Death comes calling in almost every household as Covid ravages our nation
On Monday, 3 May, Delhi recorded 448 deaths from Covid. One of them was my brother-in-law.
When my sister made a group video call to her daughters and me late at night, worried that my brother-in-law was having trouble breathing, despite being on an oxygen concentrator, none of us realized that the end was only an hour or so away. My brother-in-law was struggling for breath, but he was still well enough to speak. We tried to rally him around, encouraging him to do prone breathing. The nurse in attendance gave him his prescribed injections and set up a saline drip.
We thought he was feeling better when he got up and – assisted by the nurse and my sister – went to the loo. But the moment he came back and lay down on the bed again, he simply stopped breathing. We realized that only when we heard my sister’s panicked cries. The nurse tried to do CPR, but to no avail. The oximeter went blank, and he was gone. All we were left with were my sister’s heartbreaking sobs of anguish and disbelief.
We stayed on the call with her for another couple of hours, trying to comfort her as best we could. But what comfort can you offer a wife who has seen her husband pass away in front of her eyes?
There are no words.
And in Covid times, there are no hugs either. There is no comforting embrace to offer. There is no shoulder for the bereaved to cry on. There is no presence of family to provide some solace and balm.
In the absence of this, there is just a piercing loneliness. You are alone with your grief, alone with your thoughts, alone with your regrets, alone with your memories.
There may be other people at the end of a video call, but to all intents and purposes, you are alone.
But that is the nature of death in the times of Covid. You die alone, those that are left behind mourn alone, and you then begin the slow process of recovery all on your own. I can’t even begin to grapple with the unfathomable sorrow of it all.
Not that my family is alone in suffering this loss. Thousands of families across the country are dealing with bereavement as Corona deaths mount with every passing day. But as we count our dead, we must not forget that those souls who have left us are not just statistics that tell us the story of how this pandemic has ravaged our country. Each of these numbers is a person who meant the world to those who loved him; who was, in fact, somebody’s entire world.
My sister’s entire world, for instance, revolved around her husband. In recent years, as his health declined, she became his primary caregiver, monitoring his sugar levels and blood pressure with a zeal that would do any professional nurse proud. Her day was measured by the doses of medicines she would dole out to him. Her mission every day was to cook something that would tempt his appetite even a little. And once he went down with Covid, she monitored his oxygen levels with a hawk eye, adjusting the oxygen concentrator ever so often.
But her best efforts were not good enough in the face of the implacable march of this deadly disease. And now she has been left alone to mourn, even as she tries to recover from her own Covid infection.
My brother-in-law’s last moments, which we witnessed on that video call, haunt all of us. There is a sense of abject helplessness, that we could do nothing to help him take just another breath, and then another and another… There is the horror of seeing someone you love pass away in front of your eyes, and not being able to even reach out and hug them close in their last moments.
But I hope in time that we will not remember him, Satish Kumar Bharadwaj, by the manner of his passing, but by the way he lived his life. That we will remember his unconditional love for his wife and daughters, we will celebrate his unquenchable zest for life, and we will keep the memory of his joyful spirit alive in our hearts.
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