A black-and-white cat paused in the doorway, giving me the once-over.
“There’s Oscar,” said Sandra Wittman, in her Carpentersville home. “When he hears a male voice, he comes. Just in case it’s Norm, his daddy.”
It’s not, and never will be, as Wittman outlined in an email:
“You wrote a column about my husband, Norm Kopp, who died of Covid five years ago today. That article meant a lot to me and put a face on the more than a million Covid victims in our country. I am 82 now. It has been a difficult five years and, since we never had children, I am alone with my cat Oscar and sometimes lonely. I miss him every day. I am still living in the home we shared which is filled with memories.”
Is it ever. Art from trips to Venice and Spain. Grief is not easily told or understood. But given how completely the 1 million victims of COVID and their millions of immediate survivors have been swept under the rug, I felt obligated to try.
Wittman had a photo waiting on the coffee table.
“That was our 15th anniversary of living in sin,” she said. “You know, we were never married. I call him my husband. What else should I call him? ‘My boyfriend?’ We were 70-something years old.”
They met over 40 years ago, in a singles bar in Schaumburg.
“He was so bright, so funny,” she said. “I learned to eat Mexican. We really enhanced each other’s lives. We did exciting things together. We didn’t have a lot in common at the beginning. At the end, I didn’t think we were joined at the hip …”
She paused, as if realizing anew.
“Yeah. We were.”
Becoming unjoined was excruciating.
“I have to tell you how he died,” she said. “We were so careful, all those months. Then in December, it was announced, they were going to release the vaccine. His doctor said he would be on the list for high risk. Then the Trump administration cut the vaccine numbers to Illinois because we’re a blue state. So he didn’t get the vaccine.”
Instead he got COVID. From her, she believes.
“I hurt my foot and had to go for an MRI. … I’m pretty sure that’s where I got it. There was horrendous guilt that I brought it home.”
Kopp got worse in mid-January.
“The nurse said, if he makes it through the night you can come over here and be with him when he dies. Which was a real gift, because most people didn’t get to do that. I watched him die through glass. It took three minutes. I don’t even remember how I got home. I was completely alone. Nobody was here.”
Alone took getting used to.
“What are the five years like?” she mused. “I hardly remember the first two. I kept hitting my head. When you’re grieving, you lose connection with your body. You’re not yourself. You’ve lost control, and this horrible thing has happened. I was constantly banging my head on something, or falling down.”
She went to a grief group, but it seemed irrelevant.
“I realized I don’t need a grief group, I need a COVID grief group, This is another kind of death.”
She found one.
“We don’t talk about our grief much anymore,” Wittman wrote. “But when someone is having a bad day, everyone is there to help. … While not forgetting, we are all striving to move forward.”
Not that forward resembles the past.
“Norm was up for stuff. We had a lot of fun. I miss all that. I don’t want to say my life is poorer. I need it not to be, because he would want it.”
For a long time, she held on.
“I wrote him a letter every week for three years. You start to think of all the things you wish you’d done. All the things you wish you’d said. All the things you wish you never said. For a while that’s all you can do. Once you get past that, you think of all the wonderful things you did do and did say.”
Now physical woes assail her.
“My dad died in ’77, my mother died in ’79; they were both 63,” she said. “So I never saw anybody get old. This is really shocking here, what’s happening to me. I can’t focus my eyes well, my neck gets stiff, my balance is terrible. Outside of the house I walk with a cane. This winter’s been so hard for me because I’m terrified of falling on the ice.”
But that isn’t her parting message. This is: “You can come out of the other end. On one hand things are taken away. On the other, they are given back.”