My 81 Year Old Mom Got Covid and Lived

My 81 year old immunocompromised mom tested positive for Covid on Monday, August 16, 2021. Chances are excellent that what she contracted was the vicious delta variant making the rounds right now.

My family had been spending time together at our summer camp in Maine when she got sick. After a hiatus in 2020, eight of us gathered for the annual get together. We were all either fully or partially vaxxed.

We were aware that the Delta variant was “out there,” but like so many others, we’d let down our guards. Perhaps we weren’t as careful as we should have been when we ventured maskless to local restaurants to celebrate being together after two years. The mask mandate was not being enforced. Life felt more “normal.” We were eager and happy to be out and about.

Then, three days after she tested positive, my brother and I woke up feeling like garbage. Texts between me and my sister-in-law confirmed we had identical symptoms: headache, sore throat, body aches, runny nose, cough, loss off taste and smell, exhaustion. A rapid test he took the morning after getting home showed Covid positive. My PCR test appointment was scheduled for the following day. I’d have to wait up to three business days for my official results (spoiler alert: my test results were positive).

But I didn't need a test to confirm what I knew. What had a hold of me was nothing like colds I’ve caught in the past. This beast slammed into me at 100 mph, pinning me down before relentlessly torturing me from the inside out. It threw nasty punches under my rib cage, against that tender place behind my eyes before stabbing me with a long sharp blade in my stomach, legs, hips, shoulders, and feet just because it could.

Not just a few times.

Over and over again.

Sitting up to sip water caused vertigo so intense I had to lie back down. Standing up to use the bathroom required patience and grace. I lost my balance if I didn’t a. slow my roll to a crawl and then b. hold on to the wall, backs of chairs, and the handrail going down the stairs lest I collapse into a heap of virus emojis. To see me walking you would think I was wearing a blindfold.

Despite doing all the things the medical community has recommended for the past 18 months -- extra hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing, getting the jab -- several of us still got sick. Blame the Delta variant which, according to the CDC, is more contagious and mean than its Alpha predecessor and also able to infect vaccinated people.

All I know is it is one nasty SOB.

My sister-in-law, who is a nurse, half joked that she would have expected our family outbreak to happen last summer during the peak of the pandemic’s first wave before vaccinations were readily available.

“I thought we were out of the woods,” she said.

So did I -- along with millions of other Americans who are now down with the virus.


When I first began writing this essay, mom was getting ready to be discharged from the hospital and my brother and I still felt normal. We were celebrating that she did not become a statistic on the nightly news’ endless death toll loop of people who enter the hospital with COVID and never come out, secretly praying none of the rest of us ended up like that, either.

After I witnessed her legs buckle and her body go limp as she attempted to come down the stairs that morning we took her to the ER, practically collapsing face forward had my father and brother not been holding her up, I’ll admit.

I was scared.

First from the shock of seeing her almost collapse and then from the all-too likely possibility that she had Covid.

I didn’t know that she had Covid. I merely suspected. It was a scene we had worked hard to prevent.

And yet there it was playing out like thousands of scenes on the evening news since Covid came to town. Even though I intentionally stay away from the news, I've seen my share of scenes inside hospitals during the pandemic. For a while in the early days they were impossible not to see if you spent even two minutes on social media. My Facebook feed was flooded with viral videos of frontline healthcare workers attending to individuals hooked up to ventilators. People were dying alone in rooms isolated from loved ones.

In the early days of the pandemic, a woman I follow on Instagram posted that her 42 year old husband was in the hospital fighting for his life while she and their young son watched helplessly from the outside. She began documenting his Covid saga on March 30, 2020, the day she dropped him off at the hospital. It was a brutal story with a tragic ending. Three and a half months later, he died.

Around that same time, social media informed me that some childhood friends had lost their fathers or mothers to Covid. Everywhere I looked someone’s heart was broken or breaking from losing a loved one to the virus. I didn’t want to lose my mom.

I felt helpless. Confused. Frustrated. Angry. Mom is in the highest risk group for not surviving: over 80, immunocompromised, Parkinson’s, zero COVID antibodies despite being fully vaxxed.

I and my brother, on the other hand, are healthy. Neither of us have the underlying health conditions that elevate our risk category for Covid’s cruelty. We  are respectively at an ideal weight; we eat well, exercise regularly, laugh often, love our families, have strong immune systems, possess vax records. Our time away together this summer has been full of joy, playing games, telling stories, swimming, eating food, and watching the Red Sox, each an immune system booster of its own accord. Unless you’re a Yankees fan — then scratch watching the Red Sox.

Contracting Covid blindsided all of us. The pandemic was supposedly winding down this summer. Airlines were selling middle seats again. People were making fall travel plans. Doesn’t any of that count for anything?

Apparently not. It’s one thing to see stat charts splayed across the screen night after night about other people. It’s another when you become one of the stats. Why I believed Covid would miss my family because we did what was advised seems naive to me now.

Statistically we should all recover without incident but as I lie in bed isolated upstairs from my daughter and parents downstairs, I can't help but think about the unknowns lurking in the shadows around the pandemic's craggy edges.

What’s out there ready to pounce the next time we let down our guard?

Will any of us suffer symptoms from “long Covid?”

Why are some people continuing to fight science and refusing to get vaxxed?

In the age of misinformation, who and what can I believe about this virus known as Covid19?


Since entering lockdown in March 2020, cases of COVID-19 have consistently been “surging,” with new variants seeming to pop up each week. Surging has been a preferred word of the news channels, right alongside unprecedented, as they report the latest numbers. If I never have to hear either of those words again it won’t be too soon.

Weird things come to mind when you’re stuck in bed all day isolated from everyone. For example, as a way of explaining to myself how unprecedented and surging became THE words for the pandemic’s brand, I imagined a gang of evil characters from the swamps of the Dark Web standing at an enormous whiteboard ideating about how to report on Covid in the early days of the pandemic. A collection of words to use were suggested but in the end, those two won out over the gentler, less anxiety-producing synonyms, “flowing” and “fantastic.”

“These are fantastic times as the cases of Covid flow through the world.”

Not exactly going to sell any ads with that line. Gotta have something more potent, more sinister.

Enter the fear and propaganda team, stage right, a similar group of nefarious people who want to take over the world as they scribble a mind map for global domination on that same whiteboard. That's when a short story I read in college by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Young Goodman Brown popped into my head. It’s been decades since I read that story let alone thought about it but there it was flashing in my mind like a neon sign for Michelob Light on a hot summer night in 1989.

The story explores the title character’s loss of faith and belief in the world after having a "disturbing" experience one night in the forest, an experience he chose to have by the way. Spoiler alert: the ending is a downer, with Young Goodman Brown succumbing to his fears and living out the rest of his life despondent and depressed because society didn’t live up to his expectations.

Hawthorne was critical of his Puritan forebears who struggled in the new world with common human challenges like money, power, government, and religion that tend to take center stage during times of massive cultural and economic change. The haves and the have nots. Social status. Morals and ethics. Advancing technologies, political feuds, human rights, wars. (Sound familiar?) Check out a little play by Arthur Miller called The Crucible for more details about what went down.

Traditionally, authors like Hawthorne use the forest as a literary device to imply change or transformation their characters experience. In the 20th century Joseph Campbell popularized personal transformation through the framework of the hero’s journey as a means for understanding being human. In its purest form, the framework has the hero descending into darkness at a critical point in the story. That darkness can be either literal or figurative or sometimes both.

When the hero emerges from the darkness he is not the same person he was when he entered the cave, the dungeon, the forest, the dark night of the soul. He has gained new insights into who he is, why he’s here, what needs to happen next. Sometimes that new insight is hopeful, spurring the hero forward to share his gifts and newfound wisdom with a broader audience. In some cases, including Young Goodman Brown’s, depression, cynicism, or nihilism set in, driving the hero to despair, destruction, and the distribution of misinformation.

Given the events of the last 18 months, is anyone surprised at the number of “Young Goodman Browns” posting their doom and gloom conspiracy theories about Covid on social media? Who are questioning science? Who are pointing fingers, calling groups out, blaming everyone else for a world they had a hand in shaping, complicity or not?

As the world changes at a lightning pace, we’ve managed to march ourselves straight into a metaphorical forest filled with fake news and opinions masked as facts. Plenty of people have been happy to participate in leading the march, spreading misinformation meme after meme.

Of course, no one wants to admit being afraid of the changes we are all experiencing, but fear is in the driver’s seat on many a social media feed. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of being taken for a ride. Fear of losing our way of life. Fear of getting left behind. Fear of not being cool anymore. Fear of losing liberties. Fear of the vaccine. Fear of dying.

And just when it looks like we’ve got things handled, enter a new virus variant, sending us back to the drawing board as we cancel fall travel plans, socially distance, and fish our box of disposable masks out of the back of the front hall closet.


If ever there was a nomination for the modern world's best collective dark night of the soul, the Covid19 pandemic would be the unanimous winner. Lying in bed fighting this viral invasion of my body has been a descent into darkness of my own. When I haven’t been sleeping, watching movies, or switching between taking Tylenol every six hours and embracing Ayurvedic concoctions like herbal tea, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, and cayenne pepper, I’ve been thinking.

A lot.

Maybe too much?

It’s amazing how getting sick can cause you to evaluate your life and ask the big questions. Not in a “here’s a listicle I can share on social media that might uptick my engagement metrics” way.

But in a “I have some big questions about my future that I actually need to answer” way.

Questions like:

What do I really want to do in the next 3-5 years?

What do I need to let go?

Should I start watching Shitz Creek so I know what all the fuss has been about?

The truth is, I was already on the path of asking big questions prior to getting Covid. Contracting the virus accelerated the urgency I have about answering them clearly, confidently, and with conviction. (It’s a yes to Shitz Creek.)

Statistically, recovery rates from Covid19 are high. Depending on what source you reference, 90-99 percent of people who test positive for Covid don’t die. They may feel lousy for a while, but they will live to tell about it. This is welcome news. Unlike at the start of the pandemic, the medical community now knows a few things about the virus and how it spreads. My sister-in-law talks about the early ignorance among medical professionals at the start of the pandemic. It’s easy to point fingers after the fact about what should have happened when data sets about Covid are now readily available for study and analysis. Shame statements like “You should have known better” get tossed around like a beach ball at a rock concert.

But how can we possibly blame those hard working frontline professionals for making decisions quite literally in the dark? How can we blame loved ones who dropped off sick friends or relatives at hospitals who then never came out? Is it fair to blame ourselves if we get sick with the latest Covid variant despite doing the things we are told to do, including it’s okay to go out to dinner again and not wear a mask?

Therein lies the problem. No one knew what Covid was going to do to the world at that point. We still don’t know everything about how this virus operates. Leadership often means making difficult, no-win decisions. Lives might be lost. Someone is going to be pissed off.

And pissed off we are. January 6th insurrection aside, the next time you’re in the grocery store, look around at your fellow shoppers. Masks or no masks, eyes are cast down. Smiles are few and far between. Casual banter doesn’t exist. We the people are exhausted, experiencing a collective case of PTSD that, for right now anyway, can’t be addressed. There simply aren’t enough licensed mental health professionals to handle the case load.

I get it. Was I giddy when the mask mandate was issued? Then reissued and then reissued again? Did I rejoice when Costco ran out of toilet paper? Do I enjoy being told to isolate myself until further notice?

Of course not. The last 18 months have not been easy. They’ve challenged deep assumptions we’ve had of who we are individually and collectively. For millions, COVID-19 has been a catalyst for deep introspection. Some of what we’ve discovered hasn’t been pretty. But if we want to move forward into a promising future, hard questions need to be asked and answered. Putting the collective good ahead of individual rights becomes a matter of life and death.

None of us is guaranteed anything. Not now, not before Covid. Uncertainty has always been a part of being human. Yet the pandemic has given rise to a growing faction of folks who wax nostalgic about life before Covid, as if it had been some Shangri la we frolicked around without a care in the world.

Listen, we were complaining about all kinds of things long before Covid showed up. Just spend a little time on Twitter should you need some proof.

Nothing was set in stone then. Nothing is set in stone now. The faster we can come to terms with that fact, the better we will all be.

The path forward isn’t one hundred percent clear. Virus variants continue to emerge as I now know firsthand. Let me tell you — the Delta variant is not fun. If what I’m experiencing are considered mild symptoms I cringe at the thought of what severe ones are like.

Unfortunately, more people will get sick before this madness ends. Some will die. Cases will continue to surge; latest stats will continue to be reported on the evening news. The push to get everyone vaxxed will prevail. Leaders don’t get every crisis situation right and they won’t suddenly sport perfect tens from this point forward.

But leaders will do what they can in the moment. Sometimes their decisions will cause endings that flat-out suck as too many families have already experienced. Sometimes the ending works out like it has for my mom and hopefully, for my brother and me.

So far, anyway.

As with all things, time will tell. In the age of Covid19, uncertainty has taken on an entirely new meaning. We can choose to go the route of Young Goodman Brown, giving up hope on humanity and walking away from faith. Or we can choose to find a way to continue believing in a future that’s not quite as complicated as our present feels, despite the cultural challenges and shifts happening around us.

I wouldn’t wish for what has happened to the world of late on anyone. Not in a million years. But maybe a global pandemic was exactly what humanity needed to wake us up to what we are truly capable of achieving and what we will leave behind for good.

The alternative isn’t even worth considering.