I used to think COVID-19 happened but to others. Then it hit my family.
BY MARK NEIKIRK
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 11:14 AM
I was with friends recently, testing the waters of social distancing outside the home, when one asked, “Does any of you know anyone with COVID?”
The subtext was clear: This whole thing is overblown. Well, I told them, I know someone who died, someone whose parents nearly died while on ventilators, and someone my age (60s) who had just tested positive.
Truth be told, though, the pandemic still felt distant. It was happening but to others.
No more. William Robert Neikirk, a pioneering journalist in the field of economics reporting, died on the afternoon of Aug. 27. The cause of death was complications from his long and difficult struggle with dementia coupled with complications from COVID 19. Bill was my uncle.
His career started here, at this newspaper as a sports stringer while attending the University of Kentucky. Those early years produced a favorite assignment – covering a high school basketball game at which Herky Rupp was on the bench. His father, the legendary Adolph, was in the stands and alternated between clinical analysis of the game and paternal frustration: “The thought came to me that the tables were being turned on this famous coach who had many times kept youngsters sitting anxiously on the bench while their fathers watched from the stands. Eventually, though, Herky was sent into the game. Adolph beamed.
Bill wrote that recollection in 1985 when he was with the Chicago Tribune. It was a respite from covering world trade and monetary policy, but it was also typical of his approach to reporting: find the odd angle, find the humanity. His intent was to make economics relatable to all readers. He once took a guided tour of the Fort Knox vault so he could report on whether the gold was still there, gleaming and real. People were wondering. Maybe the government was lying. He assured them otherwise.
After college, Bill polished his skills at the Associated Press, first in Frankfort in the early 1960s. He moved to Louisiana, where he covered Pistol Pete Maravich one day, the Civil Rights Movement the next. He broke into national affairs in 1968 when AP put him on the team covering the Republican convention that nominated Nixon. There is a great old photo in the AP archives of Bill on press row, phone cradled to his ear and fingers on the typewriter – the very image of the term “working journalist.” Within a year, he moved to AP’s Washington bureau.
Bill drew on his boyhood when he covered economic affairs. Our family is from Irvine in Estill County, a railroad town at the mountains’ edge. He and most of his 11 siblings left for the military or college or marriage but returned for family gatherings at my grandmother’s house on Kirkland Avenue, a half block from the general store with its candy counter and its dirt path to the Kentucky River and a rope swing. Those made the house something of child’s paradise, though the generation before us had known real hardship there. The family farm was lost during the Great Depression. His family’s story was never out of mind when Bill wrote about the forces that make an economy tick. Or fail.
The same great heart that made Bill a better journalist made him a spectacular uncle. In March 2002, his older brother, my father, Marshall Neikirk, died of cancer. Less than four months later, I was in the hospital for cancer surgery. Bill and his wife, Ruth, sat with me through the night. When I woke periodically from the post-surgery fog, I would hear them chatting away in the most cheerful fashion. What a gift they gave me by their presence.
Bill’s own cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, came a few years later. With his treatment successful, he retired from the Trib, and imagined a life of travel, time with grandchildren, editing the church newsletter and finishing his first novel, “The Copperhead Club,” set in DC and in a Kentucky town you might mistake for Irvin
The dementia was gentle at first. Bill was able to finish the novel and come home to Estill County for a book signing. Ruth took names down on Post-it notes, so Bill could transcribe them in each book. To see them together, these two college sweethearts, was to see the very image of the marriage vow. In sickness and in health.
The end was unkind. Ill herself, Ruth’s could not be with Bill for the last hours. Within a day of his death, she would be in the hospital with COVID-19. Others in their immediate family would test positive, too.
I tell Bill’s story – our family’s story – with the hope that those who want to diminish COVID-19 might pause and listen to families in the pathway of the disease. It is taking something from us.
I’ve heard it said that many who have died were sick already. I suppose that is true, and a recent Centers for Disease Control report confirmed as much. But what point is being made? Is it that those with underlying health issues are not worthy of our sacrifices, our compassion or our investments in better care? They are. Rest in peace, uncle.
Read more here:
https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article245497720.html#storylink=cpy