"Next Time."

 Someone on FB just posted a question asking if anyone who’d been anti-vaccine during Covid had lost a loved one to the virus, and if they had changed their mind as a result. 

It was an interesting question, because it brought to mind the last conversation I had with my mother before she died, almost exactly three years ago.   

She was on the Covid unit at our local hospital when we had our last phone conversation. She was still able to speak then, was still lucid. She told me that “next time” she would go ahead and get the vaccine. 

“This stuff is nothing to mess with,” she said. 

But by that evening she couldn’t speak anymore. Late that night she went on a ventilator. The next morning she was dead.

We couldn't bring ourselves to tell Dad. He was in the same Covid unit, just a few doors down. He died three days later. 

Renee & Leon

My parents were fundamentalist christians, but they had never been anti-medicine or refused vaccinations before. With Covid, it was different. They were deeply in the tank for Donald Trump, and were avid followers of Fox News. They believed Trump, and Sean Hannity, and their Governor Ron Desantis, who told them that the Covid virus was a hoax, and that the vaccine was dangerous.