What COVID-19 Took from Me

Six weeks before COVID had come into our house and we didn't even know it. In the form of an in home health care aide who was a staunch republican who believed then president Donald Trump when he said that the disease was nothing more than a hoax and despite working with the most vulnerable refused to mask wouldn't wash her hands and in my mind he murdered my father. I had come home for fall break as it became clear that being on campus past Thanksgiving was not a good idea. That Thanksgiving was going to be our last but we didn't know it that night after we had eaten dinner and my father desperately tried to call his siblings just wanting to tell them that he loved them just wanting to spend a little time with them. Like the beginnings of a bad horror movie that night marks the beginning of the end. Dad had always been sick and during the winter it was always hardest that suddenly we were all sick my mother and I my little brother was sick and living in Denver not knowing what to do we called the nurse's helpline which said dad just probably had pneumonia just keep him warm OK removed his mattress from the bed we had set up in the living room to closer to the bathroom so that it wouldn't be as much of A strain on his lungs he went from just one continual source of oxygen to needing both his oxygen compressor and either an oxygen tank or another compressor going at the same time. The night before the horror show truly happened my mother and I got into a knockout fight about putting him in a home my fears of losing my father to a nursing home where no one would care for him where his needs would be neglected where he possibly could be abused and worse exposed to the virus that was already in our house though we didn't know it. Over the next three days things got worse and we called the ambulance begging for help until finally it became clear that dad was disoriented unable to know where he was it was scary seeing my father who had always been the towering figure reduced to an incoherent mess unable to take care of himself last words my father ever said to me were "Connie what are you doing here?" Those words still send a chill through my soul as the year before my aunt Constance had passed away and in the moment before he was taken to the hospital for the last time my father looked at me and saw his sister.

In the stress of it all I did what I always did I took pictures my universal language of letting people know what I was thinking and feeling in my mind I was thinking the insurance company will try and screw us over so I need proof that it really was bad enough for him to take an ambulance that it was bad enough for him to go to the hospital bad enough for him to go to the ER. Little did I know that these would be the last images of my father the last photos I'd ever take the last moments I'd have with the man who raised me. On December 14th 2020 my father died of COVID-19 the ventilator wasn't helping and with threats from the hospital it was kind of clear that we needed to take him off. Every day I've looked at these images and wondered if publishing them was right the sharing the most vulnerable moment of my life was the right thing to do. These are the hardest images that I've ever taken the most powerful the most real never edited never touched just my images of my father. I publish them because I feel that the world needs to see what happens when we allow a megalomaniac like trump and his cult to run rampant the lives lost of the COVID-19 pandemic we have never really talked about loss of the person I loved most in this world I am not alone in this over a million people in the United states have died of COVID-19 and all of them are dead because of one man's ego and inability to care for the most vulnerable in our society.