An ageing father dies alone in his hospital bed. Thousands of miles from his daughters, connected only by a daily schedule of FaceTime calls. He slips between past and present, memories of lemonade and war lace his final moments of life.
“You are contagious. No one can get near. It’s happening all over the world. You caught it in your assisted-living facility.”
Moore’s short story, published this week in The New Yorker, details the everyday experience of a white, middle-class family in the days leading up to their father’s death. The story captures the surreal sadness of long distance death, while drawing attention to the privilege attached to even being allocated a hospital bed.
Distanced already by careers and lifestyles that have led to nearly 1 in 10 British citizens living abroad, the travel restrictions of COVID-19 keep relatives even farther apart. In addition to flight bans, there are restrictions on public transport and rules against care home and hospital visitations. This has meant that thousands are dying without loved ones at their bedside.
Meanwhile, among poorer demographics and in countries without universal health care, thousands more are dying at home without access to medical interventions that could have saved their lives. A recent report published by Amnesty International estimated that over 7,000 health care workers have died from COVID-19, while the Office for National Statistics released figures stating that black men in England were three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white men.
While not the main narrative of Moore’s story, this window into one family’s lose of a father opens up the realities–and disparities–of pandemic death. The shape of these endings can look drastically different depending on geography and affluence.
“Later, I would accuse my quite comfortable friends of appropriating the illness from the disadvantaged, of co-opting a fear of the illness that targeted prisoners, front-line workers, meatpackers, and, of course, the elderly. ‘It’s all unfair.’”
For the comfortable Western middle-classes accustomed to visas and passports that allow them to trot quite easily around the globe, COVID-19 has made the limitations of geography more tangible than ever before. Flight restrictions, quarantine measures and the limitations of international travel insurance have dismantled the privileged safety net of being “only a flight away.” Like the protagonist of Moore’s story, ex-pats around the world are now haunted by visions of their parents deaths unfolding on FaceTime from thousands of miles away.
