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“When my mother passed away about two years ago, I was able to sit with her … and I was able to hold her hand and stroke her face, I was able to be present with her”, Farr told CNN’s Don Lemon on Friday. night. “And I was able to comfort her the same way she had comforted me so many times in my life.”
“With my dad, we couldn’t do that because he was isolated,” Farr said.
He says his family was able to say goodbye to his father, Marvin James Farr, practically the morning before his death.
“I’m glad I got to see him one last time, to tell him how much I loved him, how much he meant to me. But at that point, what you want to be able to do is what you want to do. be able to do it. reach out and hold his hand, touch him, spend as much time with him as possible. “
Farr’s story echoes the experiences of thousands of other families across the United States who had to say a final farewell to parents, siblings, and other family members via a device due to the protocols of ‘Covid-19 isolation. More than 278,900 Americans have died since the start of the pandemic.
Farr says it was anger, fear, heartache and frustration that led him to write a powerful obituary for his father, highlighting the toll of the pandemic and the rejection by some Americans of public safety measures like the face masks.
“He was preceded by death by over 260,000 Americans infected with Covid-19. He died in a room that was not his own, cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with Covid- 19 and his last days were more difficult, more frightening and lonely than necessary, ”said an obituary excerpt, read aloud by Lemon.
Her father, 81, was a veterinarian, Farr wrote. The science that guided his father’s professional life has now “been maligned and abandoned by so many who depended on his knowledge,” he wrote.
It is “strange,” Farr told Lemon, that some Americans seem to be denying the science touted by leading health experts in this pandemic.
He says that growing up he remembers medical professionals were highly respected and the doctors and nurses in his hometown were seen as the most important members of the community. Today, these same people who “put their lives in danger” are attacked on social networks.
“It’s unfathomable to me, it violates everything I feel I learned growing up about decency and caring for others,” he said. “And these are lessons I learned from my father.”
His father, he wrote, was “born in an America recovering from the Great Depression and on the brink of facing World War II, a time of loss and sacrifice difficult for most to imagine. of us. across the world to fight and die in wars of unfathomable destruction. “
“He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth over their faces to protect each other,” he wrote.
In many ways, Farr told Lemon, he thought his father’s death was political.
“When our local city councils, when our state legislatures, when they refuse to enact policies that can protect people, have made political decisions that make people like my father die as they are.
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