Carrying On

There are no more words to write

The hero is now gone.

We must pull together, to stand and fight, 

For we must carry on...

-S. O'Herlihy 

In the calculus of what this pandemic has cost to date, we speak in terms of lives lost, and we paint pictures using broad strokes.  The point of emphasis is on the aggregate.  The devil, however, is in the details. 

Men and women, every day, perform extraordinary tasks in the service of saving, serving, and protecting those who they do not know, who they would not know but for this crisis causing their paths to cross, and in whose company they shall not likely again be once life returns to normal or a reasonable facsimile thereof.  

COVID-19 has thus far infected more than 1,000,000 Americans.  As of April 28th, more than 50,000 Americans had died from it.  I believe the total number of fatalities reported is low.  I do not know specifically by how much.  I do know however that it is at least two. 

Lorna Breen, M.D., was the Director of Emergency Department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan.  Her father analogized what his daughter did day in, day out to being on a battlefield.  "She was truly in the trenches on the front line", Philip C. Breen, M.D. said.  He spoke the truth. His daughter, forty-nine years young, battled shoulder-to-shoulder with her colleagues against COVID-19.  As is the case in trench warfare, the in-fighting is fierce and the consequences are devastating. While leading the fight against COVID-19, Dr. Lorna Breen herself was infected by the virus.  She spent only about ten days recuperating at home before she returned to the fray.  Worried about her, her hospital sent her home again and her family, including her dad, prevailed upon her to come stay with them in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

This past Sunday, April 26, 2020, Dr. Breen took her own life.  The elder Dr. Breen, speaking of his daughter, noted that she had no history of mental illness or depression.  He also observed that his daughter had tried to her job and doing so had killed her.  He is being modest.  She did far more that "try".  She was, and is, a hero.  

John Mondello, a rookie EMT with the FDNY, took his own life on Friday, April 24, 2020.  He was three months out of the Academy.  Mondello spent his too-brief FDNY career assigned to the Tactical Response Group out of EMS Station 18 in the Claremont section of the Bronx, which section is among New York City's busiest for 9-1-1 calls.  His father, John Mondello, Sr., is a retired member of the NYPD.  

Life as a rookie EMT with the FDNY is stressful.  It is a job, by description, which can be nothing less.  These days, however, it is incomparably so.  Shortly before he took his own life, John Mondello confided to a close friend that he was not only experiencing a lot of death but that he was deeply affected by it, feeling at times as if he had "failed" to save a life. 

He of course never failed to save a life.  There simply were patients who, in spite of EMT Mondello's best efforts, he could not save.  No doubt, however, such a distinction is more easily demarcated when one has the dual advantages of time and distance.  There, in the moment and then, again, in the next, EMT Mondello had neither.  He was only twenty-three.  He was - and is - a hero.  

-AK