In an obituary that puts a human face on the widespread devastation inflicted by the pandemic, a man from Scott City, Kansas, rebuked those who refuse to wear masks in an obituary he wrote for his father, Marvin Farr, after he died from COVID-19 earlier this week.
Courtney Farr described in the obit how his 81-year-old father, who worked as the rural town’s local vet and farmer, was “born into an America recovering from the Great Depression and about to face World War 2, times of loss and sacrifice difficult for most of us to imagine.”
“Americans would be asked to ration essential supplies and send their children around the world to fight and die in wars of unfathomable destruction,” he wrote. “He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another.”
Farr blasted the town locals in particular for ignoring the severity of COVID-19 and refusing to wear facial coverings.
“The science that guided [my father’s] professional life has been disparaged and abandoned by so many of the same people who depended on his knowledge to care for their animals and to raise their food,” he wrote in the obituary.
Farr repeated the rebuke in a Facebook post published on Wednesday, saying he’s “spent most of this year hearing people from my hometown talk about how this disease isn’t real, isn’t that bad, only kills old people, masks don’t work, etc.”
“And because of the prevalence of those attitudes, my father’s death was so much harder on him, his family and his caregivers than it should have been,” he asserted.
In another Facebook post published the next day, Farr addressed criticism accusing him of making his father’s obit political.
“Well, his death was political. He died in isolation with an infectious disease that is causing a national crisis,” he stated. “To pretend otherwise or to obfuscate is also a political decision.”
President Donald Trump, with the aid of some of his GOP and Fox News allies, frequently eschews masks and has derided those who wear them as “politically correct” despite health officials’ science-based assessment that facial coverings prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Farr’s father passed away amid record-breaking surges of the virus throughout the country. Wednesday saw the highest number of COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations per day since the pandemic began, and almost 213,000 new infections were recorded on Thursday.
H/t the Kansas City Star.
