Death by Covid — A Love Story.
My Dad died on January 18 and I had to write an obituary. After it ran, lots of people told me what a great obituary it was, and I thought: Do they mean it’s well written? Or that my father had a great life?
My father DID have a great life, and it spanned almost a century, and therefore covered an enormous amount of very interesting history. He was a pilot in the RAF. He studied painting with David Bomberg. He immigrated to California. He became an architect. He traveled to wherever there were huge earthquakes to create safer buildings, he helped to re-design the Bay Bridge, and he designed and built a beautiful and extremely distinctive mid-century modern house which my siblings and I will always treasure.
But he also died of COVID-19 in the week that has thus turned out to be the deadliest week of it yet. I personally knew three people who had a parent die within 48 hours of mine, and if you widened that timeframe out to two weeks, it’s alot more.
All of us have long stories about the greatness of our respective parents, which we struggled to document in obituaries or on Facebook. But if there is one thing that it is is difficult to convey to others, it is what is unique about one’s parent. This is because, unlike with other forms of memoir-writing, what you want to tell people isn’t what it was about your parent that was so great, but how you felt about that, and them. Maybe that feeling is universal — we all feel great, and sad, about our relationship to our parents, and about what life is going to be like going forward — and if that’s the case, why even try to capture it?
And there’s this other thing too, which I am now learning, which is, what is haunting about a parent’s death isn’t their life, but the fact that there’s all these things you now wish you knew, and now you never will.
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When I was 21, and had just finished my college degree, my best friend’s Dad died of a heart attack. She had just had a discussion with him at dinner, and a few hours later she found him unresponsive on the kitchen floor. She had to give him CPR.
That was the first parent funeral I attended, and though I was horribly sad for my friend, and thought that I understood what a loss it was for her, I also thought he died in part because he was old. In fact, he was 58.
In many ways, Mr. Nasr’s death doesn’t seem similar to that of my father. He was young, his death was unexpected, and his children had a long way to go in their lives without him. All those graduations and weddings without him. All those christenings. Which is sadder, I wonder, that he didn’t get to know his grand children? Or that my Dad — who did — didn’t know who I was the last time I saw him?
Mr. Nasr was Egyptian, or rather, he was from the area we now call Palestine. When I think about that, I have so many questions. What was he doing during World War II? What was it like to be there then? But at the time I knew him he was just a Dad — you know, he drove us to swim meets sometimes; he sat at the head of the dinner table when we ate over, things like that. What a long way it must have been from Egypt to suburban California. And yet, I knew nothing of that. Sure, he had an accent. But so did my Dad, so what?
Thinking back, people are always so much more interesting than they are in their role as parent. But it’s only as parents we get to know them. And it’s only in their obituaries that we can really understand the long sweep of their life, the things they were before they were what we knew them as, the whole picture of their life. I remember one of the stupid Ivy Leagues I applied to back in the day had as its personal essay prompt, “Write your own obituary, as if you died tomorrow.” And I’m sure that I, like everyone else, just wrote one long boastful list of accomplishments: “Captain of the swim team. Winner of St. Mary’s math contest.” Surely that’s not really what obituaries should read like, but on the other hand, how do you explain, not what a life was, but what a life meant?
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My mother was really excited by what my father’s obituary looked like, but I realize that hardly anyone else will see it, at least not out in its natural habitat, the world, because no one reads the paper anymore. Such things are a throw back to a different time. Running the obituary in the paper did mean that I was able to get a nice link and share it on social media, but that’s not quite the same thing, and it still doesn’t really answer the question of why obituaries feel so empty and dry and so lacking in truth. Do they capture anything at all?
I think my dad’s life would have made a good novel, but only if it was lightly fictionalized and given an exciting plot. Without that veneer of fiction perhaps the only people who would want to know about him are us, his children, and like I said, despite having lived our whole lives alongside him, there is still so much we didn’t know.
I know, for example, that my Dad voted Labour in the general election of 1945, but given that he was completely uninterested in politics the whole time I knew him (as an alien, in the U.S., he was pretty detached about everything that went down here, a fact I found annoying when I was younger) I would like now to know why he did that. I want to hear more about the Blitz, and food rationing, and his mother, whom I never met. Also, I know that he married my mother in 1953, after a year on Fulbright Scholarship at Stanford, but given they have almost nothing in common at all, I wonder now why he did that, not to mention why their marriage lasted 67 years.
“Maybe,” my sister speculated when I brought this up, “he just did it for a green card.” And we laughed. As one does.
There are a lot of other things I’d like to know now as well, but I won’t belabor the point, because as I said, people’s parents aren’t that interesting to other people, at least not in their guise as parents.
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Sometimes it feels ironic that my father, having escaped death by World War II, died of something as quotidian as COVID. But I try not to dwell on it, especially since a doctor told me that his death would have looked the same (i.e. gruesome) had he died from pneumonia, as expected. At least this way we can say that our family participated in a historic national tragedy — and of course, as I said, since it was the deadliest month of the holocaust, I have many friends and acquaintances who can relate to the experience.
The main way that his dying of COVID has affected us is that we can’t hold a real funeral. Thus, writing the obituary for the newspaper has been almost the only tangible thing I was able to do to commemorate his death. Today the newspaper called me up and asked if I’d like some extra copies, and I said yes of course, though now that I have them, I am not sure what I will do with them. Mail them to England probably — where my relatives will get a kick out of the front-page stories about protests in front of the local business Robin Hood Ltd. and the State’s severe lack of vaccines.
Meanwhile, I am still stuck with the feeling that there is more to be said, more to be done, more to be lived, more to be felt, even. Instead, I am paralyzed. There’s this feeling that the loss of a parent brings, that some part of yourself has died along with them. I don’t know…maybe it’s the part that allows you to think of yourself as a child. All I know for sure is that I, and my ten other friends who lost parents in the last few months, and probably everyone else, is struggling to articulate it, and the obituary section, however inadequate, is the only place that lets us try to do that.
