Who Dies

COVID took my grandfather. But it wasn’t what killed him.

- By Sarah Jones

The author at age 3 with Grandpa Charles.

WE CREMATED MY GRANDFATHER the week I was supposed to get married. The white dress I bought a year ago still hangs in my closet, next to the black dress I brought home with me to Virginia. I’d flown back from New York the first week in September, when he was still alive, when there was still a chance he could stay that way. But we all knew the odds. The black dress was a precaution and a reminder of how badly things had gone awry. I’d bought it when I still thought I would wear it to work in the summer. Then the pandemic happened, and it’s a funeral dress now.

My grandfather died from complications of covid-19. The last time I saw him, I wore gloves and a plastic gown, and put a face shield on over a mask. I stood next to his hospital bed with my family. The doctor warned us not to touch him, but I did, gently, one gloved hand over his. That he should die without touch felt intolerable, a punishment for a man who didn’t deserve one. We reminded him that we loved him. My mother told him that the neighborhood bear had returned, that the farmers’ market had good carrots. Despite our alien look, he recognized us. The virus was bad, he said, but he’d fight it.

He tried. He lingered for several long days until the virus had its way. From the evening I got the call that he was sick until the moment my mother told us that he’d died, he fought. But he was 86 years old, which made him a high-risk covid patient. His health had been declining, gradually, for months. The virus attacked his lungs, and then his heart, with lethal precision. In the end, he was no match for it.