My neighbor died of COVID

My neighbor died of COVID a couple weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about her lately. Workers have been next door removing her belongings from the house — placing some in the back of a box truck but most in a dark blue dumpster that takes up nearly all of her driveway. Soon all traces of her will be gone from the neighborhood. Then we’ll get new neighbors, I suppose.

My wife and I were not particularly close with our neighbor, but we did interact with her regularly. She was in her late-60s, with myriad health problems that made it difficult for her to get around, even on her good days. On her bad days, she was basically homebound. She had our cell phone numbers and would occasionally ask us if we were going to the store and could pick up some groceries for her. We would deliver the groceries and then spend a couple minutes just talking about the usual small stuff — weather, our dogs, if we’d be traveling for upcoming holidays. She paid us for the groceries and occasionally threw in a Starbucks gift card for our trouble.

Once the pandemic hit, these visits became even shorter. My wife and I were acutely aware of our neighbor’s vulnerability to COVID and never wanted to be the exposure that cost her her life. So we went over there masked and often just left the grocery bags on the porch. More and more, our interactions with her were only via text.

Meanwhile, her other health problems left her constantly in danger of exposure to COVID. Multiple times the fire department showed up at her house to help after she’d fallen. Sometimes an ambulance would show up and take her away for a few days. Sometimes she would drive herself to the hospital and check in. It’s a testament to the masking and infection control procedures of the first responders and hospital workers that she never got COVID during those times.  

When the vaccines were approved, she needed some coaxing to take them. My wife and I both told her we had gotten ours as soon as we were eligible, and that seemed to ease her mind somewhat. Still, she backed out of her initial vaccine appointment and had to wait a couple more weeks, which was frustrating for us. After she finally got her shot, she texted that “We are all pioneers” on a journey with these new vaccines. I considered the real pioneers the people who signed up for the clinical trials, but I could understand her perspective. 

When she got her second dose, we breathed a sigh of relief, but given her health issues, we knew the vaccine wouldn’t be a silver bullet. As the months passed, we never followed up with her about getting a booster, which I really regret now (based on conversations with some of her friends, we don’t believe she ever got it). 

When the delta/omicron surge hit and it seemed like COVID was everywhere, it happened: our neighbor checked in to the hospital with a breakthrough infection. She told us via text that she thought her home health aide had brought the virus into her house. She also told us that a friend was getting her mail and her dog was being boarded. 

That was her second day in the hospital. We asked how she was doing and she said she was on oxygen and it seemed to be helping. She was at a small satellite hospital and was awaiting transfer to a bigger facility. 

That was the last text we got from her. About a week later we learned that she had died. I don’t know if she ever got to that bigger facility. Our hospitals were absolutely slammed at that time and beds were hard to come by. Nor do I know whether it would have made any difference. She was very medically fragile.

Those “what ifs” are not what I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks. Instead, I’ve been wondering what her last days were like. What happened in the time between when she sent us that last text and when she passed away. She would not have been allowed any visitors other than family, and her only family was a sister who lives on the East Coast and was not able to be here. It comforts me some to know that she was not truly alone — that the hospital staff was there at least.

But I still wonder what it was like. Was she sedated and put on a ventilator and just never woke up? Did she opt against “extraordinary measures” like intubation and drift away on a morphine drip? Or did it all happen too fast for that, and she died “coding” — gasping for air as medical workers rushed into her room and tried to help? Was she resigned to death, or was she fearful? How much did she suffer, physically or emotionally?

It’s impossible for me to know. The only potential clue I’ve found is that in our last text exchange she mentioned “dog’s boarded” twice. In those exact words. Once at the beginning and once at the end. 

Her only daily companion, the one creature in this world that relied on her, was safe. She wanted us to know that. I think maybe she wanted to remind herself of that too. 

For much of the last two years our national conversation around this disease has focused on disagreements over masks, school closures and vaccines. All of that is important, and Lord knows I have engaged in a lot of those conversations myself. But I also think maybe we’ve gravitated toward those discussions because it’s easier than trying to just grapple with the immense human suffering the pandemic has caused. It saddens me to think about what my neighbor might have gone through in those last days. Then I remember that more than 900,000 other Americans and almost 6 million people worldwide went through the same thing and, well, that’s just impossible to fathom.