The Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America had already closed its church in a corner of Washington known as Little Rome. “It’s personal for us,” Dunham said of the crisis, but he told them he had realized something else: “It’s personal for everybody.” In Washington, the first death - a 59-year-old Franciscan friar named John-Sebastian Laird-Hammond - came March 20, and 10 days later, at the same moment Murkowski gaveled the Senate into order, Father Larry Dunham addressed some of the friars who knew Brother Sebastian best. “Things are working, even though we’re not all physically present.”Ĭongress, though, isn’t debating or passing new bills, and as the deaths continue to mount, no one knows when it will again. “The government’s still open,” explained Murkowski, who stayed in Washington because she would be quarantined for 14 days if she flew home to Alaska. One runner leaned her back against a wide column, looking up at the wall inscribed with the Gettysburg Address.īlooming flowers frame the U.S. But this early, before phones started pinging with news alerts, Lincoln’s visitors could stand at his feet and take a breath, try for a moment of calm. At the top, they paused beneath the engraved names of the states, almost all with a rising death count. Just past sunrise, as the sky above him brightened, runners made wide arcs around each other as they climbed the 87 steps of the memorial. Presiding over all of it, carved from Georgia white marble, is Abraham Lincoln, the slain president who kept America from coming apart at its worst moment. This is the Washington people know best, where the powerful and well-connected make deals and clusters of cherry trees surround soaring monuments. Then she climbed into the lime-green cab of her 15-ton truck, squeezed into the middle seat between two of her co-workers, pulled on a white mask and rode toward a neighborhood of seven-figure rowhouses on Capitol Hill. So, after French parked her car, she retrieved a pink Victoria’s Secret hoodie and slid on an extra pair of gloves. That’s why she decided to think as little as possible about the deadly virus consuming the nation and its capital city - her city. But would she have to risk her life to keep it? She didn’t know who would care for her son, a first-grader, if she got sick, or worse. Now she made $45,000 a year, and French was proud of that salary. She remembered what it felt like to lose a job, to apply for unemployment. French, 27, was a single mom with rent to pay. Octavia French, pulling into the lot just then from her nearby apartment, didn’t want to hear those stories. His father said the Navy veteran, a diabetic, had a fiancee and a 5-year-old son. Just three hours earlier, he had learned that his only child, named after him, had died in a Detroit hospital.
“I just want to let y’all know this is serious, you know what I’m saying? I just lost my son this morning with coronavirus,” said Thomas Fields Sr., 51, as dozens of eyes turned toward him. Monday, a bearded man in dark-rimmed glasses raised his hand. On the edge of the crowd at the parking lot, just before 6 a.m. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post) Sanitation workers in Washington, D.C., keep the city running by emptying trash and recycle bins, but are now exposed to the coronavirus every day they go to work.
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