Letter to the Editor: No chance to say good-bye

To the Editor:

My mother-in-law was one of the nearly 200,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19 so far this year. Olly lived in a nursing home.

I always imagined that my husband and I would be able to sit with her and hold her hand when she neared her death, so she wouldn’t be alone. But when she began to have trouble breathing one morning in late June and began rapidly declining, she was isolated in her room and given a COVID-19 test.

Only one nurse could enter. She checked on Olly once an hour until, a day later, she went in and Olly had died, alone. Because the virus had spread so virulently and you couldn’t know who might bring it into the nursing home, we had not been allowed to see Olly for several months.

Now we find out that the country could have been warned as early as the start of February - instead of April - that the virus spreads through the air, through exhalations and inhalations. If we had been told that keeping our distance from each other and wearing masks would slow the spread of this virus, we could have contained it, or at least slowed the spread.

The caregiver who got COVID-19 and unwittingly gave it to my mother-in-law might not have gotten sick in the first place, and we might still have had a chance to say good-bye to Olly and hold her hand sometime down the road.

November 3, Americans can change the direction this country is going. We can elect leadership that will not keep secret the vital information we need to stay healthy. I hope we do make that change. I hope your parents or grandparents don’t have to die alone behind a locked door.

Ellen Modersohn
Lansing