My dad used to say that “para morirse, sólo hay que estar vivo” (in order to die, all you need is to be alive). In other words, anyone can die, at any time and for no reason. On a Sunday this July, my son’s dad died suddenly, unexpectedly, of COVID19.
My son and I got the news by phone in our hometown of New York. My ex had passed away in
Miami, where, as I write this, hospitals are packed at over 140% capacity, but many folks still aren’t taking it seriously. Several staffers at his worksite had tested positive and were walking around coughing and wearing no masks. He did try to protect himself, wore face coverings, avoided sick people. It was in his nature to be cautious.
But one afternoon—just once—he slipped up and gave a sniffling coworker a ride home. The next day, he tested positive and was sent home from work, to self-quarantine. (I still question why nobody thought of sending him to a hospital.) He called to give us the news.
When I spoke to him, he was slurring his words and said he felt exhausted, just wanted
to sleep. He sounded like hell, but I thought he’d get over it, and I guess, so did he. Why not?
This was good ol’ dependable Rudy; surely he wasn’t about to die, to exit our lives without so much as a warning. Coronavirus fatalities happened to OTHERS, not me, not my son, and Rudy,
he was breathing okay. He was being looked after; sort of. People were dropping off food and medicine at his door, checking up on him periodically by phone.
So when he took a turn for the worse that Sunday, he shrugged it off at first —that’s what Latin men do. And when relatives finally convinced him to go to the ER, it was too late: he collapsed in his bedroom, getting dressed to head to the hospital.
Thankfully, there was no funeral, no need for us to fly to that nest of infection that is Florida today. His ashes were scattered over the ocean. My son is mourning in his own, quiet, intense way, mostly anger at a turn of fate that he thinks could have been avoided.
I didn’t cry, still haven’t. Things had ended badly between us, and had been iffy for a
long time.We were both Latin, but from completely different social backgrounds and after the initial romance wore off, we fought like cats and dogs. And we never really became friends after the split, something I tried to bring about. Though superficially polite, our post divorce relationship was always kind of volatile and I’d hear an edge of resentment in his voice whenever we talked.
To be honest, I never really understood the guy— but I know I wasn’t blameless, and that whatever I did, he never forgave.
I do recall some good times along the way. There were sunsets in Key West and moonlit beaches in Puerto Rico. There was that memorable first night in our first apartment as a couple, in Queens—
we’d arrived before Con Edison and the furniture and had to sleep by candlelight, on a bare
mattress on the gleaming wooden floor. We were much younger; we didn’t mind.
As I say, we did have some charmed moments in our marriage.
So no, when we got the call that Sunday morning, my son and I didn’t cry, but we were
stunned and depressed, and, yes,suddenly even scared for our own lives.
The weird thing about death is that you always think it’s going to happen to someone else, then it sneaks up on you, it takes who you least expect—and it does so with a finality that’s as cruel as it is brutal.
Every day, I see and hear about the number of COVID cases on the rise, about the number of deaths increasing dramatically everywhere. I used to be like everyone else; they were just numbers to me, fodder for the talking heads on TV.
What’s finally brought the virus home is the strange and sudden realization that neither I nor
my son will ever speak to his father again.
