Cancer vs Covid

Thirty one years ago today I had to bury my father. 

 The service was graveside only because it was Passover, but the crowds came to pay their respects on that beautifully sunny spring day.

 A formal shiva wasn't allowed for the same reason, but still, the people came.

I thought losing my sixty-one year old father at the young age of thirty-three--just seven months before he was supposed to walk me down the aisle--was the saddest and worst thing that ever happened to me.

Flash forward to 2020.

My grief was intense(he was such a hilarious, snarky, cool guy!) but it was mixed with an equal amount of anger.

 ("You were told to stop smoking..why didn't you?")

But in 1989, you didn't pick up the newspaper and learn that there were 800 deaths in a single day of people who were perfectly healthy just weeks or even days before.

 You didn't hear about  a young, pretty nurse who left her toddler son motherless and her young husband a widower because she worked  in a hospital with inadequate supplies and protective gear

I don't have the stats in front of me..maybe seven hundred people DO die every day in big metropolitan areas from lung cancer, and maybe some of them were non-smokers.

But every newspaper and television show and television commercial were not saturated with horror stories about sudden and unexpected deaths from stupid life choices and dangerous addictions..

When someone was lost to a disease as deadly as advanced lung cancer,  they had  real funerals..real memorial services...My Dad left the world surrounded by his wife and my two brothers and me, not scared and alone like the victims of Covid-19.

Last night, my tired self wrote a post about the ravages of this epidemic, how I can't go outside and how my hair is now more than fifty shades of grey,.

Maybe my year will be erased..my summer will be summerless, but if selfish people stop being selfish, reckless, and stupid, life may resume in some form or another.

I miss my Dad today, as I always do on this date, but his loss was not..unfair..

People are succumbing from touching a piece of mail. 

 Driving a bus and being coughed on.. once.

 Loving their chosen nursing profession.

I miss you Dad..and I miss normalcy. 

 You lived during World War Two and the Korean War and even 'though America was your second home, you served your country proudly and got dual citizenship with our northern neighbors.

There's a new battlefield these days, Dad...In a way, I'm glad you didn't have to live through it.