at the urging of a loved one who suddenly got religion on the virus is a secret that followed him to the grave, as is the question of how many friends and family members he may have infected at their holiday gathering.

I don’t see Travis as a martyr who paid the ultimate price for deeply held convictions. I don’t think that by gambling with his life he died any more nobly than someone who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt or a motorcycle helmet.

I do see him as a victim. Just as the Marlboro Man made him believe that smoking would transport him to the mountains, far from gender pronouns, cancel culture, critical race theory and radical politicians who enact costly and ineffective social programs on the backs of honest, hard-working folk, Trump made him believe that by not getting vaccinated, he was exercising his God-given right while the sheeple followed the woke mob wherever the deep state told them to go. Travis was a victim of the Democrats too; after a four year opportunity to learn from 2016 they offered up a president who often can’t get his own allies and constituents to buy in, let alone those on the other side. Could Mayor Pete or Andrew Yang have been more effective than Biden in getting Travis to consider a vaccine or at least not dig his heels in quite so deeply? As with how “The Shining” starring Robin Williams would have turned out, we’ll never know, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone could have been less effective. (OK, maybe Hillary).

Travis left behind a mother, sister, wife, nephew, grand-nephew and two kids. He also left a group of friends who, while not my kind of crowd, were closely knit, in some cases having known each other for nearly half a century. What he left me was a sense that, while my opinions are unchanged, my emotional attachment to them might be worth reassessing and that I may have more productive uses for my time and energy than feeling vitriol toward those of different political stripes. There’s no LGB in my investment portfolio and no “My Carbon Footprint Will Fit Nicely In Your Liberal Ass” bumper sticker on my car now and there probably won’t be by the end of ’22. That said, the time I spent with Travis put a human face on “the other.” As I attempt to put the acrimony of 2020 and 2021 behind me, I will consider that just as my views were formed by my experiences, observations and the messaging I received growing up (I swear, my dad would get sexually aroused talking about how much he loved labor unions), so too were those of Travis.

And so I say, as one freedom-loving ‘Murcan to another, may your memory be a blessing. Oh yeah, and say hi to Ashli, will ya?