I lost my dear friend Sets (Setsuko Yoshida) to Covid-19. She was a statistic on April 7 in NYC, one among 731 who died that day. She was a resident at Isabella Retirement Home which was featured in the NY Times as one of those homes that was negligent.
I met Sets when she attended my first poetry writing support group for caregivers in Honolulu. She was caring for her husband who had Alzheimer’s. Her poems are included in three of my books on caregiving.
I always felt like a young pine next to a Bonsai when I was with her. I spoke to her often after she was taken to NYC by her son where she was placed in Isabela and I visited her as often as I could. During one phone call, she stopped in the middle of her sentence as she was saying how she missed her home, her friends and family in Hawaii. She said, “Frances, I’m forgetting to be happy exactly where I am.”
The irony is this, that she died alone. She was the first RN to open the AIDS unit in Hawaii and was recognized for her work by the Life Foundation in 1986. She held the hand of the first AIDS patient who died. She said, “I felt like that patient was my teacher….that young man showed me his humanity, how caring, how courageous one can be in accepting the illness and the courageous way – sometimes humorously , sometimes sadly – in which he faced his impending death.” She stood up against the fears and ignorance that was a rage then.
When one young man told her, “I’m still very young…why did this happen to me?” Sets said that it is not for her to judge others, she encouraged him to celebrate life. “I know you say you want to die, but it doesn’t happen that way. You have to live every day until you die.”
We talked of her work with the AIDS patients a week before she died. She was fine and we compared the present pandemic to her work with AIDS. A week later, she was gone. I have to believe, all the young men whose hands she held, were there holding hers. I’ll see you later, Sets.
