A PATRIOT'S TRUTH

Business development director Vivian recollects her sister’s battle with Covid-19 and her own spirited fight against governmental overreach.

According to the author, the U.S. government reacted to the coronavirus pandemic by taking aim at fundamental American liberties, while the “media was pumping fear at an alarming rate.” Pandemic restrictions, she says, posed a special burden for Vivian’s mother, a widow suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who lived in a nursing home in Lewisville, Texas, because it required all visitors to be vaccinated and to remain on the other side of a plexiglass wall. The author’s older sister, Kelly Canon, refused to acquiesce to Covid restrictions and avoided vaccination; as a conservative grassroots organizer in Arlington, Texas, she publicly expressed “that no one was going to infringe on her rights as an American and force her to take a vaccine that, at the time, was completely experimental.” Canon was also particularly vulnerable to the virus, as she “had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, was overweight, and vaped,” says the author. After Canon contracted the virus, she became perilously ill, was hospitalized, and finally died. Vivian vividly depicts what she sees as the human costs of aggressive implementation of anti-Covid protocols, as when she describes her mother’s poignant separation from visitors. Also, she thoughtfully explores the political polarization of the Covid era, noting the vitriol that some people directed at Canon via social media as she was dying. However, this is an undisciplined book, overall, which includes numerous pages of text messages and social media posts, as well as a protracted, digressive discussion of Canon’s opposition to red-light cameras in Texas. Vivian notes that she’s “not a writer in any shape or form,” and her book, while heartfelt, is not an original or particularly searching contribution to the growing body of literature on the governmental and medical response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

An occasionally touching but meandering remembrance that may be best appreciated by those who know the author well.