VIRUS DIARY: The unfinished business of a funeral deferred

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — It dawned on me recently at the Nashville airport that the pandemic wouldn't end at the same time for everybody. I had expected a trickle of travelers, but the airport was jammed. Most people had masks, but social distancing wasn't a thing.

I was flying to check on my mother. Still, in my mind it would be awhile before we could settle into whatever “normal" is going to look like going forward.

There is a lot of unfinished business in the world: graduations, anniversaries, and so on. Pent-up demand has driven airfares higher. People travel for different reasons, but many have been moving around freely for months now, vaccinated or not.

And there will be funerals. Closure comes hard when you are not able to say goodbye in person. That's the unfinished business for my family.

My wife's father, Bernard Francis Lyons Jr., died of COVID just before Christmas. His life ended in the company of nurses at a long-term care facility near our house. We last spoke to him by video chat.

My wife and her sister chose not to try to pull off a virtual memorial, which seemed both logistically challenging and somehow not enough. I’m sure we’re not alone in feeling that a life as significant as Bernie's deserved better than to be remembered as one of more than a half-million Americans whose lives were taken by this terrible affliction.

And so, later this year, we will drive to his native New England to honor him.

Bernie Lyons was a working-class Irish-American from Rhode Island who earned a doctorate in psychology and spent his adult life healing troubled children in Knoxville, Tennessee.

He was an elaborate storyteller, prone to exaggerating the accomplishments of the people he cared about. His stories grew more spectacular with each telling. They arose from the...