Even as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem continued to dismiss calls for a mask mandate, declared the pandemic under control, and insisted the state’s hospitals have plenty of room, Doug Raysby of Sioux Falls died of COVID-19 without getting the ICU bed his doctor said he needed.
“I think that people really recognize that leadership has consequences,” Noem told Fox News on Oct. 21, the day of Raysby’s death. “And what we're doing in South Dakota is Republican leadership.”
Raysby’s viewing was four days later, on the same weekend Noem hosted a mass gathering in Sioux Falls that included an indoor concert, the latest of a series of events she has endorsed in defiance of CDC protocols. Raysby’s 6-year-old stepson, Kalvin, known as Nugget, stood silent before the open coffin and placed a pencil drawing of the family inside.
Doug was buried with the drawing on Monday. Nugget returned to school, where his stepfather had been a volunteer between shifts at a local factory that makes agricultural equipment and, since the start of the pandemic, protective gowns. The state’s infections continued to spike and surpassed that of North Dakota, becoming the highest in the nation as Noem embarked on a multistate gallivant for Trump.
South Dakota had just reported nearly as many cases in a week (6,773) as Maine had during the entire pandemic (6,387). That did not stop Noem at a Team Trump bus tour rally in Bangor from trying to tell Maine Gov. Janet Mills how to manage the virus.
“I made very different decisions than the governor here in Maine,” Noem said. “I would remind that she overstepped her authority. Governors do not have the authority to put in the mandates that she did.”
Noem tweeted an invite to people in business to relocate to her state: “Live your life. Achieve your dreams.”
But you were out of luck back in South Dakota if you happened to be Doug Raysby or one of the 402 other South Dakotans killed by the virus. Nugget asked his mother, Katrina Raysby a question.
“Mama, are you going to cry every day for Doug forever?”
The boy had asked another question back on Oct. 9, when he first learned that his stepfather was in the hospital.
“Is it COVID?”
Katrina had given the only answer she felt able to give. She then called her own mother, Kathy James.
“She said, ‘Mom, I just lied to my kid,’” James recalled. “At this point, we still really thought Doug was going to make it.”
Doug, 57, had thought it was just a stomach bug when he began feeling ill on Oct. 9. He had, after all, been assiduous about always wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing whenever possible.
Doug was feeling no better on Oct. 10 and he went to an urgent care facility, where he was given a COVID-19 test and sent home pending the result, whenever that might be. But when he had still not improved by Oct. 11, James, who is a nurse, insisted he go to an emergency room. Doug drove himself there.
He later made a video call to Katrina to say he was admitted after being given a rapid COVID-19 test that proved positive. He was still on the call when James came by the house, and she could see he was crying when she spoke to him. She understood the tears were for his family, not for himself.
“He was saying, ‘Kathy, if I gave you this, I’m so sorry,’” she remembered. “He was always about everybody else.”
Doug had to wait five hours just to get a bed at Sanford USD Medical Center even as South Dakota was officially reporting the hospitals had plenty of room. He became so ill that his doctor said he should be in the intensive care unit.
“[The doctor] felt Doug needed an ICU bed but there were no ICU beds available,” James would remember.
President Trump, meanwhile, was tweeting effusive praise for Noem, who was extolling her state’s supposed success against the virus.
“I always knew that South Dakota could be an example to the nation,” Noem said. “I never expected that such an example would be set in the midst of a global pandemic.”
Noem actually said that the state’s top national ranking in per capita infections was an indication of what a fine job it was doing.
“Our record numbers that you’re talking about are actually just reflective of the amount of testing that we’re doing,” she said—a claim belied by increasing positivity rates and hospitalizations.
Meanwhile, James tested negative. Katrina tested positive, but her symptoms were relatively mild and did not require inpatient treatment. Doug never did get an ICU bed. He continued to express concern for everybody but himself.
“It was always, ‘How are you guys doing? How are you feeling?‘” James recalled.
He never complained and the family only got a sense of how tough things were for him when the doctor telephoned with nightly updates. Nugget overheard enough of those conversations to deduce his initial instinct had been right.
“Doug has COVID,” Nugget said with a seemingly innate directness.
He then said, “You didn’t tell me the truth.”
His mother allowed, “You’re right. We didn't want you to get upset. We didn’t want you to worry.”
He then asked, “Did I give him COVID?”
Katrina was thankful she could answer this question truthfully.
“No.”
Katrina and Doug Raysby with Nugget in pre-COVID times.
Courtesy Katrina RaysbyThe family had been told that Doug could receive a visit if he went 24 hours without a fever, but he never quite made it. He came close to complaining for the first time when this temperature rose to where he was placed in ice packs, naked save for a towel over his privates.
“He’s like, ‘I’m okay, except my ice packs are melting and I’m sitting in a pool of freezing water,’” James recalled.
On Oct. 22, the family was notified that the end was near and Doug could receive a visit once he was off life support. Katrina and James picked Nugget up at school and arrived at the hospital with the expectation the boy would be able to see Doug a last time.
“Then they say to us only one person can be with him and that person has to be over the age of 18,” James remembered. “We said, ‘We have a 6-year-old who needs to say goodbye to his stepfather. They said, ‘We’re very sorry.’”
Katrina went in. James stayed with Nugget.
“Do I get to go in?” the boy asked.
“No, Nugget, you can’t,’” James told him. “Only one person will be with him.’”
She explained that he would be able to watch on live video.
“But he won’t hurt any more,” James assured her grandson. “He won’t be ow-ey any more, just like Tony isn’t ow-ey any more.”
Ow-ey was their word for being in pain. Tony was a close friend of Katrina whom the boy had called uncle. Tony had died in 2017.
The boy’s only other experience with death was the demise of two family dogs, Hershey and Max. Nugget had at other times looked up at the sky and pointed to a cloud and exclaimed, “I see Tony!” He had then pointed to another cloud and said he saw Hershey and also Max, who had once managed to knock over and break the TV.
“I see Hershey! I see Max!” Nugget had told James as he pointed skyward. “And next to Max is Jesus’ TV!”
He had added, “They really up there and everything’s good, mama. They’re fine, except Jesus’ TV is broken.”
James now figured she knew how to explain to the boy that his stepfather was joining the dead.
“Doug is going to go to the clouds, honey,” she said. “He’ll be up there with Tony and Max and Hershey and we’ll be able to look up to the clouds whenever we need him and he will be your daddy angel.”
Nugget later set to drawing.
“He was like, ‘Look, there’s my house and there’s me!’” James remembered.
He pointed to an area nearer the edge of the page.
“He said, ‘I’ll put Doug here. I’ll put him farther away because he’s not with us anymore,’” James recalled.
Nugget drops a drawing into Doug Raysby’s casket.
Courtesy Katrina RaysbyJames brought the drawing to the viewing and asked Nugget if he wanted to put it in with Doug. James went up to the open coffin several times and silently gazed at his stepfather. He placed the drawing inside before the lid was lowered.
A graveside funeral was held on Monday in Geddes, the small town where Doug was raised. The rest of Nugget’s life began as he strode away across the snow-covered grounds.
When he was brought to school on Tuesday morning, he announced that wanted to go home.
“He said ‘I don’t want to go in there, I don’t have any friends,’” James reported.
He was in tears when he entered to join his first-grade class. But he came out smiling at the end of the school day.
“He said, ‘I was just joking. I have lots of friends. They were really nice,’” James reported.
He had a bag full of letters that his classmates had written to him on colored construction paper. One was from his best friend, who had also been in his kindergarten class, where Doug had served as a volunteer.
“YOU ARE MY BES FEN. I’M SORRY THAT YOUR STEP DAD DIED.”
Nugget has a passion for science and he and James sometimes go online to look up experiments they can do at home. Nobody in or outside of school has been able to explain to him why people do not wear masks.
“He’s like, ‘But Nana, it’s science,’” James said. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t people believe this?’ It’s really hard to explain to him.”
Doug always wore a mask and was particularly cautious because he was diabetic. The only time James can think he might have been infected was four days before he began to experience symptoms of COVID-19. He became hypoglycemic at home and an ambulance responded to the call for assistance. The paramedic entered without masks, as if they were following the lead of their governor.
“We didn't know if they were just exercising their freedom like good South Dakotans,” James later half-joked.
James herself cannot understand why anyone, most particularly a president or a governor who can influence others, resists doing such a simple thing that could save so many lives.
Both Noem and Trump like to say that even one life lost is too many, but they are really saying that to avoid any responsibility for the 225,000 lost and counting. James is reminded of the actual enormity of a single death when she recalls the manifest joy Doug and Katrina found simply in being together.
“Everybody deserves somebody to look at them the way they looked at each other,” James said.
On James’ Facebook page is an open letter she wrote to Noem at the time of Doug’s viewing and the governor’s mass gathering.
“Unlike your event we still asked for masks and social distancing,” James reported.
James added that she was also posting photos of her son-in-law, daughter, and grandson Nugget.
“See the drawing Nugget made?” James wrote. “It will go in Doug’s casket. It’s of all of us and his home. Doug is farthest away because he isn’t with us anymore.”
She went on, “Your political career will be over by the time that Nugget votes, so you don’t have to pander to him.”
James wondered if Noem would nonetheless help her explain some things, beginning with the security provisions the governor had recently added to her official residence.
“You felt threatened by something non specific so you took 400K taxpayer dollars and built a fence around the Governor’s property. Doug was threatened by a deadly virus. Yet you couldn’t ask people to wear a $2.50 mask from Target. Help me understand why your perceived threat was more important than the actual threat to his life.”
Other questions James had included why Noem and her fellow Republicans are seeking to destroy the Affordable Care Act when it would leave millions—including Doug’s widow—without health insurance.
“Thank goodness she doesn’t appear to be a COVID long hauler,” James wrote. “That pre-existing condition might not get covered in a few months.”
James continued, “Nugget loves science. You apparently don’t love it or certainly don’t understand it.”
James referred to a Sioux City newspaper’s refusal to print a Noem op-ed about the pandemic because it strayed too far from the truth.
“You are angry that your false statements about COVID aren’t getting printed,” James wrote. “Doug had me, who understands COVID well to help him. I would think you would be embarrassed to spread lies that might cause more death. Yet you aren’t.”
James made Noem an offer she will surely refuse.
“So I have an invitation for you. We are going to be at the cemetery November 11th (my daughters birthday). We are having cake with my son-in-law. Maybe you can join us. Bring Senator John Thune. I am hoping U.S. Senator Mike Rounds is voted out but bring him anyway.”
She went on, “We can distance outdoors so you don’t have to mess your makeup with a mask to protect us. You all can explain to me why the Senate can push through a [Supreme Court] justice because [she is] ‘pro-life’ when lives like Doug’s don't matter as much. I want to understand why public health science is less important than your popularity. I want to know why you can’t set an example by just wearing a mask.”
She ended with a variation on the slogan printed on Noem’s T-shirts.
“Until our next chat. More science. Less you.”
In the meantime, Nugget is sure to miss his stepfather all the more when Halloween arrives. Nugget was Batman last year.
“And Doug was Robin,” James said.
At least Nugget has the perfect costume this year for a little boy who finds himself in a world where he has lost his superhero sidekick because his governor and his president and so many others are too selfish and irresponsible to take simple precautions to save lives.
“A ninja,” James reported.
