JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR

This will be the first of periodic blogs I plan to post during the pandemic of 2019-2020.

May 6, 2020 — Karen Wessel Marcus, my wife, Leslie’s, best friend since sixth grade, died of the Coronavirus Sunday night at 9:16 p.m. Eastern time. Her death came almost one month to the day after her 67th birthday. She’d been in the ICU ward of Lawrence hospital in Bronxville, NY, for more than two weeks, on a ventilator and in an induced coma. After many ups and downs, she underwent complete organ failure, and would have suffered a great deal if she’d miraculously survived. In the 55 years they’d known each other, Leslie and Karen were almost like sisters, yet without the petty annoyances and rivalries that sometimes arise between siblings. They shared everything, spoke to each other about virtually any subject without reservation. One aspect of their relationship I found charming was their habit of calling one another by their maiden last names, so Leslie was always “Ware” and Karen “Wessel.” I remember receiving a note from Karen shortly after I married Leslie in 1988. “Take care of our Ware,” she wrote on behalf of herself and her then-husband, Fraser Marcus.

Karen was a quirky woman with a sense of adventure, and she took a childlike delight in new experiences, such as the time we took her out star-gazing in the hills near our place in Arizona. She practically clapped when we showed her the Orion Nebula through our eight-inch telescope, and the Pleiades and celestial beacons like Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus. She’d lived in London for many years, and took her young son, Austin, trekking the Tunisian desert and checking out volcanoes in Iceland. Later on, divorced and back in the U.S., she got a notion to travel to places she and Austin had never seen. The destinations were not always exotic. Karen might say, “Let’s go to DesMoines! We’ve never been to DesMoines!” And then the two of them would board a plane for Iowa. I’d often wondered what Austin, by then in high school, told his classmates what he’d done on the weekend or on spring break. I went to DesMoines with my Mom?

Karen was kind and self-effacing, to the point that she’d referred to herself as “egoless.” My three granddaughters met her and liked her immediately when we journeyed to Nova Scotia, where Leslie’s extended family maintains a summer house. We sailed and canoed during the day and played pool or penny-ante poker at night. Karen was without fail delightful company.

About three weeks ago, Leslie and I were hiking in Arizona when Karen responded to a text from Leslie, who hadn’t heard back from her for awhile. Karen texted, “I’ve got the virus.” She had noticed the symptoms two weeks earlier but had not called a doctor, choosing instead to quarantine herself. She had told only her mother, brothers, and son. We were at a loss to explain this reticence, this extreme sense of privacy. Leslie tried to convince her friend to FaceTime with a doctor and get tested, but the advice wasn’t taken, and it was too late anyway. That night, unable to get out of bed, Karen called 911. An ambulance brought her to the hospital. Seventeen days later, Mark texted Leslie that her friend had passed. Leslie has been in tears, off and on, ever since, recalling a sisterhood that endured for more than half a century. In my mind, I multiply Leslie’s grief, and the grief of Karen’s family, by 72,271 — the number of U.S. deaths from Covid-19 as of Monday, May 4 — but no mathematics can communicate so much loss, so much sorrow.       

Discover more from Philip Caputo

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading