I’m Ready For My Close-Up, Mr. Patrick

My aunt will be 101 this week, which means she was alive for the Spanish Flu, though being in utero she doesn’t remember it. She does recall her mother’s stories about expecting in 1918 and delivering in early ’19 when the pandemic was still raging. Pregnant women topped the most-vulnerable list and hospital births were risky but her mother was small and delicate — and expecting a nine-pound newborn — so a home birth was ruled out.

Now Aunt Nell is tiny and frail, another scourge is spreading and she’s once again counted as a member of a high-risk group. That is: seniors targeted by Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, who advocates willfully sacrificing them to jump-start the economy. To his way of thinking, after surviving one pandemic Nell should voluntarily surrender to another.

Patrick favors lifting lockdowns no matter the outcome for elders, who, he maintains, can take care of themselves — closing the distancing gap with the generation gap and ignoring the pesky pandemic. “There are more important things than living,” he told Fox News, in true Trumpian fashion. The 2020 version of It’s the economy, stupid.

There’s a group called Ropes that Rescue. And now we have Cures that Kill — hydroxychloroquine, bleach smoothies and forgoing social-distancing.

As a baby boomer I’m also in Patrick’s target group, so in our family alone he’d kill two old birds with one stone.

But I’m a bit confused about what he wants us to do. Since we old folks are on our way out, we might as well just go out? Shop till we drop? Or should Nell spare a millennial by delivering groceries with her walker and I save a student by being an alternate at Spring Break? Though — full disclosure — me in a swimming suit would undoubtedly clear a beach. Or should we just wander in front of speeding cars like cows on a country road? No matter the method, the message is clear: swarm together like bees until you drop like flies.

I’m nostalgic for 9/11. When a national tragedy was considered a tragedy and lives were properly mourned. When The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” made me sob at the loss of a stranger. Each life was enthralling, every death haunting. Not just the famous or wealthy, not only first responders. But the “ordinary” people of New York, who turned out to be extraordinary to the parent, spouse or child, the sibling, coworker or friend who buried them.

Nell is now the matriarch of our family, the last of her generation, our on-site historian. A retired journalist, she wrote a biography of our uncle, her husband of 56 years, for his 27 nieces and nephews, full of anecdotes we hadn’t heard and photos we’d never seen. She’s the last person who remembers that he fought in France in World War II under General George Patton while his brother served in Hawaii as a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes. She tells me a grandmother I never knew was a dead ringer for Billie Burke — Glinda the Good Witch of the North — and that she had her Louis XVI bed copied in miniature for her pampered Pomeranian.

At 96, Nell stopped driving, gifted her historic Cadillac and assented to assisted living, though she held on to her condo for awhile in case she changed her mind. She once studied painting in Mexico and Paris and traveled through Europe, Morocco and Haiti but now inhabits a single room, albeit in a caring and cautious community. She’s bolstered by books, art and her newspaper articles, bound in four anvil-weight volumes, and her still-functioning typewriter. She follows the Times, nightly newscasts and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Because of the coronavirus, she’ll visit on the phone but now eschews company. She’s not ready to surrender — in Mary Oliver’s words — her “one wild and precious life.”

In Nell’s lifetime women won the right to vote and Lindbergh soloed the Atlantic; there was a Great Depression, a second world war and a man walked on the moon; a president was assassinated, the twin towers attacked and the internet was born. She yearns for one more first — to celebrate a woman inaugurated president of the United States. She wishes the 2016 election had turned out differently.

Don’t we all.