What COVID-19 Took from Me

"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.