Around 25 years ago, my then-husband and I hosted a gathering one evening at our home. We invited several other couples with whom we spent three or four hours eating, talking, and laughing until we cried. As the party was breaking up, one of the men present received a phone call from his younger son, informing him that his older, twenty-five-year-old son had died earlier that evening when the motorcycle he was riding was struck by a car.
Standing in my family room, I watched as the shock registered on the man’s face and in his body. He jumped into the air and did a slight pivot before planting his feet and bending slightly forward in deadly earnest as he listened to the words coming through the phone line. His first verbal response was “NO! Don’t tell me!” I continued to watch as his wife was brought from another room and he gently seated her in a chair, then knelt before her to break the news that her beloved son was no longer living. I watched her face as she registered the shock and went immediately into the denial stage of grief, shaking her head and repeating over and over, “No, not my Richard. Not my Richard.”
I watched as the other guests gathered around them and began offering comfort and support. One of the men volunteered to drive them home, while another said he would deliver their vehicle for them. A few days later, my husband and I walked with them into the room where they would for the first time see their son in his casket. I saw them catch their breath and turn their faces away as they got their first glimpse of his lifeless body, then move closer and hold each other while they both wept.
From that day until this, I have never read a headline reporting a traffic accident in the same way I had read those headlines before. We see them every week, and we feel a certain level of compassion and sympathy. “Oh, that’s terrible. His/her poor family.” But it’s hard to hold onto that compassion or even to experience it at a very deep level when the victim has no face, when the grieving family are just names in the obituary. What that evening did for me was put a face on the headline “25-year-old Man Killed in Accident.” Now when I read similar stories, I see my friend hearing for the first time of his son’s death; I see his wife who for ten minutes couldn’t stop shaking her head and moaning “No, not my Richard.” Dick and Penny are for me the real people whose real suffering gives such stories meaning and impact.
Like everyone else in the country, I read each day and listen each night to the day’s grim statistics: number of new COVID infections, number of deaths on that day, and total number of deaths so far. Also like almost everyone else, I find it a bit hard to be appropriately compassionate toward faceless numbers. I haven’t personally known any of those people, so they’re just vague, faceless statistics. Heartbreaking, yes. Frightening, definitely. Reason for taking precautions, absolutely. But I don’t know them; they’re people “out there” somewhere.
All of that changed, however, in the wee hours of Christmas morning, 2020, when one of my high school classmates lost his battle against the virus. Now COVID has a face: the face of John Mathes. I’d been following John’s progress for a little over a month, as he was placed on a ventilator three times and then removed when there were signs he was going to beat the illness, as he was moved into and out of ICU several times, then to a rehab center, and then back to the hospital. Finally, at 12:30 a.m., as Christmas Eve faded into Christmas morning, in his wife’s words, John was just too tired to fight any longer.
I haven’t seen much of John since high school, but I received updates through mutual friends, saw him and his wife at a couple of class reunions, and for the last few years communicated through Facebook. After graduation, we went different routes: I went off to college and then to various other cities, while he put down deep roots in our home soil. Within a couple of years, he had married our fellow classmate Sharon Warling, and they spent the next 50+ years creating a loving family and being a vital part of our hometown community.
Now when I read the number of daily COVID deaths, I’ll see John lying in a hospital bed, attached to a ventilator. I’ll see Sharon, mostly at home because of visiting limitations necessary for such a highly contagious disease, praying for the miracle that would bring her husband back to her. I’ve never met their three daughters or any of their grandchildren and great grandchildren, but they have lost the rock of their family and must find a way to bring stability back to their own lives while supporting their mother and grandmother as she learns to navigate her new normal and find new meaning and direction, without the partner with whom she’d shared her entire adult life.
John Mathes is more than a number on a list of statistics, more than just one of the 300,000+ people who have succumbed to the ravages of this virus. He’s the guy who played golf in high school and beyond, who always had a big smile on his face, who married Sharon, one of the Catholic school girls who joined us at the public school in ninth grade. They had three daughters, were among the first of us to become grandparents, and may have been the very first to become great grandparents.
John and Sharon are the ones who took over the job of keeping our class united after Eve–the classmate who organized most of our reunions–died. They sent out emails and started a weekly meetup for anyone in town at Marion’s Pizza. They became the glue that held us all together. He’s the guy with whom I’ve had so many lively political debates on Facebook over the last few years, and I’ve already missed those debates this month while he’s been fighting for his life.
John is not a number on a chart, not just a statistic; he’s a flesh-and-blood human with whom I share a history. He is for me the new face of “pandemic.” Many people still don’t have that face; to them, those numbers are still impersonal. But tragically, before this long, dark winter ends, thousands more will have a face to give definition and urgency to the dispassionate words “COVID,” “coronavirus,” “pandemic.”
As those cold numbers begin to take on flesh, the complaints about rights being violated and government overstepping its bounds become a bit more personal. Could those people look Sharon Mathes–or whoever else it may be that gives the disease a face–in the eye and say they’re being oppressed by the mandate that they wear masks in public? I don’t know how John contracted COVID, but I know that if my wearing a mask or taking other recommended precautions carries even the chance of protecting another family from suffering the devastation that the Mathes family is now mired in, I wouldn’t think of insulting those families by complaining about my “rights” or my “inconvenience.”
Another face that guides my responses these days is that of my former pastor, from the church I left when I moved out of Florida. I’ve read Pastor Jeff’s letters to members as he navigates this uncharted territory of how to have church during a pandemic. Is it safe to meet for in-person worship, or should services be streamed online only? If there are occasional in-person meetings, what precautions need to be followed? How does a leader do the tightrope dance of trying to balance wise judgment and scientific fact with maintaining harmony and good will among parishioners who have differing ideas about how things should be done?
Reading Jeff’s personal and honest accounts of his grappling with the responsibility–in conjunction with the church’s ruling elders–to make the right decisions, knowing that no decision will be met with unanimous approval, has moved me to greater compassion for all leaders who are doing their best to guide us through these unfamiliar waters.
Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, comes to mind, along with the other governors who struggle to make wise, science-based policies while facing the ire of citizens who resent their efforts and who will flout whatever guidelines and mandates they propose: citizens whose conception of their “constitutional rights” outweighs any consideration of public welfare or the common good.
Government powers must be restrained, of course. Too many countries in world history have been case studies in government tyranny, and we have ample examples of corruption in our own country. Yet in fact, although each of us sees our personal concerns and although those concerns are valid and deserve consideration, it is not only the right but the responsibility of our elected officials to oversee the whole system, to make sure all of the parts function together. They are privy to information to which the rest of us don’t have access, allowing them to see a bigger picture than most of us are able to see. There is good reason to question the wisdom and integrity of individual officials; however, making decisions to insure public welfare is the job those officials are elected to do, and they of derelict of their duty if they don’t do it.
Locally, the West Seattle bridge was closed this year because of cracks and structural instability, and it will remain closed until at least 2022. The bridge was part of a major thoroughfare, and its closure has posed an inconvenience for probably thousands of commuters. Our local government made the decision to close based on engineering data because it is their responsibility to act for the public good. If they had simply informed the public of the structural problems and advised against using the bridge, knowledge of human nature should tell us that hundreds if not thousands of people would still be driving across it because it’s their normal route and the g-d government has no right to tell them where they can and cannot drive. They’ll make up their own minds, thank you very much.
The tell-us-what’s-happening-and-then-let-us-decide method of handling matters of public safety seems to be the choice of many who feel the government has gone too far in imposing restrictions to limit the spread of COVID. Yet history has shown that such an approach rarely if ever ends well and that those same people would lash out at the government for being too lax and for abdicating their duties if restrictions were to be loosened and the death toll to rise even more.
My heart goes out to our governors and local law makers who must do their jobs in the current polarized atmosphere, knowing they’re “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” Dr. Fauci has received death threats and a few months ago said he had hired security for himself and his family. He expressed disbelief that a doctor–one who took an oath to “do no harm”–would find himself needing protection for doing his job.
To Pastor Jeff, Governor Inslee, Dr. Fauci, and the many others charged with the enormous task of saving lives and leading others to act safely, whether they want to or not, you have my highest respect and support.
“Make America Great Again” needs to change to “Make America Compassionate Again,” “Make America Responsible Again,” “Make America Moral Again,” or “Make America United and Cooperative Again.”
The stage has been set. There will be more John Matheses, and there will be more grieving widows like Sharon Mathes; those are unavoidable facts, largely beyond our power to control. What is within everyone’s power is to take the personal responsibility to keep the number of Johns and Sharons as low as possible. We’re overwhelmed, but we’re not helpless. Everyone has a duty to be part of the solution. It’s going to be a long, dark winter; but I want to be here to see next winter.
Wear the damn mask!