My father, Captain Charles C. Benedict’s grave marker, Arlington National Cemetery
As our current health crisis reaches 180,000 deaths from the virus, I am bothered by the fact that there are people that feel this virus is not serious because they do not know anyone who has died from it. That, in fact, they feel that the numbers may be inflated, and include people who were ill, possibly old, and going to die anyway.
I have had some personal experience with this that I would like to share. In World War II military deaths reached 416,800. These numbers do not include civilians, but only those who were on active duty, and serving on the front lines of our country’s battle against Germany and Japan. Among those thousands was my father who was shot down flying a B-29 over Manchuria in 1943. I was born after he had left for the front so we never met, and I was a mere 9 months old when he was killed.
But here is the most interesting part. In all my childhood, which I spent in the unusual position of being the child of a single parent, a rare bird in the 50s, I never met another child whose father had been killed in that conflict. Not one. Ever. Therefore, were these numbers wrong? Were they inflated as some of those killed perhaps had medical problems that would have killed them anyway? Does that mean the government or the press inflated the numbers to keep us in the war? Can I conclude that because I never met another child in my situation that my father’s death and burial in Arlington Cemetery is a fiction? If that sounds wrong, then so does the reasoning on the current deaths from the virus. 180,000 is a huge number that represents grieving families who often are left without the benefit of even saying good-bye to their loved ones as they languish and die alone in ICUs.
No matter what one’s place is on the political, religious or social spectrum, can we at least have some compassion for all those who have been affected severely by this all-encompassing disease, even if we do not personally know them? If anyone in my family or any of their friends thought they could have had a chance to save my father by merely wearing a mask and keeping six feet from someone else, I know they would have done it without question. And if that had not helped, they would certainly not have belittled his death by making it some sort of questionable numbers game.