"Ted, are you okay?"
"How are you doing? Do you want to talk?"
Such texts from dear ones have chimed into my phone since I shared the news of the covid death of my youngest daughter, Kathryn, two weeks ago.
The scene around her apartment in Austin was as if in a TV crime show: three police officers, two EMTS, a county medical examiner and a family liaison social worker. Kathryn had shut herself off from help. Though she protested, I drove down to check on her. A day too late.
After spending last year recovering from organ failure due to her own alcohol abuse, she had begun to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Though she placed herself into the category of the immuno-compromised, she still didn't have to die this way. She had received her first vaccine. But procrastinated on the second. Then it was too late. Kathryn was in jeopardy, as though walking along the shoulder of a busy Texas interstate. And the unvaccinated, unmasked whizzing by in Hummers and F-350 duallys swerved and mowed her down. But for the stubbornly unvaccinated in Texas and nearby states and the politics questioning the efficacy of vaccines and masks, I think she may have survived. We shall never know.
I wish not on my worst enemy my experience of saying goodbye to a child, gently placing my sanitized hand on her cheek, just before the body bag was zipped.
I vacillate between stoic silence and anger. Prayer and church attendance two Sundays thence have become the beneficial interstitial fluid between those two emotions.
So how is Ted? I defer to screenwriter and fellow Louisiana native Robert Harling as I paraphrase words he put into Sally Fields' mouth in "Steel Magnolias" upon the death of her character's daughter:
I'm fine. I'm fine!
I can jog all the way home to Arkansas and back to Texas, but my daughter can't. God! I'm so mad, I don't know what to do. I want to know why. I want to know why Kathryn's life is over. I want to know how her estranged young son will ever know how wonderful his mother tried to be. How she struggled. Will he ever know what she went through?
Oh, God, I want to know why! Why, Lord? I wish I could understand.
It's not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to go first. That's what husbands and fathers are supposed to do. Die first.
I've always been ready to go first.
I just want to hit somebody until they feel as bad as I do. I just want to hit something! I want to hit it hard!
In the movie, Olympia Dukakis proffers Shirley MacLaine for Fields, playing the bereft mother, to hit and hit hard. It was comic relief. I need some comic relief.
In my script I would strike out against self-absorbed, Trump-age Republicans who care more to pontificate on right to life, passing draconian laws against abortion, than about caring for life outside the womb. Gin up the base. Avoid anything remotely noble in service to the health, wellness and safety of the living. That's the new Republican Party.
I want to smack Texas Gov. Greg Abbott so hard he would fly from Austin to El Paso. That's what I think of his anti-mask mandates.
I want to shove a photo of my daughter's deathly, cyanotic face under the noses of Arkansas legislative members like Sen. Trent Garner, with his Arkansas mask prevention law. Such as he profess to stand on principles of liberty and freedom of choice. Never mind if the youngsters and the susceptible (like my daughter) fall ill from covid. They matter not, as long as deep red state Republicans have checked off the Trumpite boxes.
And to the parents -- mostly mothers -- who loudly chanted against masks outside the Bentonville School District office last month, I hope you never have to experience anything similar to my last two weeks. May you never sit outside an isolated hospital room while your school-age daughter is on a ventilator, and worse, I hope you never have to make arrangements with a mortuary far from home, emotional closure delayed because embalmers and crematories are so backed up with the body count.
In the name of human decency, I wish these anti-science vigilantes would mend their ways. They disrespectfully stomp on covid-death graves of 650,000 Americans.
And when my family ordeal finally ends, my dear Kathryn will be one of them in the Bentonville City Cemetery.