Accepting Loss

More than a quarter of a million people in the U.S. have died from Covid since March. They say that most every citizen knows of someone who has perished from the disease. We learned of two such deaths last week.

These weren't people that we know, but they were family members of someone we met, a furnace installer from nearby Watsonville. 

"People say it's no big thing," he told us. "But I tell them it's real. I tell them my story."

As soon as he vacated our premises, Barbara and I looked at each other, our eyes as large as saucers.

She immediately went to work sanitizing everything he had touched. We aired out the detached room where he had been working. Of course we had been wearing masks and only momentarily within six-feet of him.

Covid cases are rising by the hundreds almost every day in Santa Cruz County as we draw near Thanksgiving, a favorite holiday of our spread-out family. It's a time when we try to get together. Not this year. Not in person.

I am thankful that our family are all healthy, but it is a loss and sacrifice not to be able to touch them and feel their physical presence. I want to joke around with my grandchildren, watch their eyes light up and their expressions turn to smiles.

As an old guy who has been sheltering for months, I can't think of anything I'd like more. I never had grandparents, three of them had died before I was born, the other not too long afterward. I fear my grandkids will lose out, too. By the time we can get together they won't be kids any more. 

Times are very strange and I'm old enough to have already lost a few good friends and a spouse, and I'm cruising through the "at risk" demographic of septuagenarian. I accept the pandemic. I've made peace with my losses.

Which brings me to this curious election situation. Our two, and only, choices for President of the United States in the confounding year of 2020 were both seventy-something old white men. The two oldest dudes ever to run for president. It's crazy.

The guy who won, at least, is able to talk about his losses -- three children and a spouse. And how many attempts at running for president did he lose? Yet here he is, the president-elect. He accepted loss and moved forward. 

The other guy, who's lost a brother and a few casinos and now an election, cannot accept loss. He refuses to acknowledge that he is not the winner. His pathology is very clear.

Thousands of his supporters gathered in Washington this past week to protest the election, claiming that he won, that the election was stolen, blah blah blah. The reason they believe this is because the old guy tells them so. It makes them feel better. They take whatever he says at face value. It makes the old guy feel better to see them applaud him, and that's really all he wants.

At the expense of the truth, at the expense of his country and the expense of a pandemic.

Grow up, old man. It’s a good day to lose.