When Mike Farley was hospitalized for COVID-19, a kind nurse taught him how to FaceTime — enabling the whole family to connect. And five days later, it was how they said goodbye. CPRNews
Mike Farley's family marked his passing with an Irish wake held over Zoom. His brother, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews all joined in to remember him.On Monday, March 23, I was working on aabout hospitals preparing for the coronavirus. An emergency room doctor in a big Colorado health system was telling me they were seeing a surge, a doubling each day, in COVID-19 patients.
Though I hadn’t seen him in some time, I’d known Mike Farley since I was a kid. Mike’s wife Nancy taught my brother how to play piano. His son John and I grew up swimming and playing soccer together. John and I were high school classmates at Manual High in Denver, part of a tight group that remains close friends today. And I knew Mike’s daughter Maggie, who is a couple of years younger than John, as well.
Favorite stories flowed about Mike, a retired lawyer, lover of classical music, avid reader and advocate for those experiencing homelessness.“That really was his passion,” she said. “He loved to drive by the sites that they had built and see families out in the yards playing.” Nancy and Mike were watching a movie at their house with friends when he started to cough violently and couldn’t stop. Everyone in the room looked at each other.
After about an hour, Nancy returned to the front desk. “I said, ‘What is going on?’ Finally, somebody did come back and say, ‘We're admitting Mike to the hospital because he has bilateral pneumonia.’”They spoke on the phone a little while later. Mike was desperate for some books, including one called ‘The Bishop’s Pawn,’ “probably a mystery,” Nancy said. He only had about 20 pages left in one of the books, and Nancy brought over three to the hospital.
“He reached out and said that he really didn't think he'd be around tomorrow, and I said, ‘Oh Dad, I look forward to FaceTiming and seeing you tomorrow morning,’” John said. She said it would be very much her dad’s way to decide to open up the use of a ventilator for another patient.“But I think we regard it as a gift to us, actually. I think he was envisioning a future when he would come home and just be stuck on oxygen and be kind of a burden to the family and not be able to go anywhere,” Maggie said. “He just decided he would rather have a better life rather than a longer life.”And like many sick patients in the COVID-19 era, he was alone.
“There is not even going to be equipment, maybe, for the doctors and nurses, and they could end up victims themselves,” Maggie said. “So there's going to be a whole lot more people dying alone, and there are going to be a whole lot more doctors and nurses who don't have masks and gloves if we don't fix this. And I think that is absolutely criminal. We saw this coming and we were utterly unprepared.
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