That is the title of this powerful opinion piece at the NY TImes Website.
The subtitle reads “Young, healthy people like me are getting very, very sick from the disease caused by the coronavirus.”
The author is Mara Gay, a member of the Times editorial board, who has had frequent appearances on MS-NBC.
Her powerful piece begins like this:
The day before I got sick, I ran three miles, walked 10 more, then raced up the stairs to my fifth-floor apartment as always, slinging laundry with me as I went.
The next day, April 17, I became one of the thousands of New Yorkers to fall ill with Covid-19. I haven’t felt the same since.
A few paragraphs down we read
The second day I was sick, I woke up to what felt like hot tar buried deep in my chest. I could not get a deep breath unless I was on all fours. I’m healthy. I’m a runner. I’m 33 years old.
Gay never had to go on a ventilator.
She had a strong support system, including people with medical expertise.
After telling us she didn’t need a ventilator, she writes
I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping.
I hope by now you are interested enough not only to read the complete piece, but also to pass it on.
There is much to ponder in this superb op ed. Consider, for example just these two paragraphs:
Why are more people dying of this disease in the United States than in anywhere else in the world? Because we live in a broken country, with a broken health care system. Because even though people of all races and backgrounds are suffering, the disease in the United States has hit black and brown and Indigenous people the hardest, and we are seen as expendable.
I wonder how many people have died not necessarily because of the virus but because this country failed them and left them to fend for themselves. That is the grief for me now, that is the guilt and the rage.
And there is her conclusion, written after telling us of others who did not survive their encounters with COVID-19. Gay write
Theirs were the faces I saw when I lay on my stomach at night, laboring for every deep breath, praying for them and for me. Those are the Americans I think about every time I walk outside now in my tidy Brooklyn neighborhood, stepping slowly into the warming spring sun amid a crush of blooming lilacs and small children whizzing blissfully by on their scooters.
I hope the coronavirus never comes to your town. But if it does, I will pray for you, too.
I sit at home in my living room, both my wife and I in high risk categories both because of age and also underlying health issues.
I spent today, the penultimate of the school year for the seniors I teach, grading and commenting on their final two papers, prodding others to get their work in, commiserating with them at the loss of the normal culminating activities at the end of high school.
But I also find myself fighting depression, despair, and rage.
The depression comes from knowing the losses we are still going to suffer.
The despair at the needlessness of the loss and diminution of living of so many, because too many in this country did not take this seriously.
The rage? That despite all we have learned how willfully blind are some, how skewed the decision making of many in positions of power for whom apparently the lives of others is a lesser value than politics or the Dow Jones or the size of portfolios.
I hope despite that I can maintain what Mara Gay offers at the end of her piece, these words:
I hope the coronavirus never comes to your town. But if it does, I will pray for you, too.
Peace.