Obit for Kansas COVID victim takes the anti-maskers to task

After his 81-year-old father died of the coronavirus on Tuesday following nearly aweek of isolation at a nursing home, Courtney Farr could not contain his frustration with the attitudes of people in his rural Kansas town who’ve downplayed the severity of the pandemic and railed against wearing masks for months.

So when it was time to write the obituary for his father, Marvin James Farr, the son slammed those in Scott City, Kan., who refuse to wear a mask to prevent the spread of the virus that killed his dad and more than 275,000 other Americans.

“He was born into an America recovering from the Great Depression and about to face World War 2, times of loss and sacrifice difficult for most of us to imagine,” the obituary said. “He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another.”

Farr’s father died after six days in isolation inside the Park Lane Nursing Home. Farr did not hide his frustration when he penned the obituary describing the days his father spent struggling with the virus without the comfort of familiar faces.

“Hedied ina room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways,” the obituary said. “He died with COVID-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.”

The passionate obituary began to spread widely on social media this week after his son posted it on Facebook and the Kansas City Star reported it on Thursday. The memorial joins the ranks of several other obituaries for COVID-19 victims to criticize people, including elected officials, for failing to take the pandemic seriously enough.

“I’ve spent most of this year hearing people from my hometown talk about how this disease isn’t real, isn’t that bad, only kills old people, masks don’t work,” Courtney Farr said on Facebook. “And because of the prevalence of those attitudes, my father’s death was so much harder on him, his family and his caregivers than it should have been.”

Marvin James Farr was born May 23, 1939, in Modoc, Kan. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1968. Following an interest in science, he considered studying to be a mortician, but decided instead to work as a farmer and veterinarian in a small town in western Kansas, his obituary said.

“The science that guided his professional life has been disparaged and abandoned by so many of the same people who depended on his knowledge to care for their animals and to raise their food,” his son wrote.