Failures of leadership are made manifest in the grieving of everyday people.
When Pamela Caddell died of COVID-19 last month, there was no funeral — her family knew that, as a former nurse, she wouldn’t want anyone else to be exposed to the disease.
But there was still something her husband, Richard, wanted to say — needed to say — so he sat down in his empty house to write her obituary.
After honoring her decades in medicine and listing her surviving relatives, he included a plea to anyone who picked up the Courier & Press in Evansville, Ind.
“Pam died of Covid-19,” Richard wrote. “It was her fervent wish that everyone take this horrible disease seriously. This was her last wish to all people.”
Richard may not have known it, but the obituary for his wife belongs to a growing genre that dates to the summer. At the time, President Trump and his Republican allies were pushing to keep businesses open and downplaying the possibility of a deadly second wave of infections.
Now with a third wave overwhelming hospitals across the country, Americans are increasingly turning their private grief into public calls for action as the COVID-19 death toll grows by thousands each day.
Unlike Trump, the mourners do not have tens of millions of Twitter followers, nor do television cameras hang on their every word. Instead they’re buying obituaries in local newspapers, sometimes for several hundred dollars. There have been some efforts to turn the obituaries into a more coordinated activist campaign, but for many it’s a decision they reach on their own, a reflection of their own frustration, anger and pain.
“A lot of people knew my wife,” Richard said. “Her message was to take it seriously. Everybody. Take it seriously. And there’s a lot of people that I’m afraid that they don’t. They listen to the wrong person.”
Among the many things I will never forgive "conservatives" for is that they used "Culture Of Life" as a political weapon, only to turn this country into a Culture Of Death kinda place.
No comments:
Post a Comment