A Florida cousin died from COVID last week — he was 63, nine years my junior and otherwise in good health.

His mother, literally my first cousin, preceded him into the same hospital by a day, also stricken with COVID. She is on a ventilator today, in an induced coma; and at 86 she’s been given a 30% chance of survival. Both she and her son declined to be vaccinated.

Her reasons were politically seasoned; I don’t know the reason for his reluctance, they may have been the same. But near the end, he refused to be put on a ventilator, and his last days were painful, I’ve been told; agonizing.

Yet isn’t it strange the things we immediately recall about someone dear, when we first learn of their passing, from whatever cause?

Gerry and I largely grew up together summers at Tripp Lake in Poland, where his incredible grandmother and my aunt had a two-story, multi-bed camp; a renovated boathouse. It was the gravitational center of our extended families’ summer vacations and weekends.

Though Gerry was somewhat younger, play dynamics at camp, where one didn’t have one’s usual circle of peers, were often cross-generational. And Gerry’s gentle manner, plus his sweet voice with its near lisp, are what I remember most clearly during the many seasons we shared: on the sand beach, beside the house with its Olympic-sized badminton court, while swimming in the lake or playing kick-the-can at nightfall.

Gerry also had a deaf older brother, and this gave both him and his older sister proficiency in sign language and innately protective natures, which they carried with them into adulthood, along with their mother. His sister was present at their brother’s passing, and when she posted the news on Facebook, she said she lost her best friend that morning, and asked for everyone to please, please, get vaccinated.

Yet still, in nearly every family, there are many who refuse it.

Who seem not to understand, for one thing, that the beds they are filling in hospitals (at the rate of, and accounting for, 90% of all COVID/ICU cases — making this, in fact, now a pandemic of the unvaccinated) are in some states potentially denying life-saving rooms to victims of car accidents, heart attacks, strokes or burn emergencies.

Who seem not to understand that their decision to refuse medicines designed to minimize their body’s reactions to a COVID infection — which would likely keep them out of hospitals, and virtually secure their protection from death by COVID — is resulting in the compromised care and deaths of others, their own brothers and sisters, their own families.

On the Longley Bridge between our cities, anti-vaccine protesters are appearing these days, holding signs that read: No COVID Coercion; My Body, My Choice; Freedom Not Force.

There is always traffic behind me, so stopping to say that I just lost a cherished cousin to that thinking, and may lose another any hour, is not an option, however deeply I may want to risk pulling over and telling them.

What more can be done to persuade, to influence, to penetrate this oppositional intransigence to something that is now, with growing frequency, also filling pediatric hospitals in some states and taking children’s lives?

With some few I know it is a fear of needles, though they may not want to admit it. With others it’s a presumed inalienable sense that they have to be, what they want to be. And with still others, it’s a philosophic or religious objection — which for fellow Christians I have only these words, if we want to take this to an extreme, nearly surreal, level: “Greater love has no one than this: than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Yet in the end, in a lesser way, isn’t that what we are being asked to do, to not only protect ourselves but protect each other against this contagion, with its self-replicating dynamic? That primarily only vaccinations and mask wearing will accomplish and finally, finally . . . end?

I know that my decent and beloved cousin, with the sweet voice in his youth, is in a better place today. And how I wish I could contact him and ask him what he would want to share with the ones he left behind — with other family members who may be balking at these protective vaccines — and tell the world.

I’d like to think that his answer might include a reference to John 15:13 above, and how he wished he had understood its words better, that protecting others was its golden, intended message.

Paul Baribault of Lewiston is a playwright and author of children’s and non-fiction books, who also writes about current events.