Remembering Covid -- a Memorial Thread

Four years ago today, I walked into the apocalypse.

Crossing the line in the ER felt like entering a whole other world.

Frenetic alarms.

Patients strewn about, struggling to breathe.

Too few staff. Too many deaths.

Covid was everything.

It had completely taken over our ER 

Covid inundated NYC a week prior.

And many of our staff fell ill.

Especially the nurses.

We had only a fraction of those we needed.

Too few to notice when the oxygen tanks under patients’ beds ran out.

So we did something kinda insane.

Actually unbelievable 

We ran tubing from the oxygen outlets on the wall

up, up, up

then through the ceiling

and then dangled it down to the middle of the ER

All over the ER

So everyone could get a reliable oxygen supply

And not suffocate when their tank ran out

It saved lives.

A lot.

A lot. 

But not all

“Hey, who has the guy in room 7”

—“Oh, me”

“He’s dead”

Keep going.

Others would die the same shift. 

Hundred died that day in NYC from Covid

The worse was still in front of us

A week later, 815 died. In one city.

Morgues were over capacity.

Walk by trucks set up outside the hospital for the overflow.

More staff fell ill.

They couldn’t get tested. Still. 

Four years ago, we had no idea what would happen next.

How long it would last

Or who would be next

Would it be as bad in Chicago?

LA?

Detroit?

Phoenix, Cheyenne, or Pensacola?

We know how it played out now

We knew nearly nothing then

We didn’t know 

Today, many will tell you we overreacted then

But you’ll never hear that from someone, anyone who worked in the hospital then

Covid scarred a generation of healthcare workers

Many watched their colleagues suffer.

Struggle to breathe.

Then die. 

Mistakes were made.

Politics became paramount.

We all paid the price.

But until the day I die

No one can tell me…

The things I saw

The things we

All those on the frontline

Witnessed and endured

We’re not real

We’re not the worst things we will

EVER see 

The past is being rewritten

But none of us who witnessed those early days can scrub our memories of the pain, and horror

We’ll never forget finding young, otherwise healthy people dead in a chair

And we’ll never forget our colleagues who died

You might.

But we won’t. 

Forgiveness Note

In the middle of the night, surfing the web looking for something else, I came across something I wrote and forgot in 2008. These reflections about forgiveness may some day be helpful for someone struggling to forgive someone or come to terms with injustice to themselves or others about which they know. Forgiveness is the most challenging of all Christian ideas.

I finally got around to following up this comment thread. Thanks for the promo!

You raise the central question: Should one forgive in the midst of the ongoing unrepentant practice of evil?

If we use Christ as our model his dying words suggest exactly that. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Thankfully I no longer work for him, but for nearly twenty-seven years I was subordinate to one of the meanest men in the company for which we worked. Without going into detail, it is sufficient to say that he was known by one and all to be insulting, sarcastic, abusive and unaccountably indifferent to the feelings of others. He kept his job because he was knowledgeable and well-organized...and his father was well-placed. Anyway, at one particularly stressful point a sympathetic customer who knew the situation said something helpful: "It will build your faith," she said. And she was correct.

I thought about that a lot as the years went by, and I had to forgive this man, sometimes several times a day, for what he said and did. In time I came to feel sorry for him, much the same way one feels sorry for any of God's pitiful creatures. I learned in time actually to defend him when talking about him with others, despite his ungrateful, relentless verbal and psychological abuse. (It was some comfort knowing that he was not just picking on me. He was that way to everyone at one time or another, scapegoating or insulting them for situations over which they had no control.)

You put your finger on the dynamic in your post. We forgive, not because of what forgiveness does for the perpetrator, but for what it does for us. When we fail to forgive we get infected with a corrosive, septic spiritual condition that poisons everything in life. All our senses are affected, and we can no longer hear, see, feel or experience life without distortion. For me, it is the same dynamic that makes me oppose capital punishment. The reason has more to do with what it does to me than what happens to the criminal. In the same way that capital punishment caused me as a citizen to become a perpetrator of evil, unforgiveness also transforms me into someone I know I don't want to be.

It's easier said than done, of course. But that's the best I can do in a comment thread.

I wrote about Leila Abu Saba at my first blog if anyone cares to know the backstory. She died of cancer shortly after this was written but thankfully some of her writing remains accessible, including this link to one of her several blogs.   This post is not linked to my social media platforms because some of my friends from the past will recognize the person about whom I wrote and I want to avoid conflict.