Minister survived but remains traumatized

‘I hope that my experience is completely behind me. One day.’

Edward DuBose

After church on a recent Sunday, Edward DuBose stepped into a restaurant and began a grim ritual.

First the 63-year-old surveyed the dining room of the Ole Times Country Buffet in Columbus. It was crowded, he immediately thought. DuBose noted the distance between tables and people. He thought everyone was too close. He checked faces for masks. Too few wore them.

If DuBose had been out to eat alone, he might’ve walked out. He knows it might sound strange for a person like him — a minister, a mental health counselor, a civil rights leader, a former drill sergeant — to be afraid of a Sunday lunch rush. But COVID-19 haunts the man.

DuBose spent three horrific weeks hospitalized with the disease in July 2020 and inspired others when he pushed his atrophied legs to walk again and became a vaccine advocate as he returned to his busy life. DuBose owns a counseling business and is a national board member for the NAACP. But even a year and a half later, as normal as his days of bouncing between meetings and appointments may appear, DuBose said he doesn’t feel back to normal.

“When you know that you have certain responsibilities, you have to operate almost, for lack of a better word, mechanically,” he said. “I know that I have to get up. I know I run a business and the business has got to run. I have a family and they have to eat. I know I have responsibilities in the NAACP. But I’m nowhere near normal.”

He feels the lingering damage every day. His lungs sometimes skip a breath. The fingers on his left hand pulse with what DuBose assumes is nerve damage from where he was strapped to an ICU bed. The most significant mark, DuBose said, was left on his mind. DuBose’s anxiety rises with COVID-19 case and death numbers, which he checks often. He sees people around him growing more comfortable, pulling off their masks in what they consider safe places. DuBose wears two masks and gloves.

He was wearing them when he arrived at Ole Times. Walking to a table in the back with his wife and a granddaughter, he tried not to look like he was panicking, but he was.

DuBose didn’t want to worry his wife, Cynthia, with his anxiety. She’d been through much with him after he went to the emergency room the day before their 36th wedding anniversary. Just before staff put him on a ventilator, the husband told his wife this would be their last, because he was dying. In his time in the hospital and every day since, she’d been with him, even when hospital protocols meant she couldn’t be there physically. Simply seeing her in the morning when he wakes gives him hope.

Now she sat at their table in Ole Times, talking with their granddaughter about something DuBose couldn’t fully hear. His mind was spiraling away. He looked around the restaurant and saw danger everywhere. He didn’t focus on the protection his vaccine had given him or about all the trials he’d conquered in his 63 years. He thought about COVID-19 taking him all the way out this time.

Silently, DuBose prayed: “You didn’t bring me this far to leave me.”

In a few moments, his nerves settled and he joined the conversation. DuBose had won again, and he intends to push through the next time. DuBose is shaken and changed but not broken.

“I hope that my experience is completely behind me,” he said. “One day.”

COURTESY Edward DuBose, who lives with the trauma of a harrowing bout with COVID-19, reads to his grandson, Seneca Allen. Over a year after surviving the disease, DuBose says he’s “nowhere near normal.”