COVID-19 took my husband’s life. Other than being 67 and taking medicine for slightly high blood pressure, he was extremely healthy. Mike was very physically active and had been constructing a duplex for our two special needs adult kids with his own two hands and rarely had anyone help him with that huge project. He was strong. He was also a professor and a musician, so he had very good lungs and didn’t smoke or drink.

I have not been able to wrap my head around why he got so sick and died in the summer of 2021 from this virus. The only thing he hadn’t done was get the vaccine. He was waiting until he finished the last part of the project (approx. one month away) before he did it, in case he had side effects or just couldn’t work on the duplex for a couple of days if it made his arm too sore. And what also bothers me is that, by this time, there were monoclonal antibody infusions available (but most of us didn’t hear about them yet), yet he was not ever offered that option. Yet, the very next week after he was admitted to the hospital, my daughter (who’d caught COVID from him), was given that antibody treatment at the very same hospital. Was ageism involved? Is that why they didn’t even mention the antibodies to my husband?

All these questions still haunt me. I know of only one other person in my entire county (pop. about 21,000) who died from this virus during the entire pandemic. What did I do wrong (took him to the wrong hospital? waited too long? trusted our clinic which gave only one instruction – “stay home and treat it like the flu”?) or what did he do wrong? These questions still haunt me as I see the 4th anniversary season coming up a few months from now.

In addition to the lack of support from our PCP and clinic, such as giving us some indication of what warning signs to watch for while he “stayed home and treated it like the flu”, I also have had to deal with living in a “red” state where people still scoff and act like this was not even a real illness and on social media, shortly after he died, I had total strangers saying such hurtful and hateful things to me. For instance, I’d responded to a post by our health department about vaccinations to encourage people to get them because if he’d had his, my husband might have lived, only to have someone reply to me, and newly widowed grieving wife, that “They paid you to say that!”. Another person, on a different post, had the gall to tell me that “the only reason he died was because you took him to the hospital!” I engaged with that person and asked him to consider what he would have done in my shoes … would he have “just let his loved one get worse and worse on the couch until they died at home?!?” Eventually, this aggressive person with his unfounded very strong opinion, got the point and backed off. No one talks about that kind of trauma for the surviving family members. I still see it today, as neighbors talk derisively about the pandemic, in front of me… people who know me, knew Mike, and know what killed him. And our very own country! No National Memorial! No kindness or caring like other victims of natural or violent acts receive. It has been painful and isolating. No one ever demands to know if a cancer patient or a person killed in a car accident had “any pre-existing” conditions, do they?

If it were not for a special “COVID-19 Loss Support for Families and Friends” Facebook group I found, and a few other grassroots resources like WhoWeLost.org that have helped those of us who went through (and still go through) this very traumatic experience a safe place to share with and support each other, I’m not sure how we COVID-19 widows/widowers, parents, children, and friends who lost people during the pandemic would have made it this far. I am so grateful for the people I’ve met who truly understand. Because America doesn’t understand or doesn’t care to. I so wish our nation could do something significant to honor the 1.22 million fellow Americans we lost in such an awful way.