COVID-19 took this man, my friend SueG's father last week. This picture was taken last Easter when all Don cared about was making it to his 90th birthday. It had been his resolution for the year, and I had recorded it on my phone, reminding him of it every time I saw him.
He made it.
He turned 90 in December after Christmas at a small birthday party that I missed because I still had family in town. He ended up in the hospital later that night for a mild heart attack. I joked it was from heartache because I hadn't been at the party. He said it was more likely heartburn from the food served.
I keep wondering what he would say now about becoming a statistic of this damn virus.
Holed up in his condo with his wife, he contracted the virus because the home healthcare worker who worked with him weekly didn't wear a mask. I still can't say that sentence without hearing the disbelief in my voice or without wincing. A HOME HEALTHCARE AIDE DIDN'T WEAR A MASK.
Our country is in trouble.
The day after Don died, less than twenty-four hours later, his wife--SueG's mother--was admitted to the hospital's COVID wing, testing positive for the virus with an underlying condition of pneumonia. Luckily, her body was stronger, and after five days in the hospital, she returned to her home, which a biohazard company had cleaned and disinfected.
The first time I met SueG's parents was on Halloween when they came, as they did every year, to visit their son's pediatric office to see everyone's costumes. SueG, our friend Jyoti, and I had done the same, and we ended up crammed in an office together where Jyoti and I literally had front row seats to a taping of Everybody Loves Raymond.
Only it was with SueG's family.
I've never laughed as hard as I did that day, and the laughter has been prevalent every minute I've spent with them since then.
Don was a huge cause of that laughter.
I only knew Don in his last years, and while everyone has a past, I can only speak to the man I knew for a little over ten years. He was a man who loved his family even when he wasn't able to express it demonstratively. He had a great sense of humor, and he used it-- especially these last two years--slyly. I think I recognized it and him because of the time I spent with my mother, who, like Don, was very limited in her mobility and angry because of it.
I enjoyed listening to Don's stories, and he liked to talk. I learned about his childhood, the jobs he held, and the first time he laid eyes on the woman who would become his wife. They were married sixty-three years, and while their love/hate relationship might have turned heads when they were together, it worked for them, and in the videos his son recorded during quarantine, Don expresses those feeling with heartfelt honesty.
He was loud and boisterous, more so as he became confined to a chair, propped up as he said "in the corner" at functions and "forgotten." However, he listened to everything around him and butted into conversations as if he didn't understand the context, making people exasperatingly repeat what they'd said so he could slip in his opinion without them putting two and two together and comprehending he'd been eavesdropping. He often confused his grandchildren with his son and daughter, a mistake that once recognized, he'd play to the hilt because it made us laugh.
His tone was often seventy-five percent angry, and he could argue with the best of them, but when he told a story, his voice was soft, often fading as he lost himself in the memories. Don didn't make excuses for the way he'd lived his life, although once when I spent time with him, just the two of us during a period when his wife was in a rehabilitation center, and Don lived with SueG, he admitted if he had to do it over again, he hoped he'd try to do things differently.
"I wasn't the easiest person to get along with," he told me. "I made a lot of mistakes, but I always thought I was doing the best possible. I suppose I was, seeing as how I was raised."
I'll miss him. He was a part of my friend and the head of the dynamics that make up her family. Our gatherings won't be the same without his asking what he ordered fifty million times. In his honor, I plan to ask everyone a few times myself...
IF we ever get back to family gatherings.
Please. Please, everyone, wear a mask. If not for yourself, than for people like Don--who'd made his next goal to live to one hundred years old.
"So, I can keep wrecking havoc!"
Sadly, he won't be, and while we never thought he'd make that goal, it would've been nice to see him not succumb because of someone else's ignorance.
