I see churches burning. Flames of Covid-spiked praises dance in the air, maskless faces grin and offer me empty prayers. Skeletons of Covid victims, mostly the old, the brown, and the black, beckon the faithful to a void of nihilistic rage.
In my dream, I also see my mother, who died of a heart attack seven weeks ago, her legs moving in terminal restlessness, the half-smile of her love for me etched on her beautiful skin. My mother’s dying words were, “Tell them I don’t have Covid.” She didn’t care that her heart was functioning at less than 20%; she cared she was not a vector to her elderly, independent-living community.
If only I could transfer her desire to the rest of the family: some who don’t seem to care that they are potential carriers to the vulnerable among us. One said to me, after admitting he/she did not wear a mask 100% of the time in a closed public space, “ I don’t open my mouth when I am in a store.” So, what, he/she does not breathe when in a store for 10 minutes? He/she is a very smart person. He/she can do anything: just not so smart when it comes to understanding how our actions potentially affect one another.
Actions have consequences. We make choices. It is that simple. So when I and my five siblings asked our family members, including extended family members, to do what the public health officials and scientists are already asking us to do: namely, wear masks when in public, social distance, and avoid large public gatherings, for two weeks prior to the campout, some of them said they could not comply. We cancelled our upcoming extended family campout gathering because of their choices; they go to church on a regular basis, and those churches are exempt from public health mandates.
My mother, God rest her soul, was truly the epitome of wanting to do the right thing. When we cleaned out her apartment, we found calendars of specific prayers for each of her six children, and grandchildren, and also, a daily accounting of where she had been and who she had been in contact with, in the event she contracted Covid-19, so that contact tracing could occur. Despite the fact that I had not seen her for almost a year due to me living abroad, and Mom’s world revolved around her family and giving hugs to her family, we did not hug or visit with each other until the day she lay dying in her hospital bed.
In light of her sacrifical choices, I struggle with the choices of those in our family who felt that they could not comply with me and my five siblings request to follow public health mandates for the two weeks prior to the extended family campout, at the end of July. I work in a nursing home and my sister works in public health in the VA system; several of the grandchildren are nurses and physician assistants. We have an obligation to protect the vulnerable and immunosuppressed patients we care for. Similarly, my mother felt an obligation to protect the members of her elderly community.
While I appreciate the honesty of family members who said they could not comply, I am left with the void of their decision: held hostage by their choices. My four-day retreat for the family to process my mother’s legacy will not occur. It will wait another year. Or, maybe never. I also fully recognize that even if they had said they would comply, one of us, including me, may still have been an asymptomatic carrier and infected the family. We had a contingency plan for that scenario. It was called, “Extend grace, not play the blame game; we all did the best we could.”
Perhaps my friend said it best when, after I wrote him that I wanted to burn every church not following CDC guidelines, he wrote, “Don’t worry…the American church seems to be on its own self destructive path of becoming more irrelevant.” My mother would be sad. I am sad too.
