The Trump-Cuomo Grief Monster
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Family, Short Story, Covid 19, Grief, Fiction

The Trump-Cuomo Grief Monster

When he died of Covid, two of his children blamed Trump, and two blamed Cuomo.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

They split in their response. They wanted to charge Trump with a crime against humanity. They wanted to sue Cuomo. They wanted to sue China. They wanted to sue the US government.

“It’s a pandemic,” said the eldest grandchild, a lawyer. She was dry and emotionless. “No one will take accountability for his death. That would open the floodgates to more lawsuits.”

The siblings were divided. Two believed the other two did not deserve their inheritance, because they supported the man who killed their father. They looked on the internet and on YouTube for any evidence they could find.

The Trump-Cuomo grief monster infiltrated their lives and filled them with rage. A Zoom funeral would be more responsible. No, they should go there in person and have an event as a “fuck you” to Covid. No, they should just bury him and do a large mass later, “when this was all over.” No, this would never be over, because the Chinese would release another virus and then we would lose more freedoms. We needed to fight back now, or his death was in vain.

Nothing was right. They all tried to loop back around to “what he would have wanted.” “He would not have wanted us to risk our lives for his funeral.” “He would not have wanted us to live in fear.” He would have wanted this or that.

And on and on they went, putting their own desires into a dead man’s mouth…masking their own desires by making a statement that could never be proven true or false.

SSRIs were prescribed. An overwhelmed grief counselor could not handle all the tears. Senseless. Senseless death. Senseless doom. The grief counselor tried to help them frame the death, to make it into an inspirational story. But there was no frame — Her attempts fell into nothingness, like dry sand. He could have lasted five or ten more Christmases, five or ten more Thanksgivings.

And there was blame. Blame on politicians, blame on siblings for not taking him in and for putting him in a home, blame on so-and-so for voting for what’s-his-name.

“How could they vote for someone who called our father stupid for dying?”

The disease ravaged on. Two of the children (who were on opposite sides of the political fence) developed a combination of anxiety and depression. One insisted the virus was not real, and that he was a person of interest. The other insisted the virus was real, but created and released intentionally, and that it was created to target her genes in particular.

Both of them felt hunted by the government. Neither applied for unemployment benefits, even though they both qualified.

The other two seemed all right, but they were afraid of having to carry the emotions of the other two. They were barely holding it together. They couldn’t take any more weight.

Christmas came and went. Those on SSRIs handled it all right. They were fine with cooking small birds and staying in. The other two made large meals for just a few people and sighed at their big, empty houses.

They did and didn’t want to carry the others.

It was complicated.

The drive to file lawsuits fizzled out. The lawyer in the family was right, maybe.

Life was moving on. The healing was not over. Just the rage had dulled. The pandemic was still here. They were still living through it, and now they had to protect their children, their mother. Life kept going. The pain didn’t subside, but this thing kept on going and going.

They would get away with what they did, whatever it was they did, whoever they were.

One more meaningless passing in a ravaged, moaning sea of souls.