Pamela Addison is in her own words ‘one of the most shy people in this world’. Definitely not the kind of person who would submit an opinion piece to a newspaper, start an alien support group, or ask a U.S. senator to vote for $ 1.9 billion in legislation.
But for the past five months, she’s been doing all these things.
Her husband, Martin Addison, a 44-year-old health worker in New Jersey, died of the coronavirus in April after a month of illness. The last time she saw him was when he was loaded into an ambulance. At 37, Mrs. Addison left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and a baby boy and to get on her own right.
“The impact my story had on people – it was very therapeutic and healing for me,” she said. “And knowing that I’m doing it to honor my husband gives me the greatest joy, because I’m doing it for him.”
With the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States – more than 535,000 people – come thousands of stories like her. Many people who have lost loved ones, or whose lives have been exploited by long-distance symptoms, have turned to political action.
There’s Marjorie Roberts, who fell ill while running a hospital gift shop in Atlanta and now has pneumonia; Mary Wilson-Snipes, still more than two months after she came from the hospital, is still getting oxygen; and John Lancos, who lost his 41-year-old wife on April 23.
In January, they and dozens of others participated in a training session for advocates on Zoom, led by a group called Covid Survivors for Change. This month, the group arranged virtual meetings with the offices of 16 senators, and more than 50 group members worked for the coronavirus relief package.
The immediate goal of the training session was to teach people how to do things like work for a senator. The long-term goal was to address the problem of numbers.
Numbers are dehumanizing, as activists like to say. In sufficient quantities – for example from Wednesday morning – 536 472 – they also anesthetize. This is why converting numbers into people is so often the job of activists who want to seek policy change after the tragedy.