Lori Anderson of Arkansas can attest that there is so much tragedy we can do nothing about that people have no excuse for not doing something so simple as wearing a mask and getting a shot in this time of COVID-19.
Now 72, Anderson was 5 in 1955, when she saw her mother end a protracted struggle with mental illness by fatally shooting herself.
“What really broke my heart is the last thing she saw was me looking at her,” Anderson told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
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Anderson grew up to become a mother of seven. Her youngest, Scotty Garvin, fell ill when he was just a toddler and underwent multiple transplants, followed by multiple relapses. He died of leukemia on Oct. 2, 1998.
“Seven years and seven months old,” Anderson said ”He spent half his life fighting leukemia.”
On March 19, 2017, Anderson’s 34-year-old daughter, Stephanie Woodford, was visiting a friend when a gunman suddenly began firing for no apparent reason. She was fatally shot in the neck.
“Her middle name was Adelaide, after my mother,” Anderson said.
On March 22, 2018, Anderson’s brother, Tommy, died in a car accident.
“He was my best friend,” Anderson said.
Last March, her youngest sibling, Michelle McColl, tested positive for COVID-19.
“She was a Trumper. She said, ‘There is no COVID, it’s just a flu,’' Anderson told The Daily Beast.
McColl had been a 2-year-old sitting in the next room when their mother shot herself, and the sisters had been separated through the rest of their childhood and much of their lives. The two had finally been reunited only for McColl to succumb to the virus on Sept. 11 of last year, on the anniversary of another national emergency. The ongoing one to which McColl fell victim has claimed many more lives than were lost at the World Trade Center.
“She was my baby sister,” Anderson said.
Anderson got vaccinated as soon as she was able. So did her husband, Bill. A surviving daughter, Angela Morris, was wary of vaccines and thought that maybe the worst of the pandemic was over.
“People were running around with no masks,” Morris told The Daily Beast. “I always just wore my mask, kept my hands clean, and stayed away from people. I thought we were taking the needed precautions.”
Morris did not push her 13-year-old son, Alexx, to get the shot even though he became eligible last spring. He came down with what he thought was just a cold in the early summer.
“He told me he just wanted cold medicine, so I went to go get cold medicine,” Morris recalled. “A week in, he just started sleeping. He wouldn’t even wake up for meals.”
Somebody was half joking when they sprayed some cologne as a test. The joke ended when Alexx could not smell it. Morris took him to get a COVID-19 test and it came back positive.
The next day, Morris noted that Alexx’s breathing was shallow and that he was hyperventilating. She checked him with a pulse oximeter they had at home. A normal reading is 95 to 100, and anything 90 or lower is cause for serious concern. His was 25.
By the time they got him to a community hospital in Batesville, his reading was 19. Within an hour, he was on a helicopter bound for Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.
“The doctor told me, ‘I promise you, it’s going to be a long road,’” Morris remembered. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, that’s not good.’”
Alexx spent 45 days in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, 37 of them intubated and on a ventilator. He suffered multiple organ failure and repeatedly went septic, and fought a blood infection, and was placed on dialysis.
Alexx’s father had died of cancer when he was a toddler. There is a snapshot of Morris leaving the crematorium with an urn containing the father’s ashes on one hip and her son on the other. Morris now faced the possibility that yet another tragedy might strike this star-crossed family and she might lose her son as well.
“She just kept saying, ‘I killed my baby,’” Anderson recalled
But Alexx fought on.
“A lot of bad things happened in there,” Morris said of the PICU. “A lot of good things, too, because he came out of it.”
The day came when Alexx was taken off the ventilator. He underwent speech therapy and then spoke his first words.
“I love you, Mommy.”
He was moved from the PICU to an intermediate ward and then into rehab. He remained remarkably calm until about a week ago.
“He got mad at everybody,” Morris recalled. “He just told the nurses, ‘Go away, don’t touch me!’ He didn’t want anybody near him.”
He quieted as he dozed off.
“And then he woke up and everything was great again,” Morris said. “He had to take a nap.”
He was taken off oxygen for the first time on Monday.
“We’re still not moving our toes and our legs, but we’re moving our arms and hands, and his head can stay up now,” Morris reported. “It used to wobble like a newborn.”
She added, “Except that he’s 13 and well aware he used to be able to do this stuff.”
For the moment, he still has a feeding tube. He may permanently have what the doctors call “COVID lungs.” But he had survived when it more than once it seemed he would not.
“I’ll take it,” Morris said.
The doctors will be testing his vocal cords this week.
“He sounds like a frog,” Morris said.
Mostly, he sounded alive when he spoke on the phone to his grandmother Anderson, who was spared another terrible loss.
“I love you, Memaw!” he told her.
She is left to wonder how people can fail to do something so simple as wear a mask or get a shot when there is so much tragedy we can do nothing about.
“Life is not fair,” Anderson said. “I learned that at an early age. LIfe is not fair, but we have to do the best we can for ourselves and for others.”
She paused.
“Stop what you can and then work on the rest of it.”
