Matters of Life and Death

We’ve passed the one-year mark, and the specter of COVID is still with us. Looking back, I must admit that by the fall of last year. I’d begun to feel fairly comfortable, maybe even complacent, about it. I, my family, and my neighbors had been spared the harsh realities of the virus, and the organization I work for had made it through the summer with a minimum of exposure and a maximum of financial support from the government. Then, as the year closed, so faded my sense of confidence. Over the Christmas and New Year holidays, two people I’ve known most of my life, two people who have lived exemplary lives and given of themselves beyond measure for the good of this community, succumbed to COVID long before their time.

Paul Snow and Glen Blakley are the two I’m talking about here. There are more I could mention if space allowed, and many more men and women you would add to the list of wonderful souls who are no longer with us. I share these as worthy representatives of that long list.

Paul was a respected and successful businessman in St. George. His roots ran deep to the original founders of this community. He was born with the red sand of Dixie between his toes, and he and his family have been at the core of what has made this place so desirable to the thousands who have moved here in recent years. No more genuine, charitable, or unpretentious man ever lived in this town, and he leaves a void as wide as his kind smile and as deep as his love for this place and its people. He is the true embodiment of the Dixie Spirit.

Paul Snow

Glen was a transplant from Kentucky who, during more than forty years here, made an impact as deep as the Grand Canyon. As a professor of art at Dixie College and Dixie State University, he made a difference for good in the lives of thousands of students. No man was ever more devoted to his calling. It was a calling to create fine art, which he did in abundance, to teach, and also to share the great art of the world with anyone who would come along for the ride. It would be impossible to quantify the number of people whose lives were enhanced by his knowledge, by his passion, and most of all, by his genuine friendship. And none of it was for gain because he could have made much more by turning his talents and energies toward personal fortune.

Glen Blakley

(Photo courtesy of Anna Martin Oakden)

And so it was with a heavy heart that many of us entered the new year. Even then, I didn’t realize how much closer to home the pandemic would get. In mid-January, Debbie and I went on a hike with our daughter, her husband, and three of their children. We came home and cooked dinner and spent a delightful evening together. The next morning, our daughter called and said she’d been changing the baby’s diaper and realized she’d lost her sense of smell. That’s when our quarantine began, and when, two days later, her test result came back positive for COVID, we dug in for the long haul. Three days later, our son, who is a student at Dixie State and lives with us, began to feel ill. Nearly a year after the virus broke loose in our country, it hit home at our house. When our son’s test results came back positive, we finally came to terms. That ominous word—pandemic—was no longer something floating around out in the wide world. It had literally entered our door.

A few days later I went for a test. I arrived as instructed at the north entrance of the old campus of Dixie Regional Medical Center on Fifth South between Third and Fourth East. A sign there directed me around the corner to the parking lot along Third East. As I drove up to the temporary structure to check in, I realized where I was. A feeling engulfed me. A complex mix of the sadness of untimely death and the miracle of birth and life in this beautiful but sometimes brutal world.

I was six years old the day I trudged down the street side-by-side with my dad. We walked the half block from my house on Sixth South to Flood Street. We crossed that street, which is actually Fourth East, and tromped across a vast, vacant space, over the crusty alkali, through the sagebrush and creosote, and up the incline to the backside of Dixie Pioneer Memorial Hospital. The old brown-brick building, which was torn down in the 1970s to make way for a new medical center, was a long and narrow rectangle with its front facing west along Third East. It ran north and south nearly the full length of the block between Fifth and Sixth South. From the rear base of the building, a ledge extended out ten or fifteen feet before the ground gave way to a steep incline tapering down over the open ground all the way to Flood Street.

Dad and I hiked up the hill that day. We called it Hospital Hill. It was a legendary place where everyone in the neighborhood took their wagons, their go-karts, their trikes and bikes and any other form of transportation that benefited from the wonderful principle of gravity. Those were the days just after Disneyland opened, and some of the kids in our neighborhood had actually been there. But nothing at Disneyland came close to the joyful terror of flying completely out of control down the steep dirt slope of Hospital Hill in a wooden fruit crate with tenuously attached old lawnmower wheels.

Dad and I made our way up to the ledge on the backside of the hospital. It was a formidable building in the eyes of a little kid, not just because it was so huge but because of what you imagined went on in there. What had gone on in there just a few days earlier was the birth of my little brother. In those days, moms convalesced in the hospital for many days after giving birth, and visiting restrictions were much tighter. So Dad had brought me to a spot below the window of my mother’s room. He reached up and tapped on the window and lifted me up on his shoulder to look in. Soon, my mother’s beautiful and reassuring face appeared in the window, and though we could not hear each other through the glass, she communicated her love to me, and I expressed my joy at seeing her.

As we headed back down the hill, Dad stopped, and we turned and looked up again at the building. Dad pointed to the window of the delivery room. “That’s where your little brother was born,” he said. “And that’s where you were born six years ago.”

I’ve never forgotten that moment. Somehow it was always meaningful to me to know the exact spot where I entered this world. Sitting in my car in the parking lot the other day, it took me several minutes to generate enough saliva to fill the COVID test vile they’d given me. As I did so, I looked up and felt a shiver run through me. I realized I was parked either on—or very near—the plot of earth where I was born.

About the Author

Lyman Hafen is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than thirty-five years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights. Lyman was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have six children and fifteen grandchildren.