Eighteen years ago I was having an argument with my mother. She had been sick for five days and refused to go to the hospital. She ended up dying. Sound familiar? One of my BFFs just died last month because she also refused to go to the hospital. As I lay there in the night, thinking of the similarities between the two, I was struck by how helpless I felt in both cases. I knew what was happening. I tried to tell them both what was happening. But neither one listened. They were both equally wonderful and equally stubborn women.

One gone eighteen years. The other gone forty-two days. The pain is seared into the fiber of my being. When death comes to someone you love dearly, it changes you…just as loving them did. Every Sunday night, I want to reach for the phone and talk to my mom. Every night when I sit down to write, I want to check in with Diane to see how her day went. 

I found out last evening that one of my Facebook friends died on Saturday. Evelyn was a widow, a sister in Christ, a fellow women camper, and an artist. She went through a terrible ordeal when she lost her husband. She was quite ill herself at the time and very nearly died. She fought her way back, became a speaker, and traveled around telling the story of how God saved her.

Then she got covid. 

I am torn. It hurts that she is gone and I won’t get to talk to her anymore. It makes me sad that there won’t be any more of her gorgeous wood carvings to grace my windowsill. It breaks my heart that she fought so hard to live when it would have been understandable if she would have let go in order to join her husband in Heaven. And I’m angry. Picture after picture, I have seen her socializing with others over the last two years No masks. No social distancing. No vaccine. She went out with friends for Christmas. Her smiling face will be there…looking out at her friends for however long Facebook is around. And we’ll know…

Someone will say, “It was God’s will.” “We do not live one hour beyond our allotted time.” Still…God also created doctors and gave them knowledge and sent them to create medicines to help us. It reminds me of the story of the man who drowned in a flood. He refused the radio broadcast warning and the rowboat and the helicopter that came to rescue him from the flood saying, “No! I’m a praying man…God will save me!” He asked God why He didn’t save him and He said, “I sent you a radio broadcast, a man in a rowboat, and a helicopter! What more did you want?”

I am practicing grace. There are people who are brokenhearted at the loss of their loved ones to this disease. In this moment, they are more wrapped up in the fact their loved one died and not as much in how or why. It’s just so hard when you worked in medicine…when you know the vaccine works in reducing the severity of illness and cuts down on the number of deaths. And still, people refuse…and people die. It makes me angry, and sad, and confused, and frankly…tired.

Here is an interview with a medical ethicist about this very subject. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/23/1075168721/a-medical-ethicist-weighs-in-on-how-to-approach-treating-unvaccinated-people?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab

It’s been two years since the first case of Covid was documented in the United States. I’m tired of all this illness and death. I’m tired of life being different. I read a story this weekend about a Reddit thread where someone asked the question, “What do you see now that gives you pause when you didn’t think a thing about it before Covid?” Salad bars, blowing out candles on a birthday cake then serving it to others, shaking hands with strangers, wearing masks everywhere, tasting your best friend’s drink. Life will be forever changed by Covid. In many of the same ways a death changes us.

What do you do differently now and can’t imagine going back to the old ways?

❄️?❄️

“For then the dust will return to the earth, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.”

Ecclesiastes 12:7 NLT