The medium- and low-security prison in Lompoc has largely been seen as a bright light, offering stable jobs with good benefits. But now residents fear a new stigma they won’t be able to shake: Their town is home to the nation’s largest covid-19 outbreak in a federal prison.

“The prison is in our city limits, the sick inmates are filling our local hospital beds, yet I have no control over any of it because it’s a federal facility,” said Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne. “I’m getting emails and phone calls from people who are afraid, who are asking me to do something, and I have to tell them I am powerless to do anything.”

As the coronavirus bolted through one-third of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ 122 facilities last month, cracks began to appear in the once symbiotic relationship between the prisons and their towns. The bureau’s fumbling of the crisis, which enabled the virus to percolate within the prisons and beyond, is stoking fear and resentment of the prisons – and sometimes of prison staff who live in those communities.

So far, 45 inmates across the country have died. The Bureau of Prisons announced last week that 70 % of tests of inmates for covid-19 have come back positive. As of Friday, 3,701 of the bureau’s roughly 140,000 inmates had tested positive for the disease. No prison staff have died but nationwide, 527 have tested positive, according to federal data.

Residents in Lompoc and other prison towns, including Butner, North Carolina, and Oakdale, Louisiana, say having a prison with a high infection rate unnerves them, especially when they encounter unmasked and ungloved prison staff in grocery stores, pharmacies or restaurants.

“We have people who come in with prison uniforms two to three times a week,” said Antonio de Jesus Rodriguez, owner of Floriano’s Mexican restaurant, which provides pickup orders to customers. “Some are wearing a mask, but some are without one. It’s kind of mind-boggling. As I’m taking their order I’m thinking, ‘You are in a hot spot; why aren’t you taking this more seriously?’ ”

The Washington Post reported last month that the Bureau of Prisons allowed the virus to fester in dozens of prisons before taking action to stop its progress.

It did not provide masks to correctional officers or inmates until after dozens of inmates were quarantined, and often after inmates had died. Prisoners with coughs and body aches continued to line up, just a few feet apart, for their meals and medication. And temperature checks, for both inmates and staff, did not become routine until the disease had permeated dormitory-style settings where 100 or more prisoners sleep and live within a few feet of one another.

In a statement, the bureau said it began responding to the coronavirus threat as early as January, and is using “screening, testing, appropriate treatment, prevention, education, and infection control measures.”

It also said that starting April 1, it began to minimize gatherings and that “inmate movement in small numbers” is being allowed for essential activities, such as visits to the commissary, laundry, showers, telephone and health care.

The Bureau of Prisons’ mishandling of the coronavirus threat prompted Rep. Frederick Keller, R-Pa., to introduce legislation last week that would require the bureau’s director to be confirmed by the Senate. Michael Carvajal, the current director, was appointed by the U.S. attorney general, as past directors have been.

At the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex, two inmates have died of covid, 905 inmates had tested positive and 34 staff members had contracted the disease as of Friday, federal data shows. Nearly one-quarter of the covid-19 cases in federal prisons nationwide are at the Lompoc prison.

The number of inmates who have tested positive at the prison is double the number of positive cases in all of Santa Barbara County – which has reported 450 non-prison cases among its population of nearly 450,000. The prison has 2,700 inmates.

The prison’s coronavirus cases are a burden on the compact town of 40,000, where locals and the prison system share the same fire department and hospital. The mayor believes the spread of coronavirus in the community is largely due to the prison and could have been curbed if prison leaders acted sooner and were more transparent. She estimates that nearly 60 percent of prison employees live in Lompoc.

“We’ve reached out, but either a lack of experience or lack of leadership has caused them to circle the wagons and say, ‘We will deal with it internally,’ Osborne said. “This secrecy does not build trust with the community.”

The Bureau of Prisons responded: “We have an open line of communication with public officials surrounding our facilities.”

The prison, though, has argued that details of how the pandemic are being handled must be kept private.

The bureau has asked local officials not to publicly disclose information regarding internal controls, the number of hospitalized inmates or the location of hospitalized inmates. “The BOP believes that such disclosure creates a security and safety risk,” reads the request obtained by The Post.

It’s a 15-minute drive from one side of Lompoc – past ranch-style homes, the heavily muraled downtown off Ocean Avenue and the railroad that runs through town – to the prison on the city’s other edge. The razor-wired top of the prison rises out of planted fields of kale, artichokes and lettuce that surround it, immediately next door to Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Five miles from the prison in downtown Lompoc, American Host Restaurant owner Dennis Block said “it’s a little scary” for him and his employees to know “that there’s 100 cases down the street.”

In April, when a local doctor donated $1,000 to the breakfast and lunch spot to provide free meals to the community, Block and his crew took steps to protect themselves.

More than 150 burritos were delivered to the local hospital, police department and convalescent home. For the prison workers, Block’s employees set up a table on the patio next to the parking lot, loaded about 50 tinfoil-wrapped burritos onto it, then watched from inside the diner until the prison worker who collected them drove away.

Block said his greatest worry isn’t exposure at his restaurant – it’s down the street from him at Lompoc Valley Medical Center, where coronavirus-infected prisoners are being treated and sometimes dying. “Basically, they are importing the virus into our community,” he said.

Nick Clay, director of the Santa Barbara County Emergency Medical Services Agency, said the prison has converted an old factory on the prison grounds into a medical ward that will treat up to 20 inmates with severe covid-19 symptoms. “They’re really taking active measures that are focused on resolving this issue,” Clay said, defending the prison response.

The Rev. Jane Quandt of the Valley of the Flowers United Church of Christ drives by the prison a few times a week. Construction of the ward did not begin until mid-April, three days before the first inmate’s death, and after many had landed in the local hospital. It opened Wednesday.

Quandt said she hopes the community does not blame the prison for the spread of the virus. “This is a federal institution. So ultimately it’s got to be run by the federal administration” in Washington, she said. “This is one of their babies and they’re not taking very good care of it, at least not here in Lompoc.”

– – –

Just north of the Falls Lake reservoir sits the town of Butner in rural Granville County, North Carolina, about 30 miles north of Raleigh. Tidy brick and siding-wrapped homes line grid-patterned streets dating back to World War II, when it was Camp Butner.

In 2008, Butner residents opposed efforts to add a federal biodefense research center to a cluster of government-owned facilities that dominate the region. Along with the federal prison, there’s a state prison, psychiatric hospital, addiction-treatment center and a facility caring for disabled people.

At the time, Butner residents said they feared lethal pathogens – with no known treatment or vaccine – could escape the facility.

Now, similar fears have been renewed with covid-19 and the prison. As of Wednesday, seven inmates have died. At least 306 of the 4,500 inmates have tested positive, along with 39 staff members who have been infected.

In early April, Pine Grove Missionary Baptist Church introduced social distancing and protective gear to its twice-monthly food bank. As volunteers in masks and gloves carted boxes of pasta, frozen meat and canned goods to cars and trucks of local families, conversation repeatedly turned to their collective anxiety over the prison.

“They were concerned with the possible spread of the virus within the community, considering that many of the [prison] workers live in the community,” said Michelle Ross, who helps run the food bank, about six miles from the prison.

In March, the outbreak crept closer to the Rev. Marcos León of St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Butner.

Three parishioners – two nurses and a doctor working at the prison complex – told him in confidence that they were exposed on the job and had to self-quarantine at home. They were “truly afraid,” León said. “It was the fear they were going to die. Then it was: ‘I feel so bad because of my children. I’m living in a house where I have to be separated from them.’ ”

The church’s prison ministry regularly offered Mass, confession and one-on-one spiritual guidance to inmates until March, when prisons banned visitors.

Butner and Granville County officials say they don’t expect the covid-19 outbreak will alter appreciation for the prison as a local employer offering good-paying jobs. But correctional officers who live in and around Butner say they know some people fear them, said William Boseman, a retired Butner correctional officer and union representative for the officers.

When people see the prison workers in their dark-gray uniforms walking down the street, they cross to the opposite side. In grocery stores, people scoot to the next aisle.

“They are being ostracized,” Boseman said. “When people know you work at this place where there has been an outbreak, they treat you different. They treat you as if you are automatically contagious.”

– – –

The first covid-19 death of a federal inmate took place six weeks ago – on March 28 – at a prison in Oakdale, Louisiana. As of Friday, six more of the 1,800 inmates had died. There have been 115 cases of covid-19 among the prisoners and 26 among the staff.

On the boot-shaped state of Louisiana, Oakdale sits just above the ankle. About 110 miles west of Baton Rouge, past the flooded rice-field crawfish ponds of the Cajun prairie, a meandering country road lined with towering Southern pines subtly opens into a meticulously planned, four-lane highway that drops you into the town of fewer than 8,000 people.

It only takes five minutes to drive from the center of town to the Oakdale Federal Correctional Complex. Along an access road to the complex, a long row of fluorescent pink and white signs with handwritten biblical psalms and motivational quotes flickers in the spring breeze: “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.”

Jane Willis and her husband, Greg Willis, are in their mid-50s and have been the pastors at the Christ Church of Oakdale for 15 years. They broke ground on a new church near the prison to house their growing congregation a few months ago, before the pandemic.

As the news broke of the covid-19 outbreak at the prison, Jane Willis felt called to do something for the shift workers driving in and out of the prison complex, past their property each day. So she made signs.

“I saw the workers going back and forth and it broke my heart for them,” she said. “I was thinking of a way we can encourage them as they go to work to know they’re not alone.”

The couple’s son works at the prison, as do 15 members of their congregation. One of them, Aubrey Melder, 53, a correctional officer, said when he saw the signs on his way to work the first time, his eyes filled with tears. Melder has felt supported by the community, but he has also felt its fear.

“When they look at you, you can tell they are uneasy,” he said, describing the few times he went to the grocery store in his uniform. “It scares them a little bit.”

Corey Trammel, a union president representing the correctional officers, said the community of Oakdale has long supported the prison workers, and he doesn’t blame them for being afraid of contracting the virus.

“I hate it for the community, and I hate it for our employees,” said Trammel. “If our prison would have let people know what was going on and our warden would have protected us and our community, then people would not have to look at us like that.”

In response, the bureau said in a statement: “We do everything we can to maintain open lines of communication with public officials. Our Executive staff are willing to discuss with them everything they are doing to combat this virus.”

Gene Paul, mayor of Oakdale and a lifelong resident, said the outbreak at the prison created chaos and left people in the community panicked. “Everyone is wondering, ‘Am I going to be next?’ ”

Paul said he now is in close contact with the warden, but he wishes the Bureau of Prisons would have handled the crisis better from the beginning. He said buses of newly sentenced inmates were continuing to arrive at the prison until a few weeks ago.

The bureau said that, overall, inmate movement is down 95 percent. However, they are legally obligated to accept new inmates brought by the U.S. Marshals Service. Those inmates are being quarantined for 14 days before entering the general prison population.

Paul estimates that half of the prison staff live in Oakdale and, although many are angry with the bureau, that rage is not directed at the people who work at the Oakdale facility.

In early April, Paul pulled a brown SUV into the Christ Church of Oakdale parking lot for a “Park and Praise” event to boost prison staff morale.

As prison employees zipped by on the access road, Paul and dozens of other Oakdale residents waved and honked their horns. Christian music blared and several people stretched their hands to the sky. A woman waved a sign that read: “Not all Heroes Wear Capes.” The prison workers smiled and waved back.

This time, as job losses linked to the coronavirus pandemic dwarf what the country experienced in the 2007-2009 crisis, the heaviest toll is falling on women.

Waitresses, day-care workers, hairstylists, hotel maids and dental hygienists are among the 20.5 million people who watched their jobs vanish in April – the most devastating spike in unemployment since the Great Depression.

“I had a good rhythm going. I wasn’t rich, I couldn’t complain saying I was poor,” said Ilanne Dubois, a 36-year-old single mother in Long Island who worked as a waitress at a Manhattan hotel. “Now, all of that stability is gone. We’re falling into a hole.”

Women have never experienced an unemployment rate in the double digits since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting data by gender in 1948 – until now. At 16.2%, women’s unemployment in April was nearly three points higher than men’s, according to Labor Department rates released Friday. But a closer look at the numbers shows deeper disparities.

Not only are women overrepresented in some of the hardest-hit industries, such as leisure and hospitality, health care and education, but women – especially black and Hispanic women – lost jobs in those sectors at disproportionate rates.

Before the pandemic, women held 77% of the jobs in education and health services, but they account for 83% of the jobs lost in those sectors, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. Women made up less than half of the retail trade workforce, but they experienced 61% of the retail job losses. Many of these women held some of the lowest-paying jobs – the cashiers, hotel clerks, office receptionists, hospital technicians, teachers’ aides.

The pandemic has wiped out the job gains women made over the past decade, just months after women reached the majority of the paid U.S. workforce for only the second time in American history.

“How are we supposed to ever come back?” said Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). “I think it’s going to take a really long time to even reach that point again. A lot of people are going to be stuck.”

Labor experts worry that even as states reopen, many workers, especially in leisure and hospitality, will continue to suffer cuts to hours, wages and tips. Low-wage workers, who are disproportionately female, will be the least likely to be rehired, economists say.

Even when men experienced the greatest initial job losses during the Great Recession, women took much longer to recover. Between June 2009 and June 2011, women lost 281,000 jobs while men gained 805,000. Those losses were driven by public-sector job cuts.

As local and state governments slash their budgets in the coming months, government workers will face painful job losses, and those will affect more women, who hold nearly 58% of public-sector posts, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. Many of these jobs are in public schools.

“That’s only going to make things worse for women,” Stevenson said.

Working mothers face an especially daunting recovery because they rely on schools and day-care centers that remain closed. Even if hotels and restaurants and stores reopen, some women might not be able to find the child care necessary to return to work.

“If summer camps don’t open up, if schools don’t open in the fall, who goes back to work?” Stevenson said.

That’s the question facing Dubois, the single mother on Long Island. For the past decade, she has built a career working at different high-end hotels in Manhattan, often working overnight and 16-hour shifts as a waitress to support her 6-year-old son. But she’s been out of work since March, when the Dominick hotel, formerly the Trump SoHo hotel, closed temporarily.

Now she’s relying on unemployment assistance to feed her son. She’s fallen behind on her mortgage, cut her car insurance and has dug into the little savings she has to pay the bills.

She’s heard the hotel may not reopen until July. And even if she could find a different job before then, maybe as a delivery driver, she doesn’t know how she’d be able to leave her son, with schools and child-care centers closed.

“I can’t afford to pay the babysitter anymore,” she said. “I haven’t thought of what I could possibly do next.”

At the start of this year, for only the second time, women reached a significant milestone: They outnumbered men in the U.S. paid workforce, bolstered by surges in health care and education.

Women have made inroads in traditionally male industries, but their job gains have primarily been in traditionally female-oriented sectors – working with people in jobs that are often lower paying. Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that differences in the occupations chosen by men and women was the single largest factor accounting for the gender pay gap.

A recent report from the NWLC found that nearly two-thirds of the 22.2 million workers in the country’s 40 lowest-paying jobs are women. It also found that more than two-thirds of mothers in the low-paid workforce are the sole or primary breadwinners for their families.

Not only do women make about 82% of what men make, but they also have less savings. And time away from work tends to depress women’s wages, potentially exacerbating the country’s persistent gender pay gap, said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the NWLC.

Many women were already barely bringing in enough money to cover child-care costs.

“Now let’s just add in the fact that your job just got a lot more dangerous,” Stevenson said. “You’re sending your kid to child care, where you’re also risking you might get sick. You start doing all that math, and it just doesn’t make sense anymore.”

While women overall were more likely than men to be unemployed, black and Hispanic women were hit the hardest, at 16.4 and 20.2% unemployment respectively.

Among them are women like Racaél Guzmán, a 46-year-old mother of three who was temporarily laid off from her custodial job at office buildings in Alexandria, Virginia, but cannot apply for unemployment because she is an undocumented immigrant.

She has worked for the company since she came to the United States from El Salvador in 2004. Guzmán, who has high blood pressure, is worried that her health care will run out at the end of 60 days. Volunteers from a local church brought her bags of cereal, cooking oil and other food for her and her family. But she’s worried about how she will pay for groceries if she can’t return to work in the coming weeks.

She barely managed to pay the rent last month.

“Purely thanks to the holy Mary, we were able to make it,” she said. “But I don’t know about the next month.”

Sabrina Baptiste, a single mother of 15-month-old twins in Washington D.C., was down to about three days’ worth of diapers last week before a church group stopped by her apartment with more. Since mid-March, she has not been able to return to her work as a bartender.

“I had a good thing going,” she said. “I was able to do everything I wanted to do.” She had found an affordable day care for the twins and was able to make a steady income with generous tips. “Now it just took a drastic turn.”

She’s barely been able to make partial payments on her rent and utilities. She’s not been able to access unemployment assistance or a stimulus check. Even if she can go back to her job, will the child-care center reopen for her children?

“I really don’t want to go ahead and think about that,” she said. “If it gets any worse, it’s like, ‘Come on,’ I don’t know how I’ll be able to manage.”

Michelle Utterback has been a hairdresser for more than 35 years. She never made a lot of money, she said, but she always had enough to support herself.

“My dad always said it was more important to get a trade because you know you can always have a job,” said Utterback, 59. “If you’re doing hair, you know you can always get a job.”

With her salon closed because of the pandemic, she worries she’ll lose the clientele she worked hard to build up. She fears she might be laid off permanently and will struggle to find another job.

Dubois also has wondered whether she will have to change careers. For more than a decade, she has loved the hotel industry. “I am a hospitality person,” she said. “I’ve always been a friendly, talkative person.”

After years of working three different hotel jobs, and many overnight shifts, she saved up enough money to buy a condominium in a quiet neighborhood. She was able to give her son his own room and a small yard. She was even able to take him on a vacation to Mexico recently.

“I started making something for myself, building a life for my son,” she said. “Now it’s like I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s next.”

I tell myself I should be more positive. I should be grateful. Sometimes I can make that last for an hour or two.

A day can drag on forever when you’re isolated all by yourself. I sleep as late as I can. I try not to look at the clock. I go on Facebook and read about all the ways this country is going to hell in a handbasket. I turn on the TV to hear a bit of talking. It’s been almost seven weeks since I’ve spent time with a real, live person. I haven’t touched or really even looked at anyone, and it’s making me start to think recklessly. The other day I went to Walgreens to pick up my medications, and I sat in the parking lot and thought about going inside. I was wearing my mask and I had my inhaler. I wanted run a normal errand, look at the chocolates, maybe find my way into a conversation. But I stayed in the car and went to the drive-through. I put on my gloves and handed my card to the clerk through a hole in the glass window. I took the medicines and gave a little wave.

If I get this virus, I’m afraid it would be the end of me. I’m 75. I’ve got all I can handle already with my asthma, fibromyalgia and an autoimmune disorder. The best way for me to survive is by sitting in my house for however many weeks or months it’s going to take. But how many computer games can you play before you start to lose it? How many mysteries can you read? I realize time is supposed to be precious, especially since mine is short, but right now I’m trying every trick I know to waste time away.

Negative thoughts creep up like that. I start getting crabby. It’s waves of anger and depression, and I beat myself up for it. People have it a whole lot worse. Obviously.

I’ve got two daughters out of town who call me and check in, but I don’t want to guilt them. I’ve got a high school friend who dropped off groceries. I’ve got a dog and two cats that need to be cared for, which gives me something to do. I’ve got my own manufactured home with flowers blooming all over the house. A lot of people don’t realize there’s a big difference between a trailer park and a mobile home community. I’ve spent hours lately driving up and down every block of this neighborhood, looking at people’s yards, checking out whatever might be poking through the dirt. One morning I drove my dog to the river. People were walking on the path, and I was worried about the droplets and all that. We sat in the car and cracked the windows and listened to the water.

It feels like everybody here is trying so hard to be cheerful, but boy does it take an effort. The other day was supposed to be the beginning of baseball season, and I love baseball, and the anchor came onto the local news and said: “Let’s all try to look on the bright side! Let’s find a way to celebrate opening day even though nobody is playing.” He showed pictures of fans wearing their Minnesota Twins T-shirts, or rubbing hand sanitizer onto a baseball to play catch, and I thought: You know what I’d really like to do right now if I’m being honest? I’d like to find a bat and a ball and go break a few windows.

I apologize to God for feeling this way, but he made me how I am. I’m over this whole thing. I used to be an optimist, but I’m not anymore.

I’ve never been this angry, and it’s an ugly way to feel. Maybe when you don’t get to see anybody for weeks, emotions get bottled up and have nowhere to go. I get sucked into Facebook, and I keep scrolling down from one thing to the next, yelling at my computer as the posts get more and more insane. Mike Pence was just here in Minnesota, visiting patients at the Mayo Clinic, and he went against their policy and refused to wear a mask. It’s like: “Really? How arrogant can you be?” Next it’s someone posting pictures of people crowded together like sardines at a beach in California. “You idiots. Do you care about anyone but yourself?” Then it’s the president’s saying it might be a good idea to inject some kind of bleach or disinfectant. “No thank you, but you go right ahead if you want to poison yourself.” Then it’s a militia group taking over a state capitol. It’s doctors who have to wear garbage bags instead of gowns. It’s that we still don’t have enough tests. It’s how at least most of the deaths are people over 70 with preexisting conditions. “Oh, what a relief! Who cares about them?” It’s some stockbroker or whatever saying the elderly are holding this country back from reopening, and maybe it’s their patriotic duty to be sacrificed for the sake of the economy. “Sorry to be an inconvenience to your financial portfolio. Sorry I’m still breathing.”

It enrages me. I spent my career working for the federal government at Veterans Affairs. I raised my kids by myself. I basically had to raise my ex-husbands. I marched and fought for women’s rights. I volunteered for political campaigns. I pay taxes and fly a flag outside my house because I’m a patriot, no matter how far America falls. But now in the eyes of some people, all I am to this country is a liability? I’m expendable? I’m holding us back?

Sometimes, before I know it, I’ve been writing comments on Facebook posts for hours: “To hell with you then.” “You idiot.” “How dumb can you be?” “Moron.” “Racist.” “Selfish pig.” “Idiot.” “Idiot.”

Everyone knows me as a kind person. I used to wear a peace necklace. I’ve gotten old enough that I just say whatever I think with no filter, but I don’t always like what comes out. This isn’t how I used to be.

There’s a lot I don’t recognize about what’s happening now. This country is so completely different from the one I came into. My uncle was at the Battle of the Bulge the day I was born. I arrived right near the end of the war, and most of my life was American boom times. We were the leading country in everything when I was young. My dad left for a while to work as a chef on the Alaskan Highway, and he traveled through Canada so we could carve a road 2,000 miles over the Rockies in the dead of winter. We did whatever we wanted just to show that we could. That’s how it felt. I graduated from high school and started working when I turned 18, and within about a year I was earning more than my parents. That’s how it went. It was up, up, up.

And what are we now? We’re mean. We’re selfish. We’re stubborn and sometimes even incompetent. That’s the face we’re showing to the world. It seems like some of these other countries almost feel sorry for us. New Zealand and South Korea beat this virus back in a few weeks. We’ve gone from ten thousand deaths to thirty thousand to sixty-some, so I guess we’re still leading the world in that.

We can’t get out of our own way. Are we shutting down or opening up? It’s the states against the feds. It’s conservatives against liberals. There’s no leadership and no solidarity, so everybody’s doing whatever they want and fighting only for themselves, which means everyone who’s vulnerable is losing big. Minorities. Poor people. Sick people. Immigrants. Elderly. We’re the ones who will die from this virus and the ones who will never recover. That’s the truth I’m learning about this country, even if I should have known it earlier.

I don’t like feeling this way. Maybe somewhere in this we’ll see a great lightning strike of American ingenuity. I doubt it, but maybe. There’s no choice but to be hopeful. I’m staying alive and sitting in my house and waiting. Where else am I going to go? I’ll be here.

Philosopher of the Heart

By Clare Carlisle

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 339 pp. $30

—

In his trial before the citizens of Athens, Socrates famously compared himself to a gadfly – a pest, sent by god, perhaps, to “awaken and persuade and reproach” his fellow Athenians so that they did not “spend the rest of [their] lives asleep.” If he was a gadfly, then piety, justice and intellectual orthodoxy were his nectar. Into these moral and ethical issues he would bite, until he sucked dry their illogic and laid bare the uncertainty at their base.

More than 21 centuries later, Socrates – or, at least, the Socratic method of laying bare – would come alive again, this time in the form of a brooding Dane, the self-described Socrates of Christendom, Soren Kierkegaard. Clare Carlisle, in her sparkling, penetrative new biography, “Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard,” explains how Kierkegaard ran against the philosophical grain of his time.

She does this in a novel way. In abiding by Kierkegaard’s oft-quoted observation – that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward – Carlisle abandons standard chronology in favor of a three-part study. Part one begins in 1843, when Kierkegaard had just turned 30; we then move to “Life Understood Backwards,” a backward consideration of the years 1848 to 1813, Kierkegaard’s birth year. The final section, “Life Lived Forwards,” brings us from 1849 to Kierkegaard’s death in 1855. With this unconventional structure – a fittingly oblique approach for a famously dialectical man – Carlisle is better able to crack open the philosopher’s life: What we get is a panorama of sorts, in which Kierkegaard’s obsession with ex-fiancee Regine Olsen (a relationship whose breakdown inspired much of his writing), his preference for coffee (lots, and sugary), his maniacal work ethic, his variously warm and shrewd letters, his thoughts on God and the individual – these parts are rendered as a woven whole.

Carlisle does not sacrifice intellectual rigor for the sake of this larger picture. Her work is demanding in its comprehensiveness. From the beginning, for instance, she sets the broader intellectual scene well: Kierkegaard’s 19th-century Copenhagen was steeped deep, like the rest of intellectual Europe, in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Under Hegel’s philosophy, concepts that were largely considered frozen in basic binary forms (master/slave, masculinity/femininity, even living/dying) were freed from their Aristotelian, binary bonds; they were shown to be in a state of dynamic movement. And once these concepts became mobile, it became possible, Hegel thought, to see all of human history as engaged in a massive, if glacial, dialectical progression, whose ultimate end was “freedom.” Lofty and forward-looking, Hegel’s progressive theories were a perfect match for rapidly industrializing European cities, and they held Kierkegaard’s contemporaries in thrall.

But not Kierkegaard, who rebelled against them. Like Socrates exposing the sophists of Athens, Kierkegaard “sought to expose” false teachers of grand schemes, the “pseudo-philosophers.” Carlisle reminds us that in “Either/Or,” Kierkegaard’s first published work, he presents Hegel’s thought as “nihilistic” and used the book, in part, to “depose Hegelian philosophy.” The main issue was that Hegel’s generalizations essentially erased what Kierkegaard considered supreme: the idea of the single individual. Hegelianism holds no space for the individual soul (or for the heart), he felt. The Kierkegaardian “single individual” is not to be confused with the (or seen as the proto-) “me” of “me culture.” Rather, Kierkegaard’s “single individual” has as its focus the individual’s relationship to God and the individual’s sense of spiritual fulfillment. This emphasis was emphatic, and unique. As Carlisle notes, it was this focus that would “inspire an entire generation of ‘existentialists’ to argue that human nature is not a fixed, timeless essence, nor a biological necessity, but a creative task for each individual life.”

But how is it that the “Christian writer” Kierkegaard came also to be cited as the “father of existentialism” – a philosophy whose other famous progenitor is Friedrich “God is dead” Nietzsche, and whose intellectual spawn (Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus) run the theistic gamut? The answer requires us perhaps God-weary modern readers (or at least this God-disinterested Jew) to broaden our vision: Kierkegaard must not be thought of as a pious Christian in the way we think of one today. He was no Bible-thumper and no pompous proselytizer. Just the opposite. In fact, toward the end of his life, Carlisle tells us, Kierkegaard “called on his readers to stop going to church; he no longer went himself, and was often seen in the Athenaeum, a private library, on Sunday mornings.” Like Socrates – who proved his own ignorance along with that of his conversational victim – Kierkegaard did not consider it his duty to show fellow citizens the “right way” but rather to disabuse them of their illusion of knowing the right way at all. As he put it, his Socratic task was not to get the masses “to comprehend Christianity, but to comprehend that they cannot comprehend it.”

This disabusing required gentle treatment. We see this in Kierkegaard’s lifelong use of pseudonyms and a wide variety of writing styles, which, he felt, lent him various portals into his readers’ souls. His style is so diverse, in fact, that in characterizing Kierkegaard as a writer it is hard to choose between philosopher, theologian, dramatist, psychoanalyst or something else entirely. Carlisle samples these approaches in her biography, which has the additional effect of showing how Kierkegaard’s thought is centered, like that of Socrates, around not-knowing: You cannot know God as a fact, so you must repeatedly readdress your faith in a God whose existence is always uncertain. This continual confronting of the self and God amounts, ultimately, to an existential task.

Carlisle’s book is an essential guide to those beginning or reembarking on their Kierkegaard journey. It is perhaps best paired with W.H. Auden’s brilliantly selected collection of Kierkegaard’s work, “The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard,” which also includes certain gems, such as Kierkegaard’s eerie prevision of the Internet era: “There no longer exist human beings: there are no lovers, no thinkers, etc. By means of the press the human race has enveloped itself in an atmospheric what-not of thoughts, feelings, moods; even of resolutions and purposes, all of which are no one’s property, since they belong to all and none.”

We might replace Kierkegaard’s “the press” for the Internet as a whole: One logs on and envelops oneself in a what-not of tweets, memes, Insta-feeds, a mishmash of love/goal/resolution-oriented articles (“Make Her Fall in Love With This Move After You Lose 10 Pounds in 3 Days!”). Today, the sense of living in abstraction is felt keenly. Anyone looking in any real way to become a lover, a thinker or a human being, take heed of Kierkegaard: He will tear you from your illusions, pull you down from your abstractions and then let you find your way.

—

Dess is a writer and critic living in New York.

His daughter Lori O’Hara said the cause was presumed to be complications from cancer.

Following the tradition of naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, Dr. Randall spent much of his career classifying organisms, engaging in the laborious and tedious branch of science known as taxonomy.

Based for more than a half-century at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop history and science museum in Honolulu, he spent countless hours poring over the minutiae of fish specimens, from scale counts to body-part measurements, to find the minute details that distinguish different species.

By the time of his death, he had described and named more than 830 fish. That number will rise in the coming years as his colleagues finalize numerous papers still in the works. His well-earned nicknames were “Dr. Fish” or “the Fish Man.”

Melanie Ide, president and chief executive of the Bishop Museum, called Randall’s contributions immeasurable. Everything in biology, ecology and conservation – even the hunt for blockbuster pharmaceuticals hiding in plain sight in living organisms – all depends on knowing what organisms you’re looking at, she said.

“It’s the science upon which everything else is built,” Ide said. “Without the baseline fundamental units of data about life on the planet, in this case in the ocean, you can’t understand systems, and you can’t understand interactions, and you can’t understand impacts.”

Randall’s early National Science Foundation-funded work on diet and behavior in Atlantic reef fish – he studied the contents of their stomachs – proved essential to understanding how those ecosystems have changed over time. And his 1958 foundational paper on the causative agent behind ciguatera poisoning, a foodborne illness experienced by tens of thousands of people annually, has been cited hundreds of times by fellow scientists.

Randall published more than 900 papers, wrote more than two dozen books and book chapters and dozens of popular-science articles. He won the highest honors in his profession, including the International Coral Reef Society’s Darwin Medal.

Richard Pyle, a senior curator of ichthyology at the Bishop Museum, said Randall was a generous mentor and among the most prolific ichthyologists of all time. “He wasn’t in it for the glory. He wasn’t in it for the fame. He wasn’t in it for the recognition,” Pyle said. “I think that’s probably what sets him apart the most.”

It’s considered in poor taste for a taxonomist to name a species after themselves, so instead, the genus and species they choose either refer to traits of the organism or to people they think deserve the honor of a creature bearing their name. Because of his standing, Randall has no less than 60 species – and two genera – that reference him.

“Fish everywhere in the world know Jack as one of their own,” wrote Sylvia Earle, a preeminent marine biologist, on an online memorial to Randall.

John Ernest Randall Jr. was born in Los Angeles on May 22, 1924. His father, a contractor, hoped to encourage Jack to study architecture. But living near the ocean – and with a mother who took him fishing and with school visits to tide pools – he took an avid and early interest in exploring under the sea more than building on land.

After Army service stateside during World War II in the Medical Administrative Corps, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1950.

The next year, he married Helen Au, and she became his partner in life and science, often helping him on expeditions and preparing manuscripts. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In 1955, he received a doctorate in ichthyology from the University of Hawaii and held positions at the University of Miami and the University of Puerto Rico before returning to Hawaii in 1965. In 1967, he started working for the Bishop Museum and, though he officially retired in 2009, he continued to describe species as an emeritus senior ichthyologist.

At his death, he was completing a memoir tentatively titled “Fish & Ships: The Life and Discoveries of an Ichthyologist,” which included anecdotes about playing tennis with Emperor Akihito of Japan and scuba dives with novelist John Steinbeck.

Randall started diving years before the term “scuba” was coined, and dipped his long johns in latex to stay warm before the invention of neoprene wet suits.

He conducted his last dive in 2014 to celebrate his 90th birthday. At that point, he largely relied on a walker, as the nerves in his legs had begun to fail him. “I can swim better than I can walk,” he mused to Hakai Magazine in 2016.

A month had passed since the first-grader last saw her dad, and her mom hadn’t stopped by in nearly a week, but now, from the kitchen, she heard a tapping on the front window. Tamina Tracy looked over, and when she saw the woman in a blue surgical mask standing outside the northwest Washington rowhouse, the girl’s hazel eyes widened.

“Mama! My mama is here!” said Tamina, 6, as she hopped into the air and sprinted barefoot toward the door, her pigtails bouncing.

She wasn’t expecting her mother, Leah Lujan, that April Saturday. When her parents, both nurse practitioners, started treating patients with a scary new virus, they’d sent Tamina to live with her cousins. Her dad, Jimmy Tracy, also left their home, moving into a relative’s empty apartment. Tamina didn’t know he’d developed a fever a few days later or that her parents feared he had the virus until his test came back negative, allowing her mother to visit the day before Easter.

Tamina, an only child, had struggled with the move, at times finding the separation unbearable, so they didn’t tell her Jimmy was sick. She understood it could happen, though. Before schools closed, a classmate explained that everyone who gets infected with the coronavirus dies. Then she overheard her parents talking about how they both expected to catch it, and she thought that meant they would die, too.

No, Leah told her daughter. That wasn’t true. Most people who get sick recover. But Leah didn’t lie, either. Some people, she acknowledged, do not make it.

That terrified Tamina, one of thousands of children across the country who have suddenly confronted the possibility that their parents’ jobs – to care for the ill – could cost them their lives. Already, more than 9,200 health-care workers have tested positive for covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illness has killed at least 27 of them, the CDC says, but the true number is much higher. National Nurses United found that more than 50 registered nurses, alone, have died.

Some health-care workers have moved away from their families, and many others have isolated in spare bedrooms or basements, trying to explain to their kids that they can no longer hug them because the consequences of even a single touch could be dire.

Most of all, parents have wrestled with how much to divulge, because what their children do and don’t know about the pandemic could consume them. In many cases, it already has: Kids have endured nightmares and recorded their anguish in journals, written parents goodbye letters and created detailed plans of what they’ll do in case they never see their mom or dad again.

Tamina’s anxiety seldom relented. Nearly every time her mother visited, the girl asked the same questions.

“When can I come home?”

“Why can’t daddy be here, too?”

“When is this going to be over?”

This time, though, Tamina was distracted.

“I brought you all kinds of stuff,” Leah said as she opened a shopping bag packed with toys and clothes.

Tamina pulled out her green Easter dress and decided she didn’t want to wait until the next day to wear it. She was excited for the holiday, but also worried. Tamina wondered whether the Easter Bunny would realize she wasn’t at home.

“Does he know that you guys work at a clinic so I have to live somewhere else?” she asked her mom.

That’s what her young life had become – glimpses of normalcy abruptly interrupted by reminders that nothing was normal. While Tamina picked through the bag, she spotted a bottle of hand sanitizer and immediately squirted a dollop on her hands, then insisted her mom do the same. Later, when she was zipping a toy boat across the red-brick porch, her 10-year-old cousin knocked a ball over the metal fence into a neighbor’s yard. Tamina stopped the boat and stared.

“Don’t catch anything over there,” she said.

Even the lightest moments were tinged with sorrow.

“I wanna dance,” she announced, yellow tulips blooming in pots all around her.

“Should we put music on?” Leah asked, and Tamina said she wanted to hear “Budapest.”

“Oh, Papa would be so happy,” Leah said, because that was one of Jimmy and Tamina’s favorite songs. Before all this, the two of them would play it in their house a few blocks away and shimmy together, hand in hand.

Now, Tamina danced alone.

On Easter, she put her green dress back on and hunted for eggs and ate the head off a chocolate rabbit. Tamina thought about her papa again, too, but still didn’t know he was sick.

That night, as she got ready for bed, he began feeling worse. Then his temperature spiked to 102.9. Then came a cough.

– – –

In the other Washington, 2,800 miles away, where covid-19 first exploded in the United States, Keis Alagba-Green knew all about what the virus could do to people, and that’s why the boy was still awake one evening early this month when his mom went into his bedroom to check on him.

Niran Alagba is a pediatrician in Silverdale, Washington, and her husband, Lawrence Green, an Army veteran, manages her clinic an hour’s drive from Seattle. Niran knew she’d treated patients who were infected, and so did her four children.

“What happens if you and daddy die?” Keis asked her as she lay next to him, two weeks before his 10th birthday.

At dinner soon after he posed the question, his parents answered it for him and his siblings. Their close friends, they explained, had agreed to care for the kids if Niran and Lawrence couldn’t. In the days that followed, each child processed the reality that their mom and dad might not survive in starkly different ways.

Third-grader Laila, quiet and matter-of-fact, seldom talked about it, while the 8-year-old’s oldest brother, Laith, 11, did all the time. An aspiring paleontologist and Lego devotee, Laith liked to plan. Right away, he wanted to know how their new life would work.

The family’s friends also have four kids and they don’t live in a home big enough for four more. He decided that the other family should move into his house, then he mapped out where each kid would sleep.

Preparing for his parents’ absence made Laith sad – in a nightmare, he saw them laying in hospital beds – but the fifth-grader believed it was his responsibility to consider the “hardship things” his siblings wanted to avoid.

Those things troubled Keis the most. One afternoon in early April, the two boys contemplated what the virus might do in the coming months.

“It could clear up over the summer,” Laith said. “It could just keep going on -.”

“And kill everybody,” Keis interjected.

“No, not kill everybody, Keis. It wouldn’t kill everybody.”

“Yeah, but it could kill a lot of people.”

“It could kill a lot of people,” Laith conceded.

Keis could never hide how he felt. He hated visiting the hospital when a heart attack took his grandfather’s life two years earlier, and he hated the idea of his parents ending up in one now.

He was convinced that both of them would eventually contract the virus, but he also knew his mom had access to hydroxychloroquine, the unproven drug President Trump touted as a potential cure. Niran explained to her son that the medication might not help, but Keis fixated on it anyway.

He needed to believe it would work, especially after the bad thoughts bubbled at night, when he would read books, concoct Dungeons & Dragons strategies, go give his parents’ hugs – anything not to obsess over losing them.

But his youngest sibling, Zade, who is 6, had decided he should do the opposite.

“I don’t want to stop thinking about them dying,” he explained, because Zade believed that if he forced himself to imagine his mom and dad being gone, he wouldn’t forget them when they were.

– – –

Taylor Lindsey didn’t know when she would see her mother again, so the fifth-grader sat in the pink chair at her desk and picked up a pencil. To prepare for a potential surge of infected patients, Amber Lindsey, a registered nurse, was about to embark on a 10-day stint of overnight shifts at her community hospital in Olympia, Washinbgton, an hour’s drive south of Silverdale. That meant Taylor, whose parents were divorced, would head back to her dad’s place.

“Dear Mom, I love you so much I have no idea what I would do with out you I would never forget you,” Taylor, 10, jotted on a sheet of paper. “Stay safe don’t get sick I be thinking about you everyday!”

She tucked the letter under her mom’s pillow, and soon, they said goodbye.

Taylor’s mother is her closest friend. They tended to their chickens and painted canvases in acrylic and kayaked Puget Sound, always as a pair. They traveled together every summer, hiking in central Oregon’s forest, sunning on Southern California’s beaches. Before the pandemic, each had given the other a beloved gift: for Amber, it was a heart-shaped necklace, inscribed with “BEST MOM EVER,” that she wore to work every day; for Taylor, a teddy bear dressed in pink scrubs that, when she squeezed its paw, played “I’ll Be There.”

On March 18, the night her mother returned to work, Taylor added an entry to her journal.

“Day 2,” it read at the top, next to “CoronaVirus.” “I really cried because I dont want her to get the Virus… I dont want her to get sick and be home alone. I cant be without her.”

The pandemic has instilled a sense of helplessness in children whose parents work in hospitals and clinics, but that feeling is especially acute for those like Taylor, the only child of a single woman living by herself while she treats sick patients. Her worries are not unique. Three-quarters of those 9,200 covid-positive health-care workers identified by the CDC were women, some undoubtedly raising children alone.

For Lexa Sterritt, 12, what might happen if her mother got sick was so unnerving that she tried never to think about it.

She and Elise Sterritt moved about six months ago from Chicago to Las Vegas, where the nurse practitioner took a job at a primary-care clinic. In March, the single mother developed a cough a few days after being exposed to two people who were later diagnosed with covid-19. Though she eventually tested negative, the episode shook her and Lexa.

What if Elise did get sick, and what if she was hospitalized? Would Lexa have to fly back to stay with relatives in Chicago, 1,700 miles away? Would she have to leave her mother?

Lexa didn’t let herself ask any of those questions aloud, and when Elise confided she might have to quit her job because the answers were too painful, her daughter assured her she understood.

Daniel Shum tried to understand when his mother explained things, too, but he was only 6.

“Mama has to take care of very sick people,” Lila Abassi, a physician, told her son on the day in March she dropped him off at her ex-husband’s place across town in New York City. She didn’t come back for Daniel the next week or the next or the one after that.

Daniel is smart. He reads at a fifth-grade level and can describe the differences among solids, gases and liquids in detail. He also wants to be a doctor, the kind “who save lives when people get very big boo-boos and is about to pass away.”

He grasped the immense risk his mother was taking, but Lila spared him from the worst of it – that nearly all of the patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where she works, were coronavirus cases and that each time she admitted somebody new from the emergency room, Lila wondered whether this would be the one who infected her.

Daniel tried not to blame her for the separation during their FaceTime calls, but he couldn’t always help it. In his saddest moments, he closed his eyes and pictured the New Year’s Eve ball in Times Square.

After nearly a month apart, Lila told Daniel she was going to pick him up. The news thrilled him, at first, but then he overheard an argument between his mom and dad, who contended it was too dangerous for Daniel to see her. Lila insisted it wasn’t and that she’d taken every precaution and shown no symptoms. Eventually, her ex-husband relented.

When at last she picked Daniel up and they returned to her East Harlem apartment, he followed her everywhere, even when she took out the trash. At night, as he listened to his Harry Potter audiobooks, he fell asleep with both arms wrapped around her neck.

He was proud of his mom, but sometimes, Daniel wished he didn’t have a reason to be.

“I think why,” he said. “I think why did she pick the job to be a doctor?”

– – –

“Is it OK if I hold your hand?” Tamina Tracy asked her mother on a mild, spring afternoon.

It was the first time they had seen each other in person since Tamina moved in with her cousins two weeks earlier. They decided to walk to Rock Creek Park, one of their favorite places. Tamina took her shoes off and waded in the cool water. She ate a Lunchable with two Oreos. She held her mom’s hand.

Tamina knew her parents were doing something important. Leah and Jimmy, who’d volunteered together in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, both spoke Spanish and worked in District of Columbia clinics that treat many immigrants who lack insurance and are at a high risk of contracting the coronavirus. Tamina often talked about wanting to help people, like her parents did, and now, they told her, she could. Her job was to stay healthy and not get anyone else sick, and to do that, she couldn’t live at home.

At her aunt and uncle’s house, she reveled in her role as the baby sister to her four cousins – all girls, all older – and embraced her newly assigned chores, aside from cleaning up after Crespa, the dog. Her aunt, Julie Lujan, set up a mattress in the living room and built a fort of sheets over it. Tamina found a strung-together wad of faux dogwood flowers and decorated the wall next to her bed with them.

This wasn’t home, though, and she never forgot that.

Her mother painted a 12-by-8-inch portrait of the two of them and gave it to Tamina to keep while they were apart. She would lug it all over the house, then sit and stare at it.

She saw her dad only through FaceTime calls, but he’d also begun to write her letters, telling his daughter that she made him proud and recounting the parts of his days that wouldn’t frighten her.

“So she doesn’t forget me,” said Jimmy, who wrote them even after the chills took hold and he couldn’t breathe for more than a few seconds without coughing. He ended each note with a request that his daughter send one back, and she did.

“I love you so MUCH,” she wrote him.

But she sometimes felt abandoned by her father and mother, and would refuse to accept the arrangement, throwing tantrums, demanding that things return to normal.

Once, she threatened to run away to her house and sounded so serious that her aunt slept that evening with her back against the front door.

Then came the afternoon of her walk through the park with her mom.

When they got back and Leah readied to leave, Tamina unraveled. She grabbed onto her mom and tried to wrap a hair tie around her wrist, imagining that it would keep her there forever. Tamina begged her to stay and screamed at her aunt when she pulled her away.

“I hate you,” Tamina said, weeping.

She looked into her mother’s eyes, peering back from above the surgical mask.

“Why aren’t you crying?” Tamina asked, and as her mother walked away, she did.

Leah returned the following day, because she’d promised to, but the goodbye was no easier. After that, they made a deal: When Leah left, Tamina could call her on FaceTime and stay on until she fell asleep.

That’s what they did at the end of the next visit, a week before Easter, and as Tamina lay in bed, inside her fort, she listened to her mom name the many people who loved her: her grandparents, her cousins, her aunts, her uncles, her Mama, her Papa.

Before she finished, Tamina’s eyes closed.

– – –

Tamina didn’t want to be mad at her mom, just as Daniel, the 6-year-old in New York, didn’t want to be mad at his. But as the pandemic upends thousands of doctors’ and nurses’ lives, it’s left many of their children grappling with a rage they’ve never shown before and that their parents don’t know how to manage.

The bitterness in Sophie Babb, 7, emerged in ways her mother never expected.

Megan, a physician who treats infants in Folsom, California, was seldom exposed to infected patients – and told Sophie that – but the workdays had gotten longer, mostly because of her push for new health-care reforms in response to the outbreak.

It wasn’t the first time Megan’s job had left her with little time for her daughter. Only now, as Sophie became increasingly preoccupied with the virus, had she lashed out over her mom’s absence. She would ignore Megan when she came home late at night and snap at her when she apologized for going in early – “I know, mom, you’re sorry.”

For Gabriel Lipkin-Moore, 9, the resentment began to build in early March, when he was on vacation in Florida and his parents told him they couldn’t go to the beach anymore. On the trip back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his mom, Ericka Powell, the medical director of an emergency department, made him wear a mask on the plane, even though no one else was.

“They don’t understand yet,” she told him, but neither did he.

Like most kids, he sulked because he wasn’t allowed to see his classmates or go outside as much, but then his parents delivered far worse news: His mother couldn’t touch him anymore. He would sleep in his dad’s room, and she would move into Gabriel’s, which had its own shower.

After she came home from the hospital one day that first week, he walked up to her. His mother stopped him.

“I need you to stay six feet away,” she said.

Gabriel tried to distract himself, playing video games and practicing violin, but he couldn’t shake his anger. At the heart of it, his parents knew, was fear – fear for his mom, whose hospital was quickly filling with infected patients, and for his father, who at 65, Gabriel learned, was much more likely than younger people to die if he caught the virus.

His frustration simmered until one day when his grandmother stopped by to drop something off and he learned that he couldn’t see her either. Gabriel obeyed, then later exploded, yelling at his mother that he couldn’t live this way. He needed her.

“I would rather die than not hug you, mom,” he said, and at last, she took him into her arms.

– – –

Walt Awdish wasn’t angry, and the third-grader tried not to feel afraid either, though he couldn’t always help that.

Usually, the more he grasped something, the better he felt, so Walt – a straight-A student who called his parents by their first names and repeated Simpsons jokes few 9-year-olds would get – found out all he could about the coronavirus.

He learned that it started in China, ravaged Italy and hit his hometown, Detroit, harder than almost anywhere in the country outside New York. He learned how viruses spread when his mom, Rana, a critical-care physician, used tiny foam balls floating in slime to illustrate. He learned that nearly every patient where she worked, Henry Ford Hospital, was infected, and that helped him understand why his parents converted the laundry room into an off-limits space, marked by orange tape on the floor, for her to change clothes when she got home.

Not everything he discovered made him feel better, though. His mom told him she wore protective gear, but he knew it didn’t always make a difference. More than 700 people who worked for the Henry Ford Health System had tested positive.

He also suspected that on the days she came home with puffy red eyes, it meant she had been crying, and that meant she had seen something sad at the hospital.

Walt didn’t want to imagine her getting sick, but he needed to find out what could happen if she did. That led him back to his computer.

He searched fatality rates on Google and clicked on a chart. In his mother’s age group, 40 to 49, he saw 0.4%.

“Out of like a hundred, like that’s – that’s like very small,” he explained. “It would actually be four-tenths of a person for a death rate out of 100 people.”

Walt decided that was good news.

In Tucson, Arizona, Kaya Dreifuss found her own way to cope.

The 10-year-old’s father, Brad, an emergency medicine physician, had launched an effort to aid people on the front lines in getting mental health support and finding comfortable housing away from their families. To help, Kaya, who’d just learned to sew, made fabric pouches – more than a dozen – and packed each with dried lavender. She gave them to her dad to sell so he could raise money for his project.

“Keep doing it,” he encouraged, because he knew that his daughter helping him would help her just as much.

She did keep sewing, and the work made her feel good, but the outbreak in Arizona soon intensified. Brad decided that he, too, needed to move away from his wife and daughter.

After he packed his car, Kaya, as usual, squeezed between her parents and pulled them toward her in a tight embrace, the “meat between the bread.”

Then she watched her father drive away.

– – –

Tamina’s father still hadn’t come to see her, and she still didn’t know why.

By then, Jimmy had taken a second test for the coronavirus. This time it came back positive. The week after Easter, though, his fever broke and his cough gradually waned. Tamina’s parents didn’t assume he was clear of all danger. Covid sometimes subsided only to roar back, sending people who thought they’d recovered to intensive care. But Jimmy and Leah also worried their daughter would somehow find out, on her own, about his illness. If she overheard a cousin mention it, would she melt down again or, worse, feel betrayed?

They decided it was time to tell her the truth.

On a walk with her mom, Jimmy called over FaceTime. Leah handed her daughter the phone, and she looked at her dad’s face on the screen. Jimmy, by then able to get through a few sentences without coughing, explained that he’d been sick and, after a test, learned he had the coronavirus.

“Huh?” she replied, her dark eyebrows raised.

Everything would be OK, her dad continued. He was already feeling better. They still couldn’t see each other, though, because he might be contagious.

“Okay,” Tamina responded, and she didn’t say much else.

The next day, Leah took her daughter over to his apartment, where they stood on the back deck and peered inside. Tamina, who wore a colorful, miniature mask, brought him his favorite Girl Scout cookies, Samoas, the ones she couldn’t pronounce.

She was nervous, her mother could tell. When Jimmy came to the window and started to open it, Tamina backed away.

He shut the window.

They spoke for a few minutes on speakerphone, but Tamina didn’t talk much. At the end, as they left, she looked back and blew him a kiss.

That afternoon, at her aunt’s house, Tamina was quiet. Out on the front porch, she sat on her mom’s lap. Leah wondered what she was thinking.

Would her daughter want to know why they didn’t tell her sooner? Whether she should be afraid of her dad? If he was going to die?

But Tamina didn’t ask any of that. She had only one question.

When could she give Papa a hug?

Six weeks into a nationwide work-from-home experiment with no end in sight, whatever boundaries remained between work and life have almost entirely disappeared.

With many living a few steps from their offices, America’s always-on work culture has reached new heights. The 9-to-5 workday, or any semblance of it, seems like a relic of a bygone era. Long gone are the regretful formalities for calling or emailing at inappropriate times. Burnt-out employees feel like they have even less free time than when they wasted hours commuting.

“I honest to goodness am wearing the exact same outfit that I started with on Monday,” Rachel Mushahwar, the vice president and general manager of U.S. sales and marketing at Intel, said in an interview last Thursday. “I think I’ve showered three times.”

Some predicted the great work-from-home migration of the pandemic would usher-in a new age of flexible work arrangements. As of 2017 only 3% of full-time workers in the U.S. said they “primarily” worked out of a home office in a Census Bureau survey. Then millions sheltered at home for what was originally thought to be a temporary hiatus. Many mapped out plans to fill time they would’ve spent commuting to take up new hobbies, like learning a foreign language, baking or getting into the best shape of their lives. It looked like the beginnings of a telecommuting revolution.

A month and a half later, people are overworked, stressed, and eager to get back to the office. In the U.S., homebound employees are logging three hours more per day on the job than before city and state-wide lockdowns, according to data from NordVPN, which tracks when users connect and disconnect from its service. Out of all countries that NordVPN tracks, U.S. workers had tacked on the most hours. In France, Spain, and the U.K. the day has stretched an additional two hours, NordVPN’s data found. Italy saw no change at all.

The contours of the workday have changed, too. Without commutes, wake-up times have shifted later, NordVPN found, but peak email time has crept up an hour to 9 a.m., according to data from email client Superhuman. Employees are also logging back in late at night. Surfshark, another VPN provider, has seen spikes in usage from midnight to 3 a.m. that were not present before the covid-19 outbreak.

Huda Idrees, the chief executive officer of Dot Health, a Toronto-based technology startup, confirms her 15 employees are working, on average, 12-hour days, up from 9 hours pre-pandemic. “We’re at our computers very early because there’s no commute time,” she said. “And because no one is going out in the evenings, we’re also always there.”

One big problem is there’s no escape. With nothing much to do and nowhere to go, people feel like they have no legitimate excuse for being unavailable. One JPMorgan employee interrupted his morning shower to join an impromptu meeting after seeing a message from a colleague on his Apple Watch. By the time he dried off and logged back on, he was five minutes late.

(Some people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to be seen as complaining about telecommuting while millions of Americans lose their jobs or risk their lives on the front lines.)

Then there’s the fact that people have turned their living spaces into makeshift offices, making it nearly impossible to disconnect. Having an extra room helps, but not much, said John Foster, who has been home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, since mid-March doing financial compliance for a manufacturing company. His workspace is right next to the living room. “You walk by 20 times a day” he said. “Every time you pass there, you’re not escaping work.”

At this point, he even misses his commute. “Usually you have that downtime to drive home or to kind of get ramped up for the day,” he said.

Others say they feel pressure from bosses to prove they’re working, especially as the economy takes a hit and the prospect of layoffs looms. At Constellation Software Inc. in Toronto, more than 100 employees got an email from a superior that said: “Don’t get distracted because you are on your own. It is easy to get into bad habits, the lure of the internet, the endless box sets. Just think, would I do this in the office? If it’s a no, don’t do it,” read the email reviewed by Bloomberg. “You know we will be watching closely,” the same manager wrote in an earlier message. A Constellation Software representative didn’t return phone and email messages seeking comment.

In reality, despite stereotypes that telecommuting breeds slacking, early data suggest productivity is up, at least at some companies. “We’ve seen, anecdotally, some increases in productivity for some of our developers as they’re hunkered and focused at home,” Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said.

At JPMorgan, where 70% of the bank’s quarter-million employees are working remotely, productivity has gone up for certain types of jobs as workers spend less time going to meetings, attending town halls or completing training sessions, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.

An internal case study at Publicis Sapient, an IT consulting company that tracked work by 410 employees on roughly 40 tech-focused projects for a large New York-based investment bank also found a productivity bump. Between March 16 and April 10, tasks were completed at either the same rate or faster than those before the crisis.

“When you’re virtual you’re less distracted-nobody’s disappearing for coffee for a while or going and disappearing to socialize,” Dave Donovan, who leads the Americas global financial-services practice for Publicis Sapient, said. “Clients are more reachable too.” Given the early results, Donovan thinks remote work is here to stay. “Once the genie’s out of the bottle it’s not going to go back.”

The gains haven’t come without costs. By early April, about 45% of workers said they were burned out, according to a survey of 1,001 U.S. employees by Eagle Hill Consulting. Almost half attributed the mental toll to an increased workload, the challenge of juggling personal and professional life, and a lack of communication and support from their employer. Maintaining employee morale has proved difficult, said two-thirds of human resources professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management earlier this month.

Those crammed into smaller quarters are also at a higher risk of developing high blood pressure than colleagues with extra rooms, according to preliminary research by Tessa West, an associate professor of psychology at New York University.

Parents with kids at home are stretched particularly thin, as they squeeze work in between child-care duties, which now include virtual learning sessions. In two-thirds of married couples with children in the U.S., both parents work, leaving nobody available to watch the kids while the other partner is on the job.

For Mushahwar, the Intel executive, there’s no winning. She feels guilty if she neglects her kids and guilty if she neglects her work, she said. “I burned the bacon between conference calls. That was the morning,” said Mushahwar, who’s caring for four children, ages 8 to 14, along with doing a full-time job.A 31-year-old web designer at a medium-sized software company said he’s starting to lose steam working 12-hour days from his tiny bedroom to meet demands of clients and supervisors, who expect him to immediately respond to phone calls and emails, even on the weekends.

His apartment doesn’t doesn’t have an office and his roommates, a woman and her small child, play and watch TV in the living room. The setup has made it impossible to disconnect from work, but he feels pressure to work harder than normal. Some of his colleagues have already been laid off.

Recognizing productivity gains may be short lived if workers burn out, some employers are attempting to help people cope. Goldman Sachs gave staff an extra 10 days of family leave; Microsoft is offering its workers an additional 12 weeks parental leave. At Starbucks Corp., employees now get 20 free therapy sessions. Salesforce.com Inc. is running virtual meditation and workouts.

But there’s only so much companies can do with schools, daycares, and offices still closed for what seems like the indefinite future. Even the ambitious plan outlined by President Donald Trump for opening up the economy suggests students wouldn’t return to schools for weeks.

At this point, even kids are wondering when things will go back to the way the were. Last week, Mushahwar’s 8-year-old asked when this was all going to end. “I just sat at the breakfast table,” the Intel executive said. “I don’t have a good answer for him.”

The child had allegedly been sexually assaulted, and Armer, a career police detective in Santa Rosa, California, had been called to investigate. Slowly, she collected her interview while still providing needed emotional support. Once she finished, she talked with the child’s worried parents, explaining the excruciating situation and assuring them on how they could help.

Christine Castillo, who heads Verity, a Santa Rosa-based nonprofit that represents survivors of sexual assault and abuse, recalls the difficult scene vividly when she remembers Armer.

“That’s how she was with survivors,” Castillo said. “That’s how she was with the world.”

Armer, 43, died on March 31 from complications of the novel coronavirus, the first California police officer to lose their life to the virus. Family, friends, colleagues and victims’ advocates alike have remembered Armer’s thoughtfulness for others. Since Armer died, she’s inspired others to carry on her selflessness.

For instance, knowing that Armer was on duty up until the time she became sick, Mari Lau, her older sister, has purchased blue masks for nearly every officer in the Santa Rosa Police Department in a tribute to her sister. Her friend and fellow officer Stephen Bussell started a fundraiser through the professional organization Peace Officers Research Association of California that has raised more than $62,400 for her family. A California woman read in the local newspaper that Armer wasn’t immediately tested for the virus and started a petition to demand testing for first responders. More than 56,000 people have signed it.

“She would be so happy to hear that,” Lau said. “I just wish that was the case prior to her having to lose her life over it.”

Armer, a 20-year veteran of the Santa Rosa Police Department, asked to be tested for the coronavirus but was denied three times, her sister said. She first complained of flu-like symptoms, including fever, body aches and chills, around March 9, but wasn’t given a test until March 23. Before getting sick, she was working, responding to crime scenes and helping patrol.

In a statement, her hospital, Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center, confirmed that Armer was not immediately tested and offered condolences to her family and friends.

“We closely follow public health authority testing rules, as we did in this case, which have been based on very limited availability of tests,” Kaiser Permanente spokesman Marc Brown told The Washington Post. “Those rules for testing have evolved over the past several weeks, whereas a month ago, testing was under the exclusive authority of the public health department and limited to those with symptoms and who had primary contact with a COVID-positive person.”

When Armer was finally told she would be tested, she went to the hospital and was admitted by staff with a high fever. The last time she texted her sister was to tell her she was going to be intubated, Lau said.

Hours after Armer was put under, her test results came back positive for the virus.

While Armer was under a medically induced coma to let her lungs recuperate, her family sent her voice recordings, and it somewhat worked — Armer’s oxygen levels improved, and her heartbeat sped up. But the changes did not last.

She died on March 31. It was a shock to her family, who thought Armer — a young police officer with no underlying health conditions — would recover.

“It doesn’t pick and choose its victims,” Lau said of the coronavirus. “It just takes whoever.”

Lau said her sister had a lot to look forward to. Armer, her husband and her teenage stepdaughter had moved into a new home a year ago. She was busier at work.

“She had so many more years to build a life in her new home,” Lau said, adding that she’s grateful that money raised by the fundraiser will go to Armer’s husband and stepdaughter.

Armer was also honored on April 3 by a mile-long procession of law enforcement vehicles with their lights flashing, which drove to the hospital where Armer died. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called for flags at the Capitol to be flown at half-staff. The police department encouraged the community to wear blue for one day. Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square was lit up in blue lights for a night.

No one was told in advance about the procession to avoid crowds from gathering, but people watched online, including Castillo, the victims’ advocate. Castillo cried as the cars inched forward in memoriam of Armer, who worked in the same building as Castillo and often visited her office to meet with victims or advocates.

When the office learned of her death, some Verity employees left wildflowers at the closed building, Castillo said. Instead of a planned staff meeting, a Zoom call turned into a conversation about Armer and their appreciation for her thoughtfulness as a detective.

Before Armer became a detective for the department’s Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Team, she became interested in police work when she was young: in high school as an Explorer for the National City Police Department. After she graduated, she was hired as a field evidence technician and rose to a sworn police officer for Santa Rosa in 2008.

Her detective job is one of the most difficult positions on the force, Stephen Bussell, a fellow Santa Rosa police officer and friend of Armer, said.

“You’re dealing with some of the most sensitive and vulnerable groups of victims, when it comes to sexual assault and domestic violence,” Bussell said. “I think those personal traits that she had obviously served her well as a professional, but also she reached across the aisle, put herself in other people’s shoes, established empathy in both realms, personal and professional.”

Despite common workplace cliques, Armer made friends with everyone, Bussell said.

Ernesto Olivares, a retired SRPD lieutenant and Santa Rosa City Council member, remembered relating to how much Armer enjoyed sharing her family’s recipe of lumpia, a Filipino spring roll, during office potlucks. It reminded Olivares of his family’s tamales.

When Olivares saw Armer’s name on his daily roster, he felt encouraged, he said.

“She just had a presence in the room that made you feel good,” he said.

Olivares left the police department, but when he heard of Armer’s death, he said it felt like losing a family member. She serves as a reminder of how vulnerable any police officer can be, Olivares said. Nine other employees of the police department tested positive, but the national scope of how the virus has impacted first responders isn’t fully known.

Lau, her sister, said Armer first became interested in becoming a police officer because she thought she could help others on the job.

“She went above and beyond that these families and kids were properly taken care of,” Lau said.

“That was her,” Lau said of her sister, “she had a heart of gold.”

The cause was suspected complications from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, his granddaughter Hannah Malcolm said on Twitter.

Houghton was among the most influential early leaders of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was set up in 1988 to advise policymakers on the science of global climate change. He was the chief editor for the IPCC’s first three reports and chaired or co-chaired the panel’s scientific assessment committee as well.

The first IPCC report, released in 1990, helped spur world leaders to convene the Rio Earth Summit two years later. At that landmark gathering, virtually all nations committed to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an ambitious treaty requiring countries to prevent “dangerous interference” with the global climate. Each round of annual U.N. climate negotiations since have taken place under the auspices of the UNFCCC.

The second IPCC report in 1995 informed negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that forced developed nations to commit to binding greenhouse gas emissions limits, while developing countries took other steps.

The third IPCC report, published in 2001, for the first time attributed “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years” to the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases in the air. It also documented rising seas, melting glaciers and other signs of a rapidly warming planet.

In 2007, Houghton was among the IPCC scientists who collected the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on behalf of the organization, which shared the award that year with former vice president Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Houghton was also the director general and chief executive of the U.K. Meteorological Office from 1983 to 1991 and established the organization’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, which is now one of the world’s foremost research organizations on climate science.

His work on climate research began in the 1960s when the focus, amid the Cold War, was on studying potential changes in the atmosphere in the event of nuclear fallout. At the University of Oxford, he conducted research into the temperature structure and composition of the atmosphere using NASA’s Nimbus satellites.

By the 1980s, Houghton was on the vanguard of studying the alarming levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He joined the nascent IPCC and tried to convince policymakers of the existential threat of climate change. “In our first IPCC report,” he told the South Wales Echo, “it became very clear to us that there was some real danger ahead, without being able to spell it out as clearly as we can now.”

His argument was scientific, but he imbued it with the moral imperative and obligation of his Christian faith.

In particular, he expressed a deep concern for how the “grave and imminent danger” of the climate crisis would affect tens of millions of vulnerable people in developing nations. “As a Christian I feel we have a responsibility to love our neighbors,” he often said, “and that doesn’t just mean our neighbors next door. It means our poorer neighbors in the poorer parts of the world.”

“The climate is changing faster than it has changed for possibly 10,000 years,” he told the Irish News in 2007. “Adapting to that change is going to be difficult for us as humans. Sea levels are rising and this century will displace 10 million people in Bangladesh and 25 million in south China. Where are these people going to go?”

John Theodore Houghton was born in Dyserth, Wales, on Dec. 30, 1931. He won a scholarship at 16 to Oxford, where he studied physics at Jesus College. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a doctorate in 1955 and went on to become a professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford.

In 1972, Houghton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest continuous scientific society. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, won the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal in 1995 and was honored with the Japan Prize in 2006.

As the science on human-caused climate change became clearer, Houghton’s warnings about its consequences grew more urgent. In 2003 he wrote that climate change constituted “a weapon of mass destruction.”

Houghton wrote the book “Global Warming: The Complete Briefing” (1994), now in its fourth edition. He was the author of widely used atmospheric physics textbooks as well as two books on science and religion. He also published a memoir, “In the Eye of the Storm” (2013).

His first wife, Margaret Portman, died in 1986. Two years later, he married Sheila Thompson. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage and seven grandchildren.

Bob Watson, a former chairman of the IPCC and chief environmental science adviser to the British prime minister, said Houghton was a rare breed of scientist who had “incredible credibility within the science community and within the policy community.” His outreach to the religious community, Watson said in an interview, made him especially unusual.

In 1997, Houghton helped form the John Ray Initiative, an educational charity focused on the intersection of science, the environment and Christianity.

“I think it’s a very exciting thing to put scientific knowledge alongside religious beliefs,” he told the Western Mail in 2007. “The biggest thing that can ever happen to anybody is to get a relationship with the one who has created the universe. . . . In the great scientific awakening of 300 years ago with people like Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and Sir Christopher Wren and others who used to meet and talk about science in that great time – they were nearly all Christians.”

“Why were they doing their science?” he continued. “They were doing their science to explore what God has done. They said quite openly, ‘We’re doing this for the glory of God.’ ”

He was initially assigned as a clerk to a garrison unit in West Germany. The job, he recalled, was total boredom, except for the day when he fingerprinted a newly arrived soldier named Elvis Presley. But even that was a letdown. “To be honest,” he wrote in a memoir, “I was not really a fan of Elvis’s music.”

When he re-enlisted, Adkins sought a unit that was “a little more active.” He volunteered for Special Forces training in 1961, and he was deployed to Vietnam as a Green Beret three times over the next decade.

Adkins’ second tour, which took him to the steep, jungle-covered hills of the A Shau Valley in 1966, proved particularly harrowing, with punishing enemy fire and an encounter with a hungry tiger. Forty-eight years later, he received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, for what the citation described as “extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty.”

“During the 38-hour battle and 48-hours of escape and evasion,” the citation read, “Adkins fought with mortars, machine guns, recoilless rifles, small arms and hand grenades, killing an estimated 135 to 175 of the enemy and sustaining 18 different wounds.”

He died April 17 at 86 after being hospitalized in Opelika, Alabama, with the novel coronavirus, according to the Bennie Adkins Foundation, which raises money to fund scholarships for Special Forces members transitioning to civilian life.

Adkins, then a sergeant first class, was among a smattering of U.S. Special Forces troops sent in March 1966 to train 400 South Vietnamese soldiers and civilian irregulars at an outpost in the A Shau Valley, in the northern part of South Vietnam near the border with Laos.

Communist forces used the valley as a conduit to move men, weapons and supplies from North Vietnam. The U.S.-South Vietnamese compound – which flooded often – was not located or built in a way that matched its strategic importance.

“I can tell you that none of us were happy to be in that camp,” Adkins observed in “A Tiger Among Us,” his 2018 memoir written with Katie Lamar Jackson. “It was about thirty miles from another friendly camp, was bordered by high mountains on the east and west, and was surrounded by a triple-canopy jungle. We were like fish in a barrel.”

From interrogated prisoners, Adkins learned that a full-on attack was coming.

Two days later, about 2 a.m. March 9, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces pounced with overwhelming strength – a 10 to 1 advantage, by some estimates. Barrage after barrage of mortar rounds killed some American and many South Vietnamese troops at the camp.

An airstrip near the compound was overrun, and the enemy penetrated the outpost’s perimeter. Adkins was in a mortar pit that enemy troops bombarded with grenades. One ripped off the leg of a member of the mortar crew and wounded Adkins.

Adkins remembered catching another grenade and tossing it back. “It was pure luck that I caught it and sent it back to them,” he said in an oral history with the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. “Playing baseball did help, since I was a high school catcher.”

According to Adkins, a company of South Vietnamese irregulars defected when the battle looked bleakest and began firing on their former comrades from inside the camp. “This was not ‘friendly fire’ they might have done accidentally,” he wrote. “It was treachery.”

Adkins and members of his team – acting under orders – managed to destroy valuable equipment and classified documents, move the wounded to medevac helicopters and fight their way out to an extraction point. With mortar fire, he also provided vital cover for an American pilot who had crash-landed his plane on the airfield after strafing the enemy and who was eventually pulled to safety by other soldiers.

At one point, Adkins and a member of the South Vietnamese mortar crew left the camp to retrieve ammunition and other supplies that had been airdropped in a minefield. (The mines had been largely destroyed by artillery fire early in the enemy assault.)

“The indigenous soldier was hit real hard,” he recalled in the oral history. “I put him on my back, and we went back into the compound from the minefield. When I got back into the compound, he had been riddled with bullets from the North Vietnamese. He being on my back saved my life.”

Despite his own wounds, Adkins carried another casualty to the extraction point only to learn that the last helicopter had taken off. Over the next 48 hours, while perilously low on ammunition, he and a small group found their way to a hilltop – hoping a helicopter would reach them before the enemy did.

Their radio’s antenna had been shot off, and Adkins improvised a new one using his 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. “I was able to stand in water, utilize my weapon as an antenna and communicate with the Special Forces support soldier that was in an aircraft that had every frequency of the radios that we had, and they were able to locate us,” he said in the oral history.

Meanwhile, the Viet Cong and a tiger were tracking Sgt. Adkins and his comrades (he said their blood had left a trail). The growls and “the glint of two large eyes in the dark,” Adkins later told the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama, seemed to scare off the enemy. “They must have heard it or seen it, too, and the only thing I can figure is the enemy was more afraid of this tiger than they were of us.”

Once the weather broke, a helicopter landed in a clearing the men had cut in the jungle and carried them to safety.

Adkins was awarded many decorations, including the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart. President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor to him at the White House in 2014 after a review of military valor awards that led to a number of upgrades.

“I harbor no bitter feelings toward the enemy, especially those who put it all on the line,” he said in an official Army release in 2014. “They were doing as they were directed to do just as we were.”

Bennie Gene Adkins was born in Waurika, Oklahoma, on Feb. 1, 1934, the fourth of seven siblings. In high school, he was president of Future Farmers of America, and he was active in sports and the student council. But mostly he focused on his farm chores.

He graduated from high school in 1952 and worked at odd jobs before his Army induction.

He retired from the military in 1978 at the rank of command sergeant major, and he subsequently completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and management from Troy State University in Alabama. He owned and operated an accounting firm in Auburn, Alabama, for more than 20 years.

His wife of 62 years, Mary Arington Adkins, died in 2019. Survivors include three children, Mary Ann Adkins Blake, Michael Adkins and W. Keith Adkins; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

When he received the Medal of Honor, Adkins described himself as “a keeper” of the award for the 16 American troops who served with him in the battle – “especially the five who didn’t make it. I can tell you every man who was there and the five who lost their lives. I can tell you how that happened. It diminishes, but it does not go away.”