"I just kept imagining what's happening to him. Is he afraid? Is he cold? I kept thinking about whether he was cold," she said, in a moment that captured so much of her sadness and frustration about what had happened. She agreed to let me share what she told me.
Edward-Isaac Dovere
It just feels like something that didn't have to happen. He had had pneumonia and had been hospitalized. This is back in February. He wanted to go home after he'd been hospitalized and his doctor said, "No, I want you to just go to a rehab and just get some of your strength back." Pneumonia really takes it out of you. And, you know, he's old. And so he went to the rehab and was ready to go home. He was packed up and ready to go home when somebody tested positive, and they wouldn't let him leave. And I called him every day for 11 days, and every day he would say, "I'm just fine." In fact, he said, "I think I probably had it before and I'm just too tough and didn't even notice."
And then he got sick, and then he died, by himself. That's the hard part -- really hard part. It's hard to process things like this because everything is happening at a distance. And human beings -- we're not set up for that. We're wired to be with each other. It makes it hard.
I lost three very important people in my life many years ago in what felt like a short period of time: my mom, my daddy, and my Aunt Bee. Each of them died differently. My mother, very suddenly and unexpectedly. My daddy, lingering cancer. I held his hand as he died. With my mother, I had been there on the day that she died, in the night. My Aunt Bee got sick and then couldn't recover. But I was with them. And I was with my brothers and my cousins and my kids. And we shared memories; we grieved together.
It was frustrating the whole time. He had pneumonia, and I was calling every day. And I couldn't be there, but it was clear he was recovering. Then, when the doctor said, "I want you to set up rehab; you'll get your strength back," I thought, That's great. We'd talk every day and tell funny stories and laugh. And he'd keep me up to date.
And then when he said that the coronavirus test had come back positive, it's like that note you hear far off -- a warning. And I remember thinking I couldn't breathe. And he said, "Bets -- "he'd call me Bets or Betsy always -- "I feel fine. I feel fine." And for 11 days, I'd call him in the morning, call him in the evening, and he'd tell me, "Oh, it's fine," and laugh. And he was irritated that he couldn't leave. And I had begun to think, This is okay. We're going to get him out of there. In fact, I'd been talking: Would David -- my other brother -- be the one to pick him up, or was John going to come? You know what I mean: working on the logistics of how to get him out of there.
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