CORONA’S CHOICE: Death in the Time of Virus [M, 3-23-20]

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter [1]

CORONA’S CHOICE: Death in the Time of Virus    [M, 3-23-20]

I always wondered how I would die in a time of crisis. I hoped I could be like Bonhoeffer, defying the Nazis, or singing on my way to the guillotine, still witnessing for justice, or going out in a blaze of glory in a gunfight with the federales!

Instead, it looks like I’ll be on one bed in the Covid19 unit, with some stranger on the bed beside me, and the doctor saying, “We have only one respirator; to whom should I give it?”

I assumed that I would have the grace to say, “Give it to that younger person there [or even that older person who is in better health than I]. I have lived my life. I’ve had a good time. I’m ready to go. Let this younger person live.”

Now I’m not so sure. What if that person in the other bed is an evangelical white nationalist “Christian,” who believed the White House and Fox News when they said the virus was just false news the Democrats thought up to embarrass Trump, and it wasn’t any worse than the flu, so we didn’t really have to be good neighbors by washing our hands and staying to ourselves?

Or believed Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” when she said on her TV program that her ministry is a prayer hospital against the virus so if you want to defeat the virus you should send her money.

Of course, we all know that this is God’s vengeance upon the US for allowing gays to exist, and that we don’t have to pay attention to physical distancing because Jesus is coming soon, anyway, and will rapture up the straight people.

All of that stuff that is being said in the patriotic and evangelical fundamentalist blogosphere right now.

So, what if the person who is going to live while I die is one who believed that stuff and so got the virus because they refused to wash their hands or stay at home? I’m a good boy; why should I have to die so a selfish ignoramus can live? Paul said you might give your life for a good person, but… someone like that? [He didn’t add that last part exactly. Check out Romans 5:7]

Well, you never know. Maybe that person who lives because I died gets a second chance at being a better human being. But maybe it doesn’t even matter. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and nothing is said about Laz living a better life after that. And we say that Jesus gave his own life, the divine life, for every last one of us, not just the saints but the reprobates, too.

I hope it will be a child clutching a stuffed dog, or a young mother who needs to care for her family, or a nurse who caught the God-damned virus while trying to save others… I hope that will be the person who gets to live in my place. But when the time comes--and I’d better be ready, because these days things change pretty durn fast—I’ll just say, “Let somebody else take the respirator… but I would like to have a cookie…”

John Robert McFarland

1] I started writing CIW when we lived in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where March is just February under an assumed name, and where winter is 13 months long. I called it Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. I no longer live in that place of winter, but it seems that we are all now in a place of perpetual winter, hunkered down alone against a different kind of blizzard, so I’m restoring the original title.