My Aunt Helen died on July 12. She was 104, but she didn’t die of old age. She died because Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan imprisoned her and isolated her for a year and a half in a care home where her hearing difficulties made it nearly impossible to speak by telephone (she needed to see your lips to grasp your words). As a result, this lady – who took care of me for more than a year after I was born and during several periods of my young life (so much so that for years as a child I believed that she and her husband were my real parents) – became demented. She had all of her marbles when she entered the facility: she was as sharp as a tack; her memory was good; she could do calculations in her head that most people can’t. And her physical health was excellent – heart and lungs like those of a healthy 50-year-old. She entered the facility because she needed help supporting herself going up and down stairs (unsteadiness), which was too difficult for her daughters, themselves in their 70s.

 She took residence in a very nice facility in Michigan just before the Covid-19 political panic swept the country and became a political football. Within a few weeks, the isolation began to have its effect. She became extremely anxious and rebellious – as any sane person would be under such conditions. She repeatedly tried to escape from her room and wandered around freely (as she would have been allowed without the Covid scare-mongering). She even tried to get out of the facility. So the staff gave her anti-anxiety medication (serotonin reuptake inhibitors). This made her “quiet,” but it was the silence of a tomb in the making — which is what happens when you give it to seniors. It was the silence imposed by people addicted to fear-porn and slogans like “if it only saves one life, we must do X.” Never mind that mere existence is nothing like “living” in the full sense of the word – in the sense that makes life meaningful and worth living. It is an imitation of life that statisticians can point to as a sign of victory because “the numbers tell the story.”

During this time, she contracted the Covid-19 virus and didn’t miss a beat; she was THAT healthy. But her mere existence as a living body was counted as a “victory” for Gretchen Whitmer and her apologists. As Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s total isolation policy for elder-care homes continued, my aunt lost her appetite for life and for food. When I finally was allowed to see her this week, shortly before her death in a hospice, she was already in a coma and could not respond to my words.

I am angry – very angry. I cannot mention my anger to her two daughters because like so many programmed people raised to believe in “the one true faith of politics,” they supported and still support Gretchen Whitmer and the lockdown policy that made a hell of their own mother’s last year and a half of life. I love those two women despite their tragically foolish beliefs because they, too, played a part in my young life, but I am disgusted that my aunt’s life was so disposable and so easily swept under the rug in the service of politics.

Is Hell hot enough for politicians?

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