Jody was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-five. MS affects each person differently. In Jody’s case, it primarily impacted the use of his legs. Initially, he used a walker in our apartment because it gave him some stability. Sadly, within two years, he needed a wheelchair to get about especially over long distances. Despite his physical obstacles, Jody was determined that he would walk again. “All I have to do is keep my muscles strong,” he would say.

Several times a day he would trudge up and down the hallways in our building using his walker. It was a chance for him to maintain an exercise regimen for his legs, but it also aided his social interactions. As he prowled about the building, he would run into neighbors and would stop for a chat, or “we shoot the shit” as Jody would say, to catch up on the building’s latest gossip. The frustrating issue was that Jody still needed my, or someone else’s, assistance to go out of the building using his wheelchair. We solved that with the purchase of an electric scooter.

That electric scooter gave Jody new opportunities for adventure and mayhem (which I won’t describe here.) He became a regular at the local playground where there are sets of exercise equipment provided for all age groups. Jody made use of most of them. A favorite was the parallel bars in the children’s area. He could situate the scooter, stand up, and walk back and forth, holding onto the parallel bars which were at just the right height for him. He would then drive over to the adult section and use other equipment like the hip abductor and adductor and the chest press. When he came home, I’d ask him how it went. And, he would always reply with his mantra, “All I have to do is keep my muscles strong.”

But, of all the places Jody traveled on his daily journeys, the most important to him was our church, The Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. On the walls of the shrine, there is a large mosaic depicting scenes from the life and ministry of Mother Cabrini. Jody was immediately attracted to a section of the mural which depicts Mother Cabrini reaching out to a young man in a wheelchair offering comfort. He would sit below that part of the mural and his head would bow in prayer. Jody told me that he always believed that Mother Cabrini would look out for him and help him to be able to walk again. Jody’s faith was very important to him.

Of course, his dream of again walking independently ended with his passing from COVID-19 in April 2020. Since then, though, I have had sensations that Jody has come back to pay me a visit. Every time he appears, he is walking on his own without a wheelchair.

July 7, 2026, will mark the eightieth anniversary of the canonization of Mother Cabrini as a saint of the Catholic Church. I’m sure Jody will be celebrating. Six years later, when I look at the mural, I don’t see Mother Cabrini offering her hand in solace to the young man in the wheelchair. I see her extending her hand to Jody encouraging him to get up and walk. I’m sure it’s true. Jody’s faith and determination make it so.

I received a phone call today from my lawyer about my brother Johnny’s lawsuit against his nursing home. It was dismissed today by the judge because of Governor Cuomo’s immunity clause protecting all nursing homes against lawsuits in the beginning months of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Even though I expected this injustice, it was still a massive gut punch and I felt like I could not breathe.

It was never about the money. The nursing home accepted Johnny after his surgery for short term rehabilitation. There was no warning to us that COVID-19 was all over the facility. They closed the facility the next day. I am quite certain his roommate had Covid from all of his symptoms that Johnny reported. Then, later the nursing home took in hospital patients who were treated for Covid. Many were still active with Covid and many could not be tested since there were limited test kits. Infection control in the facility was abysmal. Johnny told me staff members were running out of masks. I could go on and on.

I understand immunity for the professionals such as doctors, nurses, therapists etc. I will never understand immunity for not warning us about the amount of Covid in the nursing home and for the poor infection control and lack of personal protective equipment. They just took my brother into their Lions Den and my brother was eaten alive. There was no justice and no accountability. Yet I know I carried on the good fight with all my heart and all my soul to fight for Johnny for six years. What will happen the next time?

So many people woke up today without a husband, father and grandfather and the saddest part is it didn’t have to happen this way.

Only 6 years ago, we were still celebrating life and then in March 2020 Covid reared its ugliness and ruined our lives.

Today, I watched so many celebrating–a little jealous but happy for them and I have to have gratitude for the time I did have with you.

I started being very concerned about Covid-19 coming into our country the end of January 2020. So was my husband, who spoke at our town’s Mayor and Council meeting in February 2020, advising that wearing masks would be prudent. Now I am concerned about Ebola. Being a health care provider for over four decades, I have followed what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been monitoring. This center has been dismantled and our current administration has made poor choices for leadership needed to protect our country from infectious diseases abroad. The World Cup is coming soon into the United States. The epidemiologists, virologists, public health professionals and many others have not been given the tools, support and leadership to keep us safe. My brother Johnny was such a responsible and careful person. He must be rolling over in his grave.

In the summers we would visit my grandparents and my father’s family in South Londonderry, Vermont, for up to a week or so. Because these were summer vacations my personal experience of Vermont, a state that is associated with snow and skiing and winter resorts, is entirely of its summer, so I can assure those who only know Vermont in winter that in the other seasons the state lives up to the English translation of its name, its state motto: it is all green mountains.

My dad must have skied in the winters of his Vermont youth, but I remember no action photos of him on the slopes or posed outdoors with his skis held in an X beside him in our family albums. I know he skied because there was a pair of skis and ski boots down in the basement of our home in Poughkeepsie, New York. They were above my head down there, held in place along a rafter in the ceiling of the basement, near the washer and dryer. They were locked together, their bottoms against one another, the tops outward, the boots clamped into place.

Over the first few years of my life the evolution of my thought about the skis ran from, “These must be from the people who lived here before us,” to, “These are my dad’s skis, and he had a very different life before I was born,” to, “I should try these on.” Thus, when I was about ten, I attempted to secretly pull them down from their spot with a cat-like silence that I never learned to achieve, and, surprised by their weight, immediately dropped them and watched in horror as the skis and boots hit the ground very loudly and sprung apart into four unique directions and produced four different and unique loud crashes audible in every direction but especially to my parents’ ears.

I don’t remember a punishment—my self-evident embarrassment sometimes must have seemed sufficient to my parents whenever I noisily failed to injure myself or any objects—but I remember that I considered the skis to be fascinating. The downstairs was where evidence of both of my parents’ existences pre-me lay in cardboard boxes stacked on unfinished wooden shelves (the source of my first ten or so splinters): my mom’s scrapbooks from the 1950s (she ADORED Robert Wagner) and her school yearbooks and my dad’s Time-Life series of books on natural history were all there to be explored by me.

I never touched the skis again, and I never asked my dad about his skiing history, which I regret as he is gone now. He died of Covid six years ago on May 10, 2020. His old golf clubs, I was allowed to be a kid with, though, which means that I somehow unwrapped a grip on one of the fairway woods over the years and scuffed the putter by hitting the gravel stones in our driveway. He no longer golfed, but he had some instructional books (also in the basement) from the early 1970s, which means he bought them in my lifetime.

My dad grew up in what appeared to my eyes to be the smallest of small towns anywhere. South Londonderry was where my grandmother was born and lived almost every minute of her 98 years. It was a near-century of continuous and historic change, but change was something that mostly happened elsewhere, away from South Londonderry. I was aware of this seeming antiqueness from very young: my grandparents had a coal cellar and a hand-cranked clothes washer and books laid facedown on their tables as if recently looked at that were from the 1800s. I carried coal up from the cellar sometimes for cool nights and decided that I was a character out of Dickens. Those summer afternoons were always sunny and slow and it could have been 1875 as easily as 1975. At a young age, my father and his two older brothers appear to have decided that South Londonderry would be where they were from rather than where they were to be.

The skis were from that previous life, the life he was from rather than the life he was in, stored away. I expressed an interest in baseball, so a Ted Williams model baseball bat that I had not discovered in the downstairs appeared and was given to me. (I think my dad retrieved it from the barn at my grandparents house and brought it back home after one of our summer trips.) The golf clubs were from his life in Poughkeepsie as a young executive. Thus, maybe, that is why they were available for my sister and me to play with them.

My dad grew up on a small family farm on a hillside, with all that that meant: a cow, pigs, chickens. By the 1970s, my grandparents no longer maintained it as a farm; my grandmother grew flowers in the garden’s three tiers rather than food, and the barn was empty and dilapidated, a wooden jungle gym for my sister and me (the source of the next ten or so splinters). My sister and I were not going to have to live the childhood he lived, he must have decided. We were from Poughkeepsie, the suburbs. We attended school in a school district, not a one-room schoolhouse like he did. He had a nostalgia for his past, to be sure; he LOVED The Waltons, and while he, my mom, my sister, and I watched it he pointed to it sometimes like it was a documentary or a home movie.

There were things he did in youth that I know he did not like. They hunted for deer, and he never enjoyed it. I think I remember that he used a word for hunting that he rarely used: Hate. He hated killing. To this day, I’ve never touched a gun. They fished, and we never fished in New York. Perhaps he didn’t like to fish and was glad it was in the past, so my sister and I fished in Vermont a couple times … but with our grandparents. I do not know, but perhaps he hated skiing, too.

He never declared any of this, that he wanted a different life, not that I have heard. Instead, he lived it. In his descriptions, Vermont and his childhood seemed somewhat exotic, bygone, gone. He worked very hard to construct the world that my mom joined and that my sister and I grew up in. We grew up in a childhood about which we could feel nostalgic when it was our time. I know we do.