About Those Older Folks ...

We know that many of the COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing and other elder-care facilities. The old and the frail and very vulnerable to this heartless virus. (Kind of superfluous to say "heartless virus," I know.)

On Facebook and even on the news I have read/seen people talking about how, you know, old people are going to die anyway (as if the rest of us aren't!), so we might as well just open up the economy again and let the Grim Reaper reap away.

Well ...

My grandmother Dyer, Pearl Dyer, died in a nursing home on January 5, 1960; she was only 67 years old; I was in 9th grade. I'd seen her only a few times (she lived and died in Oregon), but I remember visiting her in her nursing home, where she told a story about a man hit in the head by lightning. I laughed myself sick. She was a kind, generous woman--had nearly a dozen children--her husband died when the oldest of those children was a teenager--dealt with the Depression (they lost their farm)--and somehow managed to raise an amazing group of kids, one of whom, of course, was my dad.

Both my Osborn grandparents died in a retirement community in Columbia, Missouri--Grandpa on September 30, 1965 (he was 68), Grandma in 1978 (at age 81). I knew them both very well--we were living with them when I was born (1944)--Dad was overseas with the U. S. Army--and for most of my childhood years in Enid, Oklahoma, we never lived more than a couple of blocks away from them. I attended both funerals.

My father died in a nursing home in November 1999 (he was 86); my mother died in a nursing home in March 2018 (she was 98),. They were both fantastic people--the older I've grown, the more I've come to appreciate them--what they did for their three sons--how they lived their lives.

My great teaching colleague and dear friend, Andy Kmetz, died in a nursing home in Stow, Ohio, on July 19, 2018 (he was 87). Joyce and I visited him the night before he died: He was lucid and loving--still the "Kmetz" I'd known for about fifty years.

Here's the point--if it's not already stunningly obvious: I loved all of those people. I saw them not as "old people" but as people--people who'd had enormous influence on me and on many others--people who'd loved being alive, right to their final seconds--people whose deaths were not a convenience but a great rip in the fabric of many, many others' lives.

I'm now 75 years old--and am probably not all that distant from a nursing home myself. I have so much to live for--my wife, our son and his wife, our two wonderful grandsons, the books I want to read, the writing I want to do, the ...

You know.

And so I find heartless and callous--and, okay, even ignorant--the cruel memes I've seen about letting our elders catch the next train. As Dickens once wrote, we're all "fellow passengers to the grave"--and most of the time we pretend we don't know it.*

And today, I fear, such pretending is rampant.


*In the early pages of the story Bob Cratchit, talking with Scrooge, says this:

But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.