Stiff Neck

I'd run out of sympathy for COVID skeptics. Then I remembered my father.

- By Richard Russo. Illustration by Paul Spella

The call is one we've been expecting, so when it comes we're jolted but not surprised. It's from my wife's sister, who lives in Arizona. She and her husband are both proudly unvaccinated-predictably enough since their chief sources of information are Fox News and social media. They've believed from the beginning that the coronavirus has been overblown by mainstream media and that doctors are in on it because they somehow get paid more when they record the death of somebody who died in, say, a car accident as having been caused by COVID-19, though how exactly that would work, my relatives don't explain. For them, the vaccines are not about public health so much as personal freedom. My body, my choice, and they've made theirs.

And now, the reckoning. For a year and a half, they've been lucky, but their luck has finally run out. Both have been infected by the virus. On the phone, my sister-in-law can't stop coughing, though she says her own case is relatively mild. Her husband, however, is being put on a vent tor; his chances of survival, according to his doctors, are roughly 50–50. She's distraught, and the question she wants my wife to help her with isn't How could we have been so stupid?” but rather “Why is this happening?, and she asks this in all sincerity. The obvious answer is one she can't or won't accept-in part, I suspect because it naturally leads to another question that, even in this excruciating moment, she refuses to entertain: What else have we been wrong about?