I missed my father’s funeral because it was the right thing to do.
Three weeks ago my father tested positive for Covid-19 in California. Last Sunday he died in his care home with an oxygen tube under his nose, a hospice nurse by his side and powerful opiates in his bloodstream. He and I were close, we spoke daily on the phone and I am very sad he’s gone. In lieu of — or better, in addition to — sending flowers, please stay home, wear your mask, mingle not and also consider the following:
I am a dual US/UK citizen who lives in London, a city currently spiking with a new strain of Covid-19 that is reportedly 70% more infectious than regular strains. My hometown of Los Angeles currently has one the highest infection rates in the world. As a British citizen under Tier 4 restrictions (imposed the day before my father died), I am not permitted to travel abroad. As an AMERICAN citizen, however, I can claim “special circumstances” — or ask a documentary producer friend of mine to temporarily put me on his payroll — and, with rapid results tests and two/three weeks of quarantine all told, attempt to make my father’s funeral (though there is a chance the US will follow the example of 40+ other countries and ban UK travelers completely, probably while I’m in the air, knowing my luck). It generally takes twenty-four hours by tube and train and plane and car to get from my front door to Mom’s house. So technically, I can go but…
What would you, a random stranger, want me, a random stranger, to do in such a circumstance? Fly from highly infectious London to super-spiking southern California — where there are vanishingly few empty ICU beds — and make my father’s funeral or stay home and forgo the airports? Epidemiologists and front line health care workers: same question.
I know what I want Person X to do in my situation — exactly what I wanted them to do for Christmas. Stay home. Mingle not. For their sake, for my sake, for your sake — hell, for the sake of all humanity. And yet so many chose to travel and sit indoors with friends and relatives over Christmas 2020, acting like they’re not Person X to anyone. If you think it’s all a hoax, fine. There’s probably not a single paragraph in any language that will change your mind. But to my eyes, the only reason so many educated, science-positive, well-informed people I know in England didn’t go home for Christmas is because it would have been against the law. They knew the numbers but they needed Boris Bloody Johnson to legislate the right thing to do — or, worse, created a superspreader event on public transport by trying to flee the city before lockdown. Was travelling for Christmas really that important? Yes, it’s a wonderful family holiday and heartbreaking to lose but so are funerals, visits to deathbeds and the lives of the vulnerable. Stay home. Wear your mask. Mingle not. Aren’t we supposed to be in this together?
To every Person X out there who pulled the brakes on Christmas, who traded a turkey dinner for a glitchy zoom; who chose not to see their beloved sister this one year or let their angry grandparents down; to all those who told their disappointed children that extended family Christmas was cancelled; to those of you who sacrificed a meaningful annual ritual in one of the hardest, most isolated winters many of us have ever known then broke down had a cry about it all: thank you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. To me, your staying home feels like solidarity with my grief. Your staying home says to me it’s good and right and proper I’m not pulling strings to risk Person X’s health and life so I can fly home and put my father’s remains to rest as people have been doing since before Christ, let alone Christmas. As for the rest of you:
What are your plans for New Year’s?
(Ira Winn’s obituary to be found here)
