Chanell Jackson rubbed sanitizing gel on her hands and pulled a protective gown over her clothes as she had done so many times before.
As a nurse, she did this ritual to help deliver wailing babies and wheel worried women into surgery.
But this was different. This was her father.
It was Sunday, March 29. It had been 22 days since he had returned home from a ski trip in Idaho, 14 days since he had checked into Chanell's West Los Angeles hospital with shortness of breath, and eight days since his coronavirus test had come back positive.
She carefully pressed the edges of an N95 mask until it molded to her face and affixed a plastic shield to her forehead. Then Chanell slipped a pair of gloves over her hands. And another for added protection.
Charles "Chuck" Jackson lay in the hospital bed, sedated and hooked to a ventilator cranked to the max, forcing air into his stiff lungs. Father and daughter had been in the same building for days, but unable to see each other. Now, they were finally in the same room. She could touch him, but couldn't feel the warmth of his skin through her gloves.
Chanell told her father the grim prognosis even though he was sedated and she was unsure if he could hear her. Doctors wanted Chanell and her brother, Nick, to take him off life support.
She was there to say goodbye.
Up until then, Nick had chronicled every heartbreaking development on social media. With each post and every share, he hoped to raise awareness, to dispel the myth that black people were somehow immune to the coronavirus when few knew that they getting sick and dying from COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers.
He hoped people might see his father's face and see their own or the face of one of their relatives in need of protection. He had hoped his story would not become theirs.
"I won't want somebody in this position," he said.
The beeping of machines filled the ICU as Chanell searched for signs of life _ a flutter of an eyelash or a wiggle of a finger. She saw none.
But she knew that her 64-year-old dad was a fighter. He had pulled a 300-pound tuna from the Gulf of Mexico, guarded schools in L.A.'s toughest neighborhoods during the city's most violent era, and crisscrossed the world to ski down steep slopes.
"You've lived your life," she recounted later. "You've raised us well. If you're finished here, then you can go in peace."
