My Cousin Mareta

 My Cousin Mareta

My cousin Mareta died of COVID on September 12th, 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic. She vowed that there was no such thing as COVID; she’d prove there was no such thing as COVID. She was on a vent 28 days, improved a bit toward the end, then died. 

She was the perfect Livingston Countian: She never had a job, lived her life in a two mile radius of her childhood home, living completely for her family and community, being a volunteer, church worker and caregiver. She married the boy she began dating in her sophormore year in high school, and, by all accounts, it was a very happy marriage. I have no doubt that, if she had lived, they would have grown old together and died together. I don’t think that they ever dated anyone else. 

She was born a hospital, in Salem, Kentucky, but thereafter, unless she went to Paducah for her groceries or to Florida on vacation, and for her final trip in life to the ICU, she spent her life in Hampton, Kentucky. Her parents had a farm on Duley Bluff, but it was on the edge of the town area of Hampton, which was unincorporated - you literally drove out of the clumps of houses onto their property. She went to Hampton School, to high school in Burna ten miles further away, waited for Mark, her fiance, to finish college, after which they married, and built a house literally a stone’s throw from the old house where her parents raised her and her little brother, Charlie. Now she will be buried with her parents in Hampton Cemetery, with family, friends, neighbors and relatives. 

You could say it was a quiet life well lived; she had a happy marriage; she was much loved by her parents and brother; she was respected and loved in the community; she was a sincere Christian; she did not drink or use drugs. 

But she was also very insular; she was my cousin and we literally never had a conversation. Our families had not been close, and she and I were completely different people. She wanted to do the same things that her parents had done, and wanted to be with the same people all the time. It’s just as well that she died young, for if she had outlived her few friends or her husband, she would have been terribly lonely. My mother described her as “very curious.” Mother used that word in the old-fashioned sense - odd. Mareta was, to her, a curiosity, an oddity, an odd, unfriendly girl who seemed to be very old even as a child. 

She was very much like many another individual from that county, especially the north side of the county, which is very, very insular - they are so naive that they can’t cope with the outside world, and, now, thanks to social media, the whole world is connected. People from that county can’t cope because the outside world now isn’t something they visit. It’s in their newsfeed every day. That, the constant news of the outside world, killed her. She couldn’t cope with it. 

Nothing in her upbringing or education prepared her for a pandemic. She could not believe that a pandemic was going on. It was simply an outside thing.

It’s one thing to say that you don’t know much about it because you haven’t experienced it - and that’s the only knowledge that Kentucky people will believe. If they haven’t experienced it, then it doesn’t exist. Anything in a book is a lie. 

That’s how so many people die in Kentucky; they get addicted to meth;  they flame out if they leave their little communities. They have never read a book in their lives, except for a textbook, and social media is not for the dessemination of ideas, to them. It’s just a way to hook up or to show pictures of your children. 

She’s not the only one. I have lots of examples of people from that place who couldn’t cope:

There’s the girl one year behind me in high school who went to Florida and got addicted to cocaine. She started with her mother’s pills in high school and thought it great fun to come to school high. After she experienced cocaine she was in and out of rehab for the rest of her life and lived with her parents. She never married, had children, obtained a college degree, ran a 10k or a marathon, or any of the other activities in which modern women engage. Her obituary read that she liked to go to church, hang out with family and friends and watch “Little House On the Prairie” reruns. 

There’s the girl who, two years after she graduated, died in a horrible automobile accident, because she had gone to Paducah to drink with her friends. The road made a turn and they didn’t. She couldn’t even cope with Paducah. 

There’s the guy who, two weeks after we graduated, burned himself up in his hotel room smoking in bed. He had gone to Atlanta to work in construction. This was at the beginning of Atlanta’s big boom. 

There’s the guy who was the captain of the varsity basketball team, who went to a community college on a basketball scholarship courtesy of his uncle, who finagled it for him. The kid flunked with F’s in every class the first semester, and never went back. He worked in a factory for a long time, hurt his back, got disability and now grows pot. 

These were all people, save Mareta, who were thought to be intelligent, who would do well, who would “make something of themselves.” Mareta never attempted to make something of herself. She was satisfied to be a wife, mother, churchworker, and caregiver. That’s all she ever wanted. But being a well-respected and loved member of the community doesn’t make you an expert on pandemics. 

Don’t be like Mareta.