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“Your mother will not be coming home, Son,” Father speaks. “She never regained consciousness last night. She belongs to the unknown now.”

“You and the generation before you, Father, gave us this nightmare,” Son replies. “This will forever be your legacy for all time.”

Father removes his head from his palms, staring off into the early dusk from the porch. He picks up Thomas Wolfe’s book, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and turns to the page that his Father once read to him.

“Son, let me read to you what Thomas Wolfe wrote to my Father’s generation,” Father says.

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul – but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them – but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us – we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

Son stares at his broken Father, that familiar wisp of hair casting a shadow over his furrowed brow.

“The broken heart of Mother being gone will never pass, Father,” Son says. “Some wounds heal and scar – others never heal. The sins of this Pandemic will leave wounds beyond healing – and they will be the legacy of your generation, Father.”

Father looks up at Son. He stares deep into the soul of the Son’s wounds.

“It may be the legacy of my generation that we indeed made the storms now tearing our lives apart,” Father says, pausing. “But it will be the legacy of your generation that you did not heed the warnings of the storms approaching.”

COVID 19 will be a terrible legacy for all of mankind—those who made it, those who ignored it, and those who mocked it.

Father turns away.

Pictures on the big-screen television show dead bodies being loaded into a refrigerated 18-wheeler. The bodies will be laid side-by-side before being stacked.

Those images will never pass, not in Father or Son’s lifetimes.

So, where do we go from here?

We survive.

Until the end.