About From Covid, With Love

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“I’m crying because I miss you,” Jeff said, his breath fogged in the oxygen mask, “not because I’m worried.” But both of those things were true.

Across town, locked out of the hospital and separated by a Zoom screen, Sunny and the three teens stared at their husband, their father, fading before them with Covid pneumonia. A week before, his sniffles turned into fever. Two days before, he had barely managed to walk into the hospital. And now, with his lungs giving out, he was on the verge of intubation. 

“Dad, you’re the strongest person in the family. You got this,” Jackson, the oldest, said. Charlie, who had spent the past year of the pandemic pretending her parents didn’t exist, began sobbing when the oxygen alarms sounded. Mikey had a face of stone. Later, he would say it was the worst day of his life. Because he was the one who got sick first, he wondered for weeks, “Did I just kill my dad?”

Like Jeff, Sunny’s first thought was to make sure everyone else was OK. She explained in slow, even terms what was about to happen, and what the doctors were saying. She told all of them, Jeff included, that the prognosis was good. Jeff would be under for just a few days. The mom in Sunny was fully in charge, and the terrified Sunny wasn’t allowed to show. 

The alarms got worse. Doctors waited out of frame. The kids left, and Sunny and Jeff finally broke. “Just imagine my hand in your hand in my hand right now, OK?” Sunny said.

“OK. I do,” Jeff said. He looked suddenly weak, glad for someone who would carry the burden for him. 

“Imagine me curled up next to you, because that’s where I want to be.” She thought of all the times they had ridden out heartbreak and fear that way together.

Jeff almost moaned at that. He felt for the first time in a year what it meant to be alone. “You’re my rock,” he said, trying to lift her spirits. Neither of them knew how true that would be.

Neither did they know that their children understood the threat posed by intubation better than they did. A doctor had visited their school and told them something that would have forced Sunny and Jeff’s brave faces to collapse: there was a fifty percent chance Jeff would never wake up again. 

“Tell me the truth,” Jackson said to Sunny, a few days later. “Was that the last time I’ll ever talk to Dad? Were we saying goodbye to Dad forever?”

We thought we had waited out the pandemic. As Covid-19 ripped through Los Angeles in early 2021, we hunkered down and cut off exposure to other people, even close friends and family. Then the disease came into our home in the most unlikely of ways, through a brief trip to a record store during the waning weeks of the surge.

Out of all of us, Jeff was the least likely to get sick. At 6’5”, built like a brick wall, he had seemed just as indestructible. Mountain biking twice a week during the pandemic had him in the best shape in a decade. At first it didn’t feel like he had Covid at all, maybe a cold — until a fever wracked him for days. A cough settled into his lungs and didn’t leave. On the day he entered the hospital, simply crossing the hall caused him to collapse.  He left a message for his doctor. “It’s a little hard to breath,” he said. He may have understated it a bit. When he reached the triage tent, the nurse measured his oxygen level at 65%, a point where he should have collapsed. She admitted him to the ICU minutes later for acute respiratory failure.

When initial treatments failed, Jeff was intubated for what was supposed to be only a few days. But he didn’t understand what intubation meant, other than what he’d learned from watching ER. That’s why there were so many things he didn’t know about his fate. That “heavily sedated” meant coma and delirium. That he would be immobilized, inside and out. That it meant a 50/50 chance at living. That it would be weeks, not days. 

The coma stretched on, and Jeff skirted death. Doctors struggled to stabilize him, but each time they tried to move him, his oxygen levels would plummet. His throat refused to work when he tried to talk. Jeff’s brief moments of consciousness were filled with confusion, hallucinations and terror. He thought he had killed someone. He thought he was dead. He found himself surrounded by beings covered in yellow overalls. He fought the tube and the ventilator that were keeping him alive. 

As Jeff struggled for life and consciousness, Sunny carried on her own fight. She educated herself on the disease, and wrangled doctors and nurses to give Jeff the best and most humane treatment. She had to balance that advocacy with teaching virtually as a college professor, and the trials of three teenage children dealing not only with the last year of the pandemic, but their father’s seven-week absence and the persistent fear of his death. 

FROM COVID, WITH LOVE is a memoir of 95,000 words, which are lifted straight from this drama — and, in fact, became part of the unfolding story. A published novelist and former journalist, Jeff decided to publicly document the disease and his treatment so that people would understand how dangerous and debilitating Covid truly was. When he woke up, the words took on a different meaning. They were his only connection to the world. “I am alive and typing is stupid,” he said in a sentence that took him an hour to write with clattering fingers. He wrote to bring strength back to his hands, and to find his way back to who he used to be. He wrote to claw himself back to life.

For Sunny, writing was a lifeline of a different sort. The last thing Jeff asked Sunny before he lost consciousness was to take over posting to his Facebook page. She wrote daily about Jeff’s struggles and her own. It gave her a bridge to friends and family, but also a journal to process the nightmare as it unfolded. The raw, unflinching updates gave Covid a human face and soon attracted thousands of readers, most of whom had never met Sunny or Jeff personally. They also helped Sunny, the daughter of a journalist and a communications professor, to come into her own as a writer — so much that when Jeff came back, the readers demanded to keep hearing Sunny’s voice!

The readers checked Facebook the first thing every day to learn new developments. They read because it was a story where they didn’t know the end. They read because they were lucky enough to escape the devastation of Covid, or because they saw their own lost loved ones in the story. It woke up their shared humanity.

The readers soon formed a community that rallied behind the couple — feeding the family, paying their medical bills, sharing medical advice. Care packages arrived from long-lost friends and strangers in far-flung countries. Atheists sent good vibes through the universe, a group of rabbis dedicated a Zoom sermon to Jeff’s recovery, and everyone from Mormons to a convent in India to a temple of a thousand Buddhists prayed for him. 

The updates changed people. Those who had been careless started to show caution. Those who were vaccine skeptics got themselves vaccines. Those who didn’t believe Covid was real started to believe it. But it also helped people believe in the goodness and strength of others. This community created a collective resonance of hope, care, humanity and love. 

When Jeff finally awoke after three weeks, that reservoir of humanity helped him to find the strength to heal, to learn to breathe and speak and walk again. But his real strength came from the fierce love of Sunny, who protected him from a distance and gave him a reason to fight. FROM COVID, WITH LOVE is the wrenching, nearly tragic story of how love conquered death.

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FROM COVID, WITH LOVE is built around Sunny and Jeff’s notes to the world during the midst of the crisis, mixed with the voices of those who became part of our community. It takes place in four parts: “Falling,” which looks at our lives before and during the pandemic, and the choices that brought us to this moment; “Dark and Light,” which explores in vivid detail Sunny’s renewed connection to the world and Jeff’s hallucinatory journey back to it; “Awake,” the jagged road to health that included Jeff coughing blood through his trachea tube; and “After,” when Sunny and Jeff and their family cope with the considerable trauma they’ve endured.

The memoir isn’t a simple recounting of our near-death experience, as gripping as that is. It’s an inside look at a healthcare system that is tearing at the seams, at the exhausted doctors and nurses who still soldier on, at the solitary world of a Covid patient and the extraordinary lengths it takes to communicate, at the heroic effort required to advocate from afar. It especially digs into the horror of intubation, which can save lives but scar patients and their families forever.

It balances the heaviness with the genuine love between Sunny, Jeff and our kids, and how Covid made it stronger. It digs into how our once-challenging marriage became a haven of mutual support where our motto is, “Only one of us can be crazy at a time.” It looks back on the ways we navigated difficult times, including the toxic black mold exposure that set the stage for this brush with Covid. 

It looks at how we saved each other — and how we keep on saving each other.