Nettie Harris was born in 1934 in the South Carolina and her mother and father passed away during her teenage years. Nettie relocated to Washington, DC and was raised by her Aunt Lottie. Nettie relocated when she was in her 20s to the Big Apple–she always wanted to be in New York City and work in a hospital and also open her own fashion boutique.

Nettie was a fashionista and loved shoes and clothes. She was labeled the best dresser always because was tall and thin and gorgeous just like a supermodel. Nettie was a True Diva. Nettie married in 1961 and had one daughter named Laurie in 1963. Nettie was hired in 1970 at Hillcrest Hospital as an EKG technician in the early 70’s and she later relocated to work on the labor & delivery unit until July 2000 when Nettie retired at age 66.

Nettie opened her dream boutique and sold upscale clothing. Nettie’s husband preceded her in death and Nettie traveled the world, spoiled her 7 grandchildren and was always her daughter’s Bestie. When COVID 19 hit New York City with a vengeance Nettie left her home to live with her daughter and grandchildren. Covid had Nettie confined at home as well as her family and Nettie decided to go home one day alone. Unfortunately Nettie fell while at home alone and broke her hip and she had to have emergency surgery. Nettie’s daughter was hesitant and against her mom having to be hospitalized but she knew her mom needed surgery. Nettie’s surgery was successful and Nettie awaited a transfer to a rehabilitation facility for her physical therapy and unfortunately another patient in Nettie’s room had Covid and gave it to Nettie.

Nettie was exposed on 8/24/21 and went on to be with her Lord and Savior on 9/10/21. Nettie lived a beautiful rewarding life as a mother, a grandmother who spoiled all of her grandchildren and helping patients for 30 years and becoming an entrepreneur and traveling the world with her coworkers and her only child Laurie and her grandchildren. Nettie would be 89 years young on this July 29th. Nettie’s memory will continue to be lived on through her daughter Laurie and Nettie’s 7 grandchildren. Nettie’s new job–an Angel watching over her daughter and grandbabies.

She was such a lovely soul. She had awful dementia and couldn’t remember much more than her own name but she was always willing to see the joy in anything. I convinced her on her birthday, only two weeks before she died, that she was turning 21. I gifted her red nail polish and lipstick and for the last time I got to laugh with her.

Sadly my 92-year-old mother will soon have her third Mother’s Day without her son Johnny. It makes my Mother’s Day difficult too to see her in pain on this day and every day. It did not have to be this way. Are we prepared for the next Pandemic?

The melody of his voice carried down the stairwell and into the kitchen, the opposite of the direction of the wafting coffee aroma about which he was excitedly speaking. “I can smell breakfast all the way up here!” he announced with the excitement of a little boy who had just glimpsed a steam locomotive. The coffee steam swirled from here to there, and his voice met it and danced down to me.

The cadence of his feet on the stairs told me he already had energy to outlast my sleepless new mom energy, and it gave me hope I would have spring in my step beyond this season. The unexpected proximity of a parent living part of the time with us in my adult life allowed for so many unique sharing experiences. Making breakfast together with or for my dad was a pure delight because no one – no one – was more appreciative of or excited about the soft fluffiness of scrambled eggs, the towering height of buttermilk biscuits, the sunset sky hues of ruby red grapefruit segments shining from a turquoise Fiestaware bowl.

It was from my daddy I learned how to deftly mix pancake batter for lofty stacks, how to cook eggs with care so they were soft and not rubbery, how to make breakfast extra special with a tiny vase of freshly flowers from the yard. He did these things for my mom, and he did them for me, for us.

I can still see him climbing out of his red car, clutching a handful of azaleas for me he cut from the bushes he and my mama planted – cotton candy pink, fearless fuschia, signs of Texas spring bursting forth. The care he took to not only buy a new toddler puzzle but to also wrap it in cheerful paper with a bow, knowing half the fun for the kids is the anticipation of what lies beneath while excitedly unwrapping the package.

His patience. His forethought. His joy. His genuine concern for the current state of others’ emotions, aspirations, and comfort.

His spirit takes up so much space still, his words hanging in the emptiness where he sat or stood or danced with a grandbaby in his capable and willing arms.

It doesn’t feel that far from here to there. Earth and heaven. His earthly self and his eternal and evergreen gifts. But I miss the “here” more than anything. We need you. We’re better for you. We’re changed because of you, and fiercely stepping into how we honor you in milestones and the everyday. Hoping you can see us from there.

May 8, Kyle’s Memorial Day 2023, Two Years Gone

Oliver Jeffers is a Northern Irish painter known for his Dipped Paintings project. He spent months creating a painting, only to dip it in a vat of paint before a small crowd of witnesses. Only the top of the subject’s head remained out of the container. Whiskey was passed around, and a toast was made: ”What’s done is done, and what’s to come is to come.”

I can’t relate. I am a ruminater. Not to be confused with a ruminant. But maybe if I chew on the events of late March and early April 2021 long enough, they will become palatable?

No. Not today, on Kyle’s Memorial Day. Not ever.

Jeffers said, “The only evidence of this painting will be the people who witness it, like history.” He began the projects with interviews of subjects who had witnessed death. I thought, oh, how awful for those people.

Then I remembered. I am one.

Kyle died on April 6, 2021, 17 days after he began showing symptoms of COVID-19. He was 38. His wife Charlotte, dad Murray, step-dad Mike, and I were all in the room when he died. None of us was prepared for what would happen. Not even Murray, who had watched his wife Margaret die of cancer the previous week.

When we were told that Kyle’s death was inevitable, that he was in multiple organ system failure, we initially agreed to let him go. But later I thought I had been too hasty. I thought about what Kyle would do for me if the situation was reversed. I knew he would fight for me to live. I called and changed my mind. A meeting with the “care team” was scheduled.

The next day at 3pm, Charlotte, Mike, and I walked into a conference room to see a half dozen nurses and doctors of varying specialties and a chaplain waiting for us. A more detailed explanation was given of Kyle’s condition, but not nearly as detailed as I would have liked, though I wonder if I would have been able to absorb it all, had it been really thorough. Though they were trying to help, I felt ganged up on.

Fidgeting and half listening and trying to slow my racing thoughts, I needed the bottom line. “Have any of you EVER seen anyone in Kyle’s condition recover from this?” All heads moved slowly and sadly side to side. The young doctor who was a twin for Dr. Jimmy Palmer on NCIS looked like he would cry. I couldn’t fight them all. The decision was made.

We returned to the hospital that night around 7. None of us are medical people; we didn’t have any idea what this was going to look like. Now I wonder if the others, like me, thought it would be peaceful. It wasn’t. At least not for us.

Marilyn, the first of two tenderhearted nurses assigned to Kyle that night, whispered as she encouraged us down the hall toward the COVID ward. “Only two visitors are allowed in a room, so when we get there, I’m going to close the curtain so other families don’t get upset.”

Which of us would have been left behind if she hadn’t had the guts to break that rule? Mother? Wife? Father? Step-dad of 20 years? Thank you, Marilyn. Thank you forever.

We spent about an hour with Kyle, reconciling our lives before this night to our lives after. We didn’t say goodbye. How do you do that? We had no concept of what life without Kyle meant.

We held his hands, touched his face, spoke softly. His brother Austin was on the iPad on a table in front of the bed. Austin wasn’t speaking to Kyle at the time, and hadn’t been for quite a while. I often wonder what he felt that night. I’ll never know. He doesn’t speak to any of us anymore.

When we were told it was time to extubate Kyle and remove him from the other machines, only Charlotte was able to hear the nurse describe how Kyle’s body would react. She was told that he would sit bolt upright in bed, that his eyes would fly open, and that he would take a loud, gasping breath. He would look like he was conscious. This is exactly what happened.

I was so shocked that for a moment I couldn’t feel my body. I wanted to scream what the hell was that? Why weren’t we warned? It was the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced. I can only hope that Kyle was so heavily sedated that he was totally unaware of anything.

The respiratory therapist had tears in his eyes as he pulled the tube. The bottom of it was covered in what looked like green pea soup sludge. I knew in that moment that he never had a chance. No wonder his oxygen level had been 57% when he walked into his ICU room in the second of three hospitals where he received care. How could anyone breathe through that?

For the next 10 minutes he took about ten more ragged, gasping breaths. I leaned over and whispered in a soothing voice that he was OK, he could just relax, everything was fine. And then he was dead.

A doctor came in to pronounce him. She was a tiny Indian woman not much older than Kyle with very kind eyes. She stayed about ten minutes, repeatedly listening to his chest, and gently moving curly locks of his hair up and off his forehead. We just stood, unmoving, in our posts at his bedside.

They let us stay another hour. Finally, we had to leave. We looked at each other briefly as if to say, it can’t be time yet, can it? We shambled out of the room, each of us glancing back at him. I was the last out, and I stopped to take one last photo of this unbelievable scene. I knew that if I didn’t have evidence of this moment to revisit with my own eyes, with the heart monitor display dark and quiet, that I would find a way to deny it forever. His second nurse that night, Kevin, said to me as I crossed the silver metal strip of the door threshold, “Kyle was 38. I’M 38.” His face was a sad mix of confusion and compassion and maybe a little bit of misplaced guilt.

It has taken me two years to get really in touch with my outrage that Kyle, and we, had to go through this end of his life. Why couldn’t he have been given an injection of morphine, like the veterinarian uses when euthanizing our beloved animals? Why make us all suffer through this? It is inexcusable.

I was researching medical euthanasia drugs last week. I wanted to see what is used for terminally ill people in states where it is legal. It turns out that the drugs that vets use for our animals are not legal for human use anymore. The drugs that are used now are not uniform in their effectiveness, not in time until death or peacefulness. Who made them illegal? And how dare they?

My son had a right to a completely peaceful death since he was considered terminal. Shame on the people who made that unavailable to him. I curse their arrogance for deciding, for others, what is “right”.