SAND SPRINGS — More than 12,500 Oklahomans have been lost to COVID-19, and many of their families no doubt experienced the unique anguish of deciding when to let them go — when to silence the cacophony of machines working overtime to keep these husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and other beloveds on this side of the veil.
“I’m a reserved person, I think,” Mattie Fish, 84, said. “I’m not a leader. I don’t like to make decisions.”
But late on a Thursday evening last Feb. 11, her older son, Roger Fish, took a phone call from the hospital in Oklahoma City where his brother, Ashley Fish — Mattie’s younger son — had been transferred. Ashley, who was on a ventilator fighting COVID, had taken a turn for the worse, they said, and Mattie needed to go to the hospital and make a decision.
So she and Roger and Ashley’s children went the following morning, braving the biting cold and icy roads, to say goodbye to Ashley, 53.
“He was in a coma, but they told us he could hear us,” Mattie said. “So I told him that his whole life had been dedicated to his children and that he was a good father.”
After Ashley died, the family returned to the Sand Springs residence they have called home since 1965. Just hours later, on Saturday morning, “they called us to St. John (in Tulsa) to do the same thing for Elmer,” Mattie said.
