By Alexander Rivero, Staff Writer

The chaos that befell the world in early 2020 in the form of what was then a poorly understood virus touched every life on earth, some more harshly than others. For Wayne native Jean Sime, who lost her only sister, 60-year-old Vivian Meitzler of Bloomfield, to COVID-19 after only a week of contracting the virus, those early days of the pandemic will forever stand out as a whirlwind time of confusion, anger, separation, and loss. Two years after her sister’s passing, Sime still mourns the loss of whom she refers to as her best friend, the person with whom she did everything with.

“She was the rock of the family, and she kept everybody together,” says Sime of her sister. “She loved her family unconditionally, enjoyed helping others. She brightened up any room she happened to walk into. And anyone who ever had the privilege of knowing her, loved her.”

As is so often the case in all cases of unspeakable loss, taking a proactive initiative goes to great lengths to help ease the pain, and often helps us to transcend it. Together with eighteen other authors who have also lost loved ones to COVID, Sime has co-authored Voices-19: Their Legacies Live On, a loving tribute to nineteen precious lives lost to the deadly virus. The book, published by Wisconsin-based publishing company BC Books, LLC. is divided into individual chapters, each of which is written by a different author about someone dear to them that lost their respective war with the virus.

While the impetus that led these writers to come together and publish this book is the passing of loved ones, Sime is quick to point out that the book’s focus is not on death, but on life.

“This is a book for anyone who has been affected by the pandemic, which is really all of us,” says Sime. “At the start of the pandemic, all we were hearing from news outlets were numerical figures of lives lost. There was very little attention on the names of the victims by comparison, no talk of the families forever changed by the loss of individuals. This book reminds us of the human aspect of all of this. They were human beings that died, and their lives were important.”

Sime gives much credit to the courage and openness of the other contributing authors, as well as to the book’s editor, publisher, book coach, BC Books CEO and owner, Brenda E. Cortez, herself an author of children’s books. 

The book, says Sime, is also a healing tool for anyone who’s experiencing any kind of grief, whether or not that grief relates directly to the losing of a loved one.

“It is a book for our time. It is an attempt to place a face, or faces, on an issue that we are increasingly growing accustomed to discussing only in statistical terms, coldly, dispassionately. The book is an attempt to remind readers that each of the individuals that were lost were loved dearly, and they will never ever be forgotten.”

In the immediate aftermath of losing her sister to COVID, Sime recalls feeling utterly adrift. With hospital and funerary restrictions on the numbers of people that were allowed to be present in a given room at the same time, she was unable to give her sister a final farewell, and having to go through the impossible experience of having no closure and not being able to hold her sister or say goodbye.

She gives great credit to online support groups who, with regular conversations and Zoom meetings, helped her to navigate the emotional abyss of her own grief not only by expressing it, but in listening to others’ attempts to navigate theirs. All of these emotional peaks and valleys–the overlapping mourning and catharsis of finding solidarity with others–helped to establish the emotional platform from which she would then launch her loving homage to Vivian which, in connecting to the other chapters of Voices-19, she hopes will go to great lengths to not only honor her sister’s life but to offer a sense of relief to those who may be going through some similar grieving or stressful experiences of their own.

We must take active measures to humanize our world, urges Sime, and to go against the attempts, whether conscious or not, to reduce all of life to numbers and figures, whether those numbers come by way of “likes” on social media, or the number of lives lost in tragedies such as the one that took the world by storm in those bewildering, terrifying days of early 2020. We must never forget that there is in fact a heartbeat behind it all. They are our moms and dads, our brothers and sisters, our grandparents and our children. They will never be forgotten because their legacies live on through us all.

For anyone interested in a copy of Voices-19: Their Legacies Live On, please e-mail Jean Sime at jeansime23@gmail.com.