Lauren Petracca
In 2020, as COVID-19 stormed the shores of the United States, images from the front line arrived: Nurses and doctors speaking into their cellphone cameras at shiftâs end, some near tears, others in tears, all begging us to care â or even just acknowledge â the suffering they d just witnessed.
They left their homes before dawn, or after sunset, to begin 12-hour shifts spent sweating beneath layers of plastic, breathing through masks and face shields, carrying the weight of life and death into every negative-pressure room assigned to them.Â
In there, they saw what we didn t.
They discovered the unique loneliness of sitting in a hospital room with someone dying of COVID-19. A patient s family might be piped in over FaceTime or Zoom, but the gloved hand still held the dying one.