It was back in 1987 that the infamous Unabomber created fear throughout the nation; Ronald Reagan was president; the Stock Market cratered on October 19; CNN was just a fledgling news service; the oil bust had hit Texas hard; AOL was a start-up online email service and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was just three years old. Why, fax machines were considered highest tech.
And yet the world stopped that year and focused attention on the backyard of a Midland home starting on Wednesday, October 14. It didn’t deal with a “big deal.” It dealt with an 18-month toddler by the name of Jessica McClure. Somehow the munchkin… as munchkins do… discovered something that she shouldn’t have — an 8-inch-wide well hole in her aunt’s backyard. Much like Alice who chased after a white rabbit, Jessica’s curiosity proved too great. To this day, no one knows what attracted Jessica. Still, she fell 22 feet into the hole.
For 58 hours, everyone held their breath as the rescue of “Baby Jessica” got underway on television. It was a daunting situation. The hole was narrow, “so deep into the earth – beneath layers of rock harder than granite.”
While the rescue teams drilled a horizontal tunnel about two feet below Jessica’s location, others pumped oxygen into the well to maintain constant communication with Jessica that included singing nursery rhymes.
Over time one person on the scene said, “At one point she was singing. At another point, when a jackhammer started up, she didn’t say any words but used kind of a huffy little voice. You could tell it was an angry voice. I would say 80 percent of the time she was either crying or making some kind of noise we could hear. When we weren’t calling words of encouragement, we’d tell her to sing for us. I’ll never forget her singing ‘Winnie the Pooh.’”
It was only the second time since the Challenger space shuttle explosion that the world watched around the clock.
Finally, on the evening of Friday, October 16, people rainchecked dates and other plans to sit around their TVs to see Jessica cradled in the arms of a rescuer as she arose from the hole.
Exactly what does this 33-year-old, round-the-clock attention for the rescue of a child in a West Texas backyard have to do with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic?
Simple. Her story reminds folks of the worldwide importance that had been placed on a single life. On Tuesday, September 22, Dallas County passed the 1,000 marker of deaths resulting from the virus. Since then, 331 men, women and children have been added to that tally. Yesterday it was announced that since the pandemic started, Texas deaths have hit 19,423 and 240,000 for the U.S.
It’s perfectly understandable to become numb to these incredible figures as they’re reported. But they weren’t just numbers; they were people who celebrated last Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s Eve with nary a clue of the approaching pandemic. Even the traditional mourning process has been reduced and/or postponed dramatically due to COVID-19 compliance.
Someone recently said that the number of deaths had been reduced since the first wave of the pandemic. But let’s not forget that any death resulting from COVID-19 creates a ripple effect with friends, families and healthcare providers who tirelessly tried to save them.
While we celebrate the lives saved during the past months — just as we celebrated back in 1987 the rescue of little Jessica — let’s remember those lost and help those suffering from the loss.