Covid Two Years Later: Missing Mom

 It’s 4AM on a Monday. I have contracted Covid, confirmed by multiple home tests. I could have gotten it anywhere of course, but it feels like I got it at the senior congregant meal center I went to last week to do a Medicare presentation, or the crowded library in Vero Beach where I went to see if they’d give us space to meet with clients for appointments. 

I rarely leave my compound voluntarily, but when I do its travel into crowded viral cesspools of festering human misery. Anyway, I brought it home, and now Drew has it, which is much more alarming. I took him to ER this morning because his symptoms are worse, and I was able to get a round of Paxlovid for him. It seems to be helping. I have a relatively mild case, comparable to a nasty cold, but very fatigued and easily weakened. Breathing okay for now. 

This sucks.

I have mixed emotions, to finally contract covid two years, almost to the day, after my parents died of it. My symptoms are mild, but I can’t help but wonder how it was for them when their symptoms didn’t go away, but got progressively worse until they suffocated. I don’t fear the same fate because I have faith in science; but their final hours haunt me nonetheless. 

My parents had refused the vaccine. At the time that they got it, the vaccine was widely available, but there wasn’t a profilactic treatment like Paxlovid as there is now. Trump was still on the TV every night telling people to inject bleach or shove horse paste up their asses. It was a different time, etc. But I'm feeingl like hell even with the vaccine, even with meds. How much worse was this disease for their old and defenseless bodies? 

I keep reliving my mother’s final hours in my mind, like revisiting the stations of her cross. How long was she aware? Did she know she was going to die? Was she lucid when they intubated her? Did she know when they took her off the ventilator, or was the tube being shoved in her throat her last memory?  

It’s the closest I’ve come to grieving them. I cried a little in my bed last night, very late, when the house was dark and quiet, as my dog Mattie lay in bed next to me, licking my hand to soothe herself to sleep. I was thinking about how Mom loved the dogs, and babied them to death when she visited. I remembered how unhappy she was the week before she died, how unloved she felt. To cheer her up, I suggested we go see the dogs, but she wasn’t having it that day. When I left her, she was still angry and wouldn’t speak to me. I don’t even remember what she was so hurt and angry with me about. 

She called the next day to apologize, and we made up. It was right after that that they got sick. That difficult, frustrating day with them was the last time I ever saw either of them. 

So I cried a little in the dark as Mattie licked my hand to soothe herself to sleep, and I thought of my mom, and I wondered if she’d known, in her final lucid moments, that I had loved her. 

I’m not convinced she did. I’m haunted by the fact that my mother might have died feeling alone and unloved.