When COVID Eugenics Killed My Grandmother
Honoring the martyrs of this eugenics means not allowing ourselves to forget.
June is one of the months when I think most about my grandmother, along with March, when the state of emergency was declared. In general, any COVID-related anniversary brings her to mind.
My grandmother had psychiatric issues since at least her thirties. Poverty and raising five daughters in a patriarchal world pushed her into madness. Her daughters were afraid of her. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She also had epileptic seizures that left her unresponsive. Around 2010, she had breast cancer. She was a mother whose work for her daughters was hardly ever appreciated (and this isn’t about her personally—domestic and care work, in general, is undervalued and taken for granted).
My mother always tells me an anecdote from when she was about 20. One of her sisters said their mother didn’t clean the cutlery properly. “Mom is exhausted,” was how my mother defended her.
Domestic work and the prison of motherhood also consumed my mother. Slowly, she’s managed to begin freeing herself from that, but not many women manage to.
At the end of June, it’s my grandmother’s birthday. For several years she had been living with my aunt in a rented apartment in southern Italy. They barely went outside because my grandmother didn’t want to, and my aunt didn’t want to pressure her. My aunt received no recognition or gratitude for all the care work she did for my grandmother; instead, the men in the family labeled her as crazy too. A madness that, like all madness, is social and tied to context. The criticisms of my aunt’s “madness” always came from men who weren’t even family—just the partners of family members.
Almost all of my grandmother’s daughters have struggled with eating disorders—the patriarchal pressure on non-normative bodies combined with the teaching of submission through dieting bears its fruit.
My grandfather died quite young due to medical negligence. He was hit by a motorcycle and left on a stretcher to die slowly once he reached the hospital. He drew a cross on himself with his own blood to be blessed before dying. The situation was so grave that, after his death, a judge had to intervene and gave money directly to my family (they had to accept that sum short-term, even though long-term they might have won a case and received more compensation—my grandfather had been the family’s only financial support). Almost 40 years later, my grandmother would die due to the negligence of the same hospital, but this time because of COVID eugenics.
In June 2023, my grandmother’s birthday was celebrated—with no masks, no precautions, no testing. My grandmother and my aunt went from not seeing anyone at all out of caution, to holding a party with no protections. My grandmother got infected with COVID. My aunt didn’t tell her primary care doctor, but spoke to my grandmother’s brother (a doctor), and they sent her several medications. “Aren’t you giving me too much medicine?” was one of the last things my grandmother said before collapsing to the floor.
Healthcare in Italy has a lot to do with the privilege of where you live. If you live in the south, you won’t receive good care. That’s the harsh truth. In Spain, it’s similar—northern infrastructure is better than southern, and ongoing budget cuts make both hospital and working conditions inhumane.
There was only one hospital accepting COVID-positive patients. That’s where my grandmother was taken. She was alone. They barely allowed visits. My mother went to Italy to try to see her, but she couldn’t. “I want you to get me out of here, they’ve abandoned me,” is what my grandmother told my aunt. They signed a voluntary discharge, so my grandmother left the hospital before she should have. My mother had already returned home when the family requested the discharge.
My grandmother spent about two weeks delirious. They didn’t know what was happening and were afraid to take her back to the hospital. When they finally did, it was too late—she had developed an infection through the IV line and had been fighting an intense infection since the first hospital admission. During this whole time, she couldn’t take her medication for bipolar disorder, and between that and the infection, she was delirious, screaming, and in pain. I urged my mother to return to Italy because my grandmother’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, but my mother didn’t want to leave me alone since I was having a Crohn’s flare-up. We bought the plane ticket, I called a taxi to take her to the airport, and one hour before she was to board the plane, my grandmother died. My mother never got to say goodbye.
My grandmother’s birthday gift was social murder. My grandmother deserves justice. All the martyrs of this eugenics deserve justice. And they will never get it unless we face the fact that this pandemic continues to be used as a form of social murder by systems of oppression.
Every time someone tries to make me feel like I’m exaggerating for wearing a mask, I remember my grandmother, all the murdered ones, all the people severely disabled by this eugenics. I will not allow myself to forget. May my heart never recover from this, so that I never forget why I must keep fighting.