Dear Readers,

Recently I asked for your prayers for my brother John, who had been diagnosed with Covid on August 10th. I thank you for all of your care, prayers, and support.

Sadly, my dear brother John passed away from complications of Covid on August 31, just a few days after his 70th Birthday. We are devastated, especially since we just lost our only other brother, Mike,74, on July 27, only a couple weeks after a devastating fall. As I mentioned in a post recently, earlier this year I also lost my brother-in-law Jack (from M.S.) and a wonderful friend, Mary (from recurrent cancer). This has been a hellish year.

I’m sure you’ll understand why I haven’t posted for a while, but I truly appreciate your continued patronage and friendship through this site. I have been working on a fun Trek article about props, but I probably won’t get back to it for a little while, as you can imagine.

At the moment I’m still processing John’s passing, and it is hell. Michael’s passing was bad enough but somehow easier to take since he had been in the ICU for nearly two weeks. But John. The hell of it was that we couldn’t visit him in the Covid ward, and because every day he was fighting so hard just to breathe, that it was even difficult for him to talk on the phone for long, and was so weak to even text. We were able to relay to him our love not long before he passed, and he related to my remaining 4 sisters and I that he loved us too. I cannot imagine life without him, he was such a loving and helpful man; always there for us. We are broken.

My brother John was so funny and loving. At 10 years older than I, he used to torment me as a kid, like most big brothers, but he loved me and all of us dearly. (For years I’d cringe when he’d enter a room in case he’d give me a Vulcan Nerve pinch – complete with whistled sound effect!) He was a magnificent artist with pen and ink, loved car racing, motorcycles and Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Of course he liked Trek too, it was his poster of Mr. Spock on his bedroom wall that first fascinated me with the character. He never owned a car that didn’t need body work, and he loved his cats.

The worst part of this whole event was that it was avoidable. Sadly, John wouldn’t get the vaccination, even though the rest of us had all had our shots, and had urged him to get it. Tragically, he had been taken in by misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories. In the end, he realized he realized he was wrong to have not gotten it, and regretted that he was a denier. He relayed a heartfelt apology to us. I can only take comfort that he is with our brother Mike and sister Maggie, and our Mom and Dad and all his beloved friends and family who went before him.

I can only urge anyone out there who feels that they are impervious to any current or future strain of Covid that they must take this seriously. Covid does not care about your race, nationality, sex, politics or age, it only knows it can kill you. Our only defense is masking, social distancing and most of all getting vaccinated. The more of us who are vaccinated, the better the chance we can stop the next, worse, variant in its tracks. Otherwise the variants will get worse, and we cannot afford that, not in America, not in the whole world.

If I lose a few readers here for my stance here, that’s your choice. But because I love you all, I urge you to please take care and get vaccinated. I don’t want this to happen to you. Too many families have suffered losses from this preventable, frightening virus. I never thought that my family would become another statistic, but here it is.

Thank you, I’ll be back soon <3

Here is a photo of my two brothers taken in 2009. John (left) and Michael. My heart will ache forever.