Coronavirus Killed My Grandfather Before I Ever Got To Meet Him
On June 2, 2020, I met my biological maternal grandmother for the first time. Only six days later, I sent a text asking “Any obituary found for Willmore/Definitive answer on his death?” in response to the news that Theodore Willmore, my biological maternal grandfather, died of COVID–19. The death of my biological grandfather made me feel… awkward. I didn’t know what to feel at the time. I never met him, Judge Robert E. Simpson, Jr. ruled on November 30, 1999, that my biological family had their rights to Kordel Kristopher Hineline terminated forever. Only a year later, Skip & Michele adopted me into their house that never became a home amongst a marriage that lasted far from forever.
The news of my biological maternal grandfather dying of COVID–19 didn’t strike me as being too legitimate. In a worldwide Pandemic, a death in the family may automatically ring bells of Coronavirus. I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes.
I begin to Google “Theodore Willmore” every day in search of answers. The results repetitively look like this:
I knew after my first search that Theodore Willmore died of Coronavirus. If Google knows his name and our Pandemic are related, then they are, Critical Intelligence doesn’t lie. I still, however, held a desire for some more concrete and tangible answers. I continue to Google his name every so often in search of these results.
In August 2020, I got what I was looking for. The coroner report appears on the first-page search of Theodore Willmore.
- Decedent Name: Theodore Willmore
- Date of Death: May 29, 2020
- Municipality of Death: West Goshen Township
- Manner of Death: Natural
- Cause of Death: Respiratory Failure, COVID–19
And so, Theodore Willmore has died of COVID–19. In Witness Whereof, the said Coroner doth set both hand and seal this 29th day of May in the year of the Lord 2020: Christina J. VandePol, M.D.
A name other from my grandfather’s being listed on the coroner report meant that I have some more searching to do.
Dr. Christina Vandepol, Candidate for Chester County Coroner.
What…? The county coroner is an elected position? Why on earth would the person whose job it is to determine the cause of death, in a nonpartisan manner, earn their job in a partisan political election?
This realization brings me back to a Sociology course I took while at Penn State, in which we learned of the “Real” Causes of Death vs. the “Fake” Causes of Death. In the case of my grandfather, Dr. Vandepol was ethical enough to write both COVID–19 and Respiratory Failure on the coroner report. This means that although my grandfather contracted Coronavirus, it may have been the Respiratory Failure that killed him rather than COVID–19. The coroner report doesn’t, however, state any preexisting conditions my grandfather may have had or if he ever smoked cigarettes. Correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. Another missing piece of the coroner’s report is my grandfather’s age. He was 70, and he would have turned 71 in June.
When the coroner report settles in my mind, I begin to realize that I am one of the few people left who can help preserve any proof of his living. There isn’t much out there on who Theodore Willmore was or what he did, every time Ancestry DNA gave me hints on his existence my biological family members would note that these life events weren’t actually his. Twitter is a good place for information to be found and preserved, with hashtags and searches and retweets. So I make a little post about Theodore Willmore, and post the same thing onto Facebook, along with a picture of the coroner report:
It’s true. My biological maternal grandfather is one of the 7,702 killed by #Coronavirus in Pennsylvania, United States. I never met him.
That last sentence starts to sink in a little more. I never met him. Did I even have any grandfathers left? One.
I never met him. Robert E., Simpson Jr. swung the gavel severing my ties to Theodore Willmore, and twenty-one years later, he is dead. I never met him.
Could I get emotional over my grandfather’s death when I never even met him? Not at first. But the day after I read that coroner report I realized that I wasn’t quite myself. I’m standing at a AAA and I just stare, unable to speak to anyone. I’m thinking about my grandfather’s death, or maybe even just the coroner report, maybe I just stand here not knowing but I’m confused and he’s dead and I never met him.
I so casually, oh too casually, told the world that Coronavirus killed my grandfather thinking that I had no emotions to deal with because I never met him. But as I read those last words carefully and think to myself I never met him, I begin to cry. No–I begin to weep. I tell myself to stop and this is stupid and I’m drooling and I haven’t cried like this since elementary school when my mother forced me into playing football but he’s dead and I never met him. I had two grandfathers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. One finalized the capital sales of Slabaugh Custom Stairs on May 5. The other died of COVID-19 on May 29. And now I have one grandfather.
I had two grandfathers throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. One is white, the other was Black. It is a known statistic that African Americans are disproportionately infected and killed by Coronavirus. Even Donald Trump admitted the truths of this alarming antithesis.
I’m happy to have my white grandfather. He, forever, is the grandfather in my life. He often filled the place of an absent father and absentee stepfather. “And this is how you sweep,” he said to me one day, taking the broom out of my hands and showing me a push stop push stop push method rather than a continuous stroke all over the floor. His custom stair company was revered and devoured the New Jersey coastline custom stair market. “That stair company over there next to the YMCA, they know how to get it done,” a technology professor told my class in sixth grade. “That’s my grandfather’s company,” I tell the class excitedly, shocking them, with their faces holding doubt in the likes that this boy from the four-bedroom household of ten must be lying about his familial relations.
I saw my grandfather this July at a, call it, family reunion. There was the brother who got married without even telling me during the pandemic. There was the mother who recently sent “one of those emails that will take five years to get past.” There were the aunt and uncle who would go on to fix my glasses later in the night, making them even better than they were in manufacturer mode. There was the sister who is starting college virtually during a global pandemic, stolen from a senior prom and a graduation ceremony at the Santander Arena. There was the grandmother who helped me chop onions and strawberries and mint for pea salad and the elementary school nephew who asked for the pea salad recipe prior to tasting the dish.
A long drive back to Raleigh from Bucks County meant that I would become my grandparents’ guest for the whole weekend. I couldn’t help but wonder as I sat there at their kitchen table if they might contract Coronavirus sometime during this pandemic, and if they did how much they might suffer from it. “The Good Lord blessed us with immune systems to fight infections,” my grandmother tells me. Even as I sat there, knowing my grandfather most likely died of COVID–19, waiting for tangible proof in the form of a coroner report, I was just about in full agreement with her.
Gender, Race, and Class analysts may state this set of grandparents is in the entitled group of White, Anglo–Saxon Protestants, or “WASPs.” My grandfather is even a known critic of Pagans and nonadherence to the laws set forth in the Hebrew Bible. Even with all of the Black Lives Matter protesting I’ve been doing I know however that this mislabeling of successful white people is wrong and slanderous. They didn’t smoke, they didn’t drink, they didn’t throw their lives away. Resilience, hard work, and decency set them apart from most of society and gave them stories to tell. Did living in a country where most bankers and bosses look like them help? Well, it probably didn’t hurt any chance at success.
During my stay with my grandparents, I was told stories of familial relations and functioning dysfunctions. My grandfather still has pictures of his first wife on his computer, all those memories from when they first met and were only dating are stored safely in his electronic data center, and probably the psychological one, too. “She must’ve been the most beautiful woman I knew at the time,” he tells me.
He shows me pictures of his church cleaning the streets of Philadelphia in the 1970s, and I ask, “Why is there trash everywhere?” I was saddened to see what looked like a population of people not care about their surroundings and fumble around with the dirt.
“You have to realize trash bags are a relatively new invention.” The people in those pictures looked a lot like me and a lot less like my white grandfather, yet he was the one with empathy towards their circumstances. So much of our battles our questions our sadness stem from class issues rather than racial ones, yet sometimes class struggles transform into racial resentments.
I left my grandparents’ house that weekend not only having met with them yet again but truly getting to know them. The way my grandfather speaks of his first wife makes me want to grab hold of a woman, staring into her eyes, and never let go. I often imagine myself if I would one day pop up at the wedding of an old crush and say to the person next to me, “she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” on some Ne-Yo “Fade Into The Background.”
My grandmother gave me some homemade strawberry jam for the way home. Maybe I’ll have toast and that delicious jam tomorrow morning with a spinach and onion omelet. We did have an interesting conversation regarding Gone with the Wind.
“They used Blackface in that film,” I inform her.
“But we didn’t get to know about any of that up North. This movie taught us about plantation life,” she replies. And so there would be no convincing her that Gone with the Wind is a racist film. I didn’t even try. It didn’t feel… soulful… to do such a thing.
I sat at the barbershop this morning, and a young little man hops in the chair next to me. Little Man’s barber pulls back the curtain, separating the two of us as if we are hospital roomies. Now in this barbershop, you come in, right away getting your temperature scanned, and hand sanitizer application whilst at the door is a must. For the first time as I watched all of these precautions, Little Man having a plastic curtain pulled in front of him, I didn’t laugh or smirk or hail inside to end the agenda already.
I sit in the barbershop chair in deep subtle thought, as Little Man will come back to his family today amidst this Coronavirus pandemic we’re in. He’s young, it’s almost Christmas, wouldn’t it be nice for him to see his grandparents this holiday season? I only have one grandfather left, the only memory I have of another one is a coroner report.
My biological paternal grandfather is a person who I’ll also probably never come to know, as the caricature Judge Robert E. Simpson, Jr. listed as my father, “Sheldon Terrell or Sheldon Arrindell,” has no evidence of ever existing in the flesh. Who am I to say Little Man hasn’t been exposed to such corruption and such trauma? Coronavirus killed my grandfather before I ever got to meet him… Coronavirus killed my grandfather before I ever got to meet him….
