A Cautionary Tale about Cautionary Tales

 On March 11th of this year, I posted what I thought would be my last post on this blog.  It was called "A Year in Review".   I thought Covid was mostly behind us.   The vaccine had come out and I had this crazy belief that everyone would get the shot and that would be that.  No more covid.

How wrong I was.

Little did I know that the worse was yet to come, at least for my family.

In August my mother died of causes unrelated to Covid.   There were eight of us in the hospital with her around the time she died.   

Shortly after she died, six of the eight of us came down with Covid.    We don't know where we contracted it, but our best guess in the hospital which was swarming with covid patients at the time of my mother's death.   We all wore masks but perhaps the viral load was just too much for our bodies to fight off.

We were all vaccinated.  Five of us recovered without the need for hospitalization.   My father did not.   My father succumbed to Covid.

There are conversations that I have been privy to since my family went through this horrific experience and there is something I'd like to address:

I have heard BOTH people who support the vaccine and those who don't support the vaccine use our family as an argument in their favor.    It works in both directions.

1.   They were vaccinated and most of them didn't have to be hospitalized and they survived.

2.   They were vaccinated and they got Covid anyway, and one of them even died.

I think you can guess which argument belongs to which party/belief system.

I would like to discuss why the second argument infuriates me.

Let's go back to the part of the story where I told you that "six of the eight of us came down with Covid."   Let's be more specific about this and I will share that it was my youngest daughter and my brother who miraculously(seriously!) escaped Covid's grip.   We don't know how.  They didn't have a different vaccine or blood type than the rest of us, so that argument doesn't work.  I would also like to remind the reader that both my parents had died within about two weeks of each other.  My daughter had lost her grandparents and my brother had lost his parents.

When I first had Covid I felt pretty awful, and I'll admit I was a little scared about what might happen to me, what my fate would be.    The thought kept going through my head, "I cannot die.  My family cannot lose any more people."   

I was pretty sick, and I don't like to think about how sick I would have been without the vaccine.  Imagine if none of us had been vaccinated.   Imagine that in addition to my parents dying that the six of us had also been hospitalized or worse.

My brother and my daughter could potentially have both lost their entire family of origin within a matter of weeks.

But they didn't.

There are people who say to me "I feel so grateful that my family hasn't been affected by Covid."  And I hold my breath and don't say, "I feel lucky too."  Because maybe that would sound weird considering what I recently went through.

But I feel so damn lucky. 

There, I said it.

I feel lucky that five of us survived Covid and we have nothing but the vaccine to thank for that.

And my father?  He died of Covid, that's what it said on the death certificate, but my family knows how badly he wanted to be with my mother again and he saw a way to get to her, and he took it.   I'm not saying that was the right thing to do but he was in the throes of grief and he had no fight in him.  He took the out.

So, using him as an example to promote an anti-vaxxer platform seems both weak and disrespectful.

This Thanksgiving there will be two empty chairs at our table and that is an extremely sad thing.  We will all be feeling that.

We will also be grateful that the rest of the table is full, that there are only two empty chairs.

And, I hope that if our family's story is used as a cautionary tale at other Thanksgiving tables it will go something like this:

"Sure they lost a father/grandfather/uncle/brother to Covid, but it stopped there.   It stopped there because of the science they chose to believe in.   It stopped there and now the two members of the family that did not get Covid have people to both celebrate and mourn with, and they are not alone.   This is something to be grateful for on this holiday.

Okay, Boomer?"

Get vaccinated.