2 - Stories from a Pandemic Part II: COVID Hits Home
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You're listening to The Nocturnist, stories from a pandemic. I'm Emily Silverman. For some of us, the pandemic is a distant thing. At the height of the surge, we wore masks, waited in line six feet apart, and did our best to shepherd our kids through virtual school. Even now, the idea of 400, 500, 600,000 deaths seems abstract. And for some, even one death may be impossible to comprehend. Many of us have gotten through this past year by keeping our heads down, putting one foot in front of the other, and waiting for a brighter tomorrow. We healthcare workers are good at compartmentalizing. That is, until COVID hits
home. Hey, yeah. Neil, your mom and I have not been able to reach you since this morning. And you have not responded to any of my texts at all. Can you just text me that you are okay? Or, I don't know, just give me a call back. Neil, your mom and I have not been
able to reach
you
since this
morning.
We're in my dad's closet now. And I come here pretty much every day. Sometimes I listen to voicemails that he sent me. A couple of days ago, I put a picture of him in here. So it's sort of become like a shrine to him. Nothing is really touched, but sometimes I walk around thinking maybe he left me a note telling me what to do or telling me how I should live my life. I've gone through this closet probably like 20 or 30 times since he passed away. Just trying to figure out like if there's something here that he wanted me to have or wanted me to know about. He still has like dirty laundry.
We should wash that.
I don't think I'll be able to do that. I don't know. He's just got random stuff in here. A lot of cologne. Definitely a lot of cologne. I don't know why he has a pocket knife.
He's got all of his shirts and stuff here and there are some shirts here that I'm pretty sure he wore at one point. They still smell like him.
The day after Christmas in 2020, I got an email from a medical student named Jackie. She was writing on behalf of her partner Neil, also a medical student. Neil's father, a gastroenterologist in Colorado, had died of COVID-19 just two weeks prior, and Neil and Jackie wanted to tell his story. Okay, I'm recording.
Recording.
All right. Are you in your childhood home right now? I
am, yeah.
And you're in Pueblo?
I'm in Pueblo.
I listened to quite a few of the recordings today, and I'd like to just rewind a little bit. Sure. Back to that day where you and Jackie emailed me.
So about a week after my dad passed away, I think it was sometime in the afternoon, on a Saturday maybe, that we decided to send you that email. I just wanted to feel like I had tried to do something to honor him, because I felt like we had been so cheated and robbed of some of the traditional grieving rituals, and it just ate at me. I felt gutted by that. I wanted to talk about what my family and I had gone through during that period, what I went through during that period, you know, being a medical student and being his son, it sort of hit me in our conversation that this could actually be a pretty cathartic process for me. It was like the first time, actually, that I didn't feel... Am I allowed to curse in this?
It was like the first time I didn't feel like shit in, like, weeks.
Over the weekend, Pueblo County moved into Level 3, which is high risk. That means we have two...
Okay, so we are now driving in downtown Pueblo. We're passing by the Courtyard Marriott. My dad's friend told me that they stayed here when they first came out here to see if they might want to move here together. And he told me a story where he said that him and my dad were smoking cigarettes in the stairwell. Then they left to go meet with an administrator at the hospital. And as they came back, they saw that there were a bunch of fire trucks standing outside the Marriott. And they started freaking out because they thought maybe it was something that they did that was the reason that there were fire trucks out there.
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