MISSION, Kan. (AP) — Carolyn Burnett is bracing for her first Christmas without her son Chris, a beloved high school football coach whose outdoor memorial service drew a crowd of hundreds.
The unvaccinated 34-year-old father of four died in September as a result of COVID-19 after nearly two weeks on a ventilator, and his loss has left a gaping hole for his mother, widow and family as the holidays approach.
How, she thought, could they take a holiday photo without Chris? What would Christmas Day football be like without him offering up commentary? How could they play trivia games on Christmas Eve without him beating everyone with his movie expertise?
The U.S. on Tuesday hit another depressing pandemic milestone — 800,000 deaths. It’s a sad coda to a year that held so much promise with the arrival of vaccines but is ending in heartbreak for the many grieving families trying to navigate the holiday season.
For its Christmas card photo, the Burnett family ultimately opted to hold up a football presented as a memorial by the Kansas City Chiefs to represent Chris. Carolyn Burnett also set up a special shelf for the holidays, filling it with a drawing of her son, his bronzed baby shoe, a candle, a poem and an ornament of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
But nothing feels quite right this year.
“These emotions come and go so quickly,” she said. “You see something. You hear something. His favorite food. You hear the song. There’s just all these little things. And then, bam.”
The year began with the COVID-19 death toll at about 350,000 in the U.S., at a time when the country was in the throes of a winter surge so bad that patients were lined up in emergency room hallways waiting for beds.
But vaccines were just getting rolled out, and sports stadiums and fairgrounds were quickly transformed into mass vaccination sites. Case numbers began falling. By spring, nearly all schools had reopened and communities were shedding mask orders. TV newscasters began talking cheerfully about a post-pandemic world. President Joe Biden proclaimed the Fourth of July holiday as a celebration of the nation’s freedom from the virus.
It didn’t last long. The delta variant struck just as vaccination rates were stalling amid a wave of misinformation, devastating poorly immunized portions of the Midwest and South. Hospitals brought back mobile morgues and opened up their pocket books in a desperate bid to attract enough nurses to care for the sick.
“People have no idea,” said Debbie Eaves, a lab worker, who grew weary of the wave of death as she collected swabs from patients at Oakdale Community Hospital in Louisiana amid the surge. “Oh, no. They have no idea what it is to look and see, to see it.”
In Kansas, Carolyn Burnett begged her son, who went by the nickname Coach Cheese because of his love of cheeseburgers, to get vaccinated.
“He was a part of the group that … just didn’t trust it,” she said, pausing and sighing. “They didn’t want to be a guinea pig. They didn’t want to be experimented on.”
She thought maybe he was softening. When his dad got his first COVID-19 shot in August, Chris, a diabetic, told his mother he would discuss it with his doctor. But then one of Chris’ children got infected at a family sleepover and soon everyone was sick.
She texted him, “Honey, God’s got you.” His last text to her said: “Mama, I feel him.” He died Sept. 11.
