1 Million Deaths, 13 Last Messages
Raymond Lee Moody, 62, a father of three, contracted Covid in early January 2021. On Jan. 15, his son, Ray Moody, found his father with oxygen saturation levels in the 50s and took him to the hospital.
I talked to Dr. F today and he gave you a good progress report. I shared with him about the pain in mouth and pain from the mask. He said he prescribed a mouth spray and hoped it was helping. When I talk to your nurse again I will ask about ice chips. I know she said she gives them to you when she can.
When my partner’s father died of Covid-19 in April 2020, what I found my thoughts lingering on, in the numb days and weeks that followed, were his text messages.
“I have the. Virus” is how we first found out he’d gotten it, a phrase whose typos and solemn tone initially struck us as both ominous and funny, but which later became almost unbearable. I couldn’t stop thinking, too, about the texts that had preceded that one, in which his father had aired his doubts about whether California’s emergency measures were over the top, and my partner had warned him to be careful. I hated that when Doug looked at his last exchanges with his father, he’d have to see those.
And I thought about his father’s very last messages. Later, during his weeks on the ventilator, we’d discuss these texts with other family members — how hard it had been to respond to his message about being intubated. “I didn’t know what to say,” one said. “I just sent a heart.”
