Penn Pandemic Diary Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry # 10: No Longer Just a Statistic

Camila Celi is a senior majoring in French and Political Science and a Perry World House Student Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

My uncle died last week due to COVID-19.

I forgot he was 75. I forgot he had diabetes. My mind had been so occupied worrying about my 89-year-old grandmother, that I forgot my uncle was also at risk. He seemed so much younger and full of life. 

My cousins don’t have a father anymore. My aunt doesn’t have a husband anymore. They are now a family of 3, instead of 4. These are all facts, yet I still refuse to believe them.

It feels like someone is telling me a joke and they’ve forgotten to tell me the punchline. Like he’s just around the corner, and any minute now he could walk through the sliding glass door and plop himself down on the patio chair that served as his throne. He’d light a cigar, and with the widest of grins say, “I can’t believe you fell for that crap.”

My uncle was a proud and portly man, who commanded any room he was in with a few domineering shouts that asserted his will. He was intimidating, he was the oldest of his generation in our family, and he never missed an opportunity to tell you about our family’s extensive Peruvian history. He was a wonderful architect, and his genius would invent the spaces and places in which my family has made so many warm memories of precious holidays past.

My uncle went into the hospital with pneumonia and a few days later he was gone. It all happened so quickly, my aunt can’t remember exactly how many days he was there or the exact combination of symptoms that would ultimately overwhelm him. For her, for all of us, it’s all a blur.

A few hours after his death, it felt like all of Lima, Peru already knew. My father was busy making distant calls, alerting his friends, only to discover that the rumor mill had been running since about 60 seconds after he was pronounced dead.

The conversations all sounded the same: “What was it?” “Corona?” “No, I heard it was pneumonia.” “Well he had diabetes…”  “He was in and out of hospitals, it’s no wonder.”

When I finally got a hold of my aunt, she said she was glad he had died in the middle of a quarantine. She couldn’t bear the thought of holding a funeral or facing society and its intrusive questions.

Thankfully, he didn’t die alone. Maybe the only silver lining of a failing healthcare system was that because the positive test hadn’t come back yet, his family was still allowed to be with him when he finally passed on.

Previous anxieties seem smaller in the face of death. Numbers begin to lose their meaning, and the news turns into a dull noise in the periphery of your thoughts. Quotidian life begins to slip away in your list of priorities, and eating and sleeping on a normal schedule turns out to be more challenging than you thought.

Until last week, I was enraged about my graduation being cancelled, my senior year being ruined, and the fact that I might not see my friends until September. Don’t get me wrong, I am still resentful about all those things. It just doesn’t really compare to the loss of an uncle or the emptiness of death.

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.