Death of an Old Friend

by Pa Rock
Class of 1966

I have basically sat at home hiding from the pandemic since word of its existence began leaking from our government back last March.  In the intervening nine months the furthest I have traveled is one hundred miles, and that was a highly focused trip to a necessary doctor's appointment.  I've cancelled one special trip to the East Coast, and missed two fairly regular outings to the West Coast to see grandchildren.   My poor old car will finally be going in for its three-month servicing next week, only about six months late.

There is a lot of COVID in my rural community, and even with my careful lifestyle I have been fortunate not to contract the disease.  I have known several people who weren't so lucky, though most of those were young and got over it quickly.  Two people that I know did get fairly sick, but they chose to take their chances at home and avoid hospital stays.  People die in hospitals.

So even though I knew COVID was out there and I was taking basic precautions to avoid the virus, the full impact had not touched me.  That changed a couple of weeks ago when I learned that one of my high school classmates, Doug, had been hospitalized with COVID and pneumonia - and was on a ventilator.  Over the next few days, the news continued to get worse.  I learned that my friend had been admitted to the hospital on Thanksgiving Day and that he was in a setting so isolated that family members were not allowed in.   This past Thursday news reached me that Doug had lost his battle with the disease that had once been dismissed by the highest levels of our government as "fake" and then as something that would be around only a couple of weeks.

We had been told to go back to work, to reopen our schools, to resume our normal lives.  Some government officials prattled on about something called "herd immunity," and indicated that the more people that caught COVID, the safer we would be in the long run.  We witnessed some of our leaders parading around brazenly without face masks - and even ridiculing their political rivals for wearing masks.  And, not surprisingly, we saw our leaders catching the disease and then receiving treatments that were not available to us mere mortals.  Nothing about the whole mess seemed honest or straight forward.

The only "straight truth" seemed to be the numbers, and they kept going "straight up."  Now we are somewhere north of 310,000 - and one of those represents a friend of mine.

Doug Morriss was seventy-two-years-old when he died from COVID and government incompetence.   He will be missed by his loving family and a host of people who had the pleasure of knowing him back when the world was normal.  

Rest in peace, Old Friend.