709: The Reprieve

Ira Glass

Rana Awdish is a doctor in the intensive care unit at a big hospital, Henry Ford in Detroit. And when corona cases started arriving in March, she made up this job for herself.

Ira Glass

She started spending hours of each day walking the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors that made up the ICU, just checking in on her co-workers, seeing how they were doing. Which means that maybe more than any single person in the hospital, she knows best what the staff has been going through at every stage of this pandemic. And she tries to help. Even, for instance, when a unit clerk tells her that she is short on bleach and wipes.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek on our staff is the person who first reached out to Rana and got to know her. Hey there, Miki.

Miki Meek

Hey, Ira. So one of the things that's new about coronavirus is how much death the doctors and nurses see. It's relentless. And Rana especially worries about the doctors who are still in training, the residents and fellows.

Ira Glass

Ah, right. Henry Ford is a big teaching hospital.

Miki Meek

Yeah, so when Rana was a resident, she says the doctors in charge never checked in with the trainees about their feelings after a patient died. She says it's traumatic. You can feel like you failed them. And Rana says that two of the residents she trained with actually died by suicide. She sometimes still wonders if someone checking in might have made a difference.

So when she heard about the team of Henry Ford trainees who lost a patient, she made a point of stopping by to see them. They were all in this cramped, windowless workroom. It's on the fifth floor.

Miki Meek

That's a resident named Rim saying there wasn't a dry eye. I'm not sure I've ever heard doctors talk like this among themselves about what it's like when a patient dies.

Ira Glass

I have to say, it's interesting. You've played me this tape, and before this conversation with the trainees even get started, their leader, Jay Lakshmikanth, heads for the door to leave. And we had to kind of blocks him.

Miki Meek

So she stands in front of the door, and she opens up this bag of donated scrub caps that have sharks and dinosaurs on them.

Miki Meek

And then Rana, she turned to that resident, Rim, to get her to say more about her feelings about this patient who died. They'd taken care of her for a whole month.

Miki Meek

Jay had tried to get Rim to take a day off to get a break. The next day was her son's seventh birthday. But Rim didn't want to leave the rest of her team hanging.

Ira Glass

We chose Henry Ford Hospital because it's in Detroit. The city is 80% Black. Black Americans have been dying of COVID-19 at higher rates than anybody else. In Michigan, they are four times more likely to die than whites. Henry Ford usually gets a mix of Black and white patients from all over the Midwest. But with the pandemic, the hospital basically turned into a huge COVID ward for the city of Detroit, and the patients in the ICU were now mostly Black. The staff says the majority were essential workers-- bus drivers, police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, people from grocery stores.

Ira Glass

Dr. Geneva Tatem is one of the few Black doctors in the ICU and one of the senior doctors in the hospital. She's a pulmonologist. Her family moved to Detroit when she was 10. She has deep ties to the city now, and a deep awareness of what the virus has done to Black people there.

Ira Glass

Dr. Tatum lives alone, but because of the stress of COVID, she's talking to a therapist for the first time-- her cousin.

Ira Glass

We started recording the staff at this hospital in mid-April, because we wanted to see what it is like for them to be going for so long in this intense and difficult situation. Rana started recording these conversations on her iPhone for us, with everybody's permission and knowledge. And she sent out emails to 40 people, urging them to talk to us, and to be honest about what's really happening in the hospital and tell everything, including, quote, "where we fail at times." "Be you," she wrote. "I love you."

The day in mid-April that we started talking to Rana and the doctors at Henry Ford was the very first day that the number of people admitted to the ER was fewer than the day before. It was the very first day after their peak, and the number of COVID patients has slowly dropped since then. We wanted to follow a hospital staff over time, because we wanted to see how they managed, and adapted, and adjusted, and just what it did to them personally.

And so we did regular calls with nurses and doctors on the Henry Ford staff for 2 and 1/2 months. And what we're going to bring you this hour are the moments that just really struck us and surprised us, of all sorts. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Robyn Semien is the producer on our staff who talked to Dr. Tatem, who you just heard. And Dr. Tatem told her this story that gives a sense of the situation at Henry Ford and in Detroit. Robyn will explain.

Robyn Semien

In our first interview, I asked Dr. Tatem a benign question about COVID patients using FaceTime to talk to their families who can't visit the ICU because the disease is so contagious. And as an answer, she told me a story so harrowing, it speaks to the relentlessness and devastation of the disease on the city, its speed and cruelty. It was about a patient in his early 40s--

Robyn Semien

His sister brought him in with COVID symptoms. She was also taking care of her mother, who was also sick with COVID, so she had to drop him off at the hospital by himself.

Robyn Semien

So they used FaceTime. This was one of the first times Henry Ford used it with COVID patients. It was still early in the pandemic. Dr. Tatem and her team got the man's sister on the phone, on video, so she could explain to her brother how sick he was and why the oxygen was necessary. And then she told the doctors what might help her brother relax.

Robyn Semien

Meanwhile, she says his mom was at a different hospital with COVID, and her condition was worsening. His sister was monitoring them both from home and calling their brother all the time to check on him and keep his spirits up.

Robyn Semien

The staff found this out by accident. One day, they needed the sister's help.

Robyn Semien

At its peak, COVID spread through Detroit like an invisible wildfire, entire homes, neighborhoods unrecognizable afterwards. The man Dr. Tatem treated was moved to rehab to recover from what COVID did to his body. What it did to his life is different. There's no rehab for that.

Ira Glass

Robyn Semien is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Pod Bless America." In April, when we first started talking to the staff at Henry Ford, the intensive care unit was struggling with something they had never seen before-- all these patients who were just not getting better. These were COVID patients who would either die, or they'd stay stuck on ventilators for weeks, and the staff had no idea how to get them off. When that doctor, Rana Awdish-- who we heard at the beginning of the show-- would circulate through the hospital, talking to staff and checking in, they all knew that she has a very particular approach to medicine and to patient care.

Miki Meek, welcome back.

Miki Meek

Hey again, Ira. So yeah, Rana's whole approach to medicine comes out of an experience she had back in 2008. She was a doctor here at Henry Ford, and then she landed in her own ICU as a patient. She had multi-system organ failure and went on a ventilator. And she told me her co-workers acted like she couldn't hear them, but she actually could.

Miki Meek

When she recovered, she returned to her job at the hospital with a new mindset. It was all about empathy-- that empathy would make her a better doctor, not worse, which was the opposite of her training. She'd been taught that too much feeling clouds a doctor's judgment. She and a small team revamped the way the whole system talks to patients, and Rana wrote a book about her experience that's now used in medical schools.

But when COVID hit their ICU, it became impossible for the staff to do some of the things Rana put in place. Like, before COVID, when someone arrived unconscious or sedated into the ICU, they'd always ask the family, what do you think your loved one would want me to know about them? Families would put up photos and bring in quilts, personalize the rooms. And the staff, they liked that. They really wanted to get to know the person they'd be caring for. But under COVID, all that was impossible. Families could no longer come in and get to know the staff.

Ira Glass

This change throughout the hospital was biggest for the nurses. They're the ones who spend the most time with COVID patients. And our next story is about the nursing staff in Pod Four.

The ICU in Henry Ford is broken up into these pods. Pod Four was the front line in the hospital's COVID-19 effort. It was the very first pod designated as all coronavirus patients before the other ICU pods also became all COVID, all the time. Ben Calhoun spent weeks talking to the nurses in Pod Four.

Ben Calhoun

By mid-April, the nurses in Pod Four had adapted to the alternate universe of COVID-19, at least in certain ways. What I mean-- take just the PPE. That's the personal protective equipment they had to wear to go into COVID rooms. This was a high-stakes thing.

At this point, people had seen 10 ICU staff get COVID. Two colleagues were on ventilators. One nurse had died. Some people got superstitious about "I always put on my gloves in this order." "I always wear a scrub cap under the paper cap, and then I won't get sick."

What I didn't get about the PPE until talking to the nurses in Pod Four was the mundane, relentless, crazy-making-ness of the very gear keeping them safe. This arduous ritual of rubber gloves, tie-up gowns, P100 respirators that look like gas masks, clear plastic face shields. It took five minutes to put it on to go into a room, five to eight minutes to take it off when you come out. You might have to do this as many as two dozen or more times every single shift.

How long it took to get into a room because of all the PPE is actually a good example of how COVID changed what it was like for people to do even just the basic and normal parts of their jobs. Evan Guffey is a nurse in Pod Four. He says you have these ICU rooms with windows out onto the hallway.

Ben Calhoun

It was hard, in the new world of COVID, to even communicate with these patients, to explain where they were and what was happening, and to reassure them, and to connect with them in the way that they're used to, the way Rana Awdish talks about. They were still puzzling out the ways to do that.

These patients, many of them were sedated, alone in a room with the nonstop sound of the ventilator, which is loud. It's like a vacuum. So nurses had to shout through their P100 masks-- which is like a gas mask-- and a clear plastic face shield over the roar of the ventilator.

Ben Calhoun

Anthony Valeri, another nurse in Pod Four.

Ben Calhoun

In April, a month and a half into all of this, the nurses from Pod Four seem like people who are in the throes of a crisis, but also like people who are used to crises. The first time I talked to Evan, I asked how he was holding up.

Ben Calhoun

Sarah Davis is another nurse in Pod Four. She'd been hoping to take on extra shifts because her husband lost his job thanks to COVID. But you ask how she's doing, she's got the same kind of ICU nurse toughness, which I sort of grew up around. My mom was a neonatal ICU nurse. She talks like Evan, who talks like Sarah.

Ben Calhoun

By May, a month later, things change. Now it seems likely that Pod Four patients, who have been stuck on life support for weeks, most of them would probably never recover. Evan was used to helping patients get better, or giving them a dignified death. Now he felt like he was seeing too many situations that were neither.

The nurses had not seen this coming. Sarah Davis told me she'd braced herself for the surge, but nobody envisioned this part.

Ben Calhoun

When I talk to Evan Guffey in May, he tells me about what he's struggling with the most-- that families are continuing to tell them to do everything they can to save patients, which he gets. But there's a patient who typifies what he's seeing-- a man, several underlying health issues, who's been stuck on life support for weeks. He's heavily sedated, breathing tube down his throat.

Eventually, the man's kidneys give out, so he's on constant dialysis. His lungs also give out. And even when they stop sedating him, he remains unresponsive.

Ben Calhoun

Evan means that the caring thing would be to let them die.

Ben Calhoun

Around the same time, Rana Awdish checked in with Erin Dicks, Evan and Sarah's boss. They were standing outside the nurse's break room, talking about exactly what Evan was saying.

Ben Calhoun

They talk about how Pod Four nurses are stuck in the worst position in medicine. They're caught in the middle between patients who they worry are suffering, who are clearly dying, and their families, who are holding out hope.

Ben Calhoun

By "these conversations," Rana means conversations with patients' families. She wonders if doctors and nurses need to change the language they're using with them, when a patient isn't getting better.

Ben Calhoun

That same week-- this is week nine-- one of the nurses I talked to, Sarah Davis, she had a day where two patients died, and neither of them had family in the room with them. The first was a man who was intubated, so he couldn't speak. Sarah stood with the doctor and held an iPad wrapped in a plastic bag in front of the face of this dying man as a woman said goodbye to him.

Ben Calhoun

In normal times, Sarah wouldn't even be witnessing this kind of private moment. Families would come into the room. Doctors and nurses would leave. The second death-- this was the same shift-- Sarah and others in Pod Four gathered outside the room of a man who was dying alone, and they prayed with the man's son, who was on speakerphone.

Ben Calhoun

Probably less than an hour after that, Sarah says, the other patient, the man with the iPad, a couple family members were supposed to be there when he died. But things went wrong. The family told the hospital, take his ventilator tube out, and we'll be there to say goodbye at 7:30. So not long before 7:30, Sarah was in the room, and he was extubated. But then, this man starts dying much faster than normal, and his family is not there yet.

Ben Calhoun

I can't stress enough how different this is from Sarah's normal job, being alone with a dying patient. Since COVID, it's common for nurses, though, in hospitals everywhere. With this man, Sarah stood by herself, and held his hand, and stroked his head. She told him he did a good job, as she stared through the window, hoping desperately that his family would appear.

Ben Calhoun

Around the same time, early May, COVID cases have finally receded enough that parts of the hospital are starting to go back to normal. Non-COVID floors are reopening. People who've been furloughed are coming back to work. Specialists who'd been assigned to COVID ICUs go back to their normal jobs. Even the deli reopens.

Some people tell Rana that they're surprised to find themselves feeling upset about other parts of the hospital going back to normal-- not because they're jealous, but because it makes them feel like this awful thing they'd all gone through is being erased. And for the staff of Pod Four with their 16 ICU beds, they're still 100% COVID patients. And the COVID patients are going to keep coming. Rana talked to Miki about it.

Ben Calhoun

COVID was this brutal new normal, stretching out all the way to the horizon of the foreseeable future.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun, he's one of the producers on our show.

Coming up, OK, your dad comes off a ventilator. His life has been saved. What is the very first thing he says to you? We hear what happened in one family. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "The Reprieve," stories of coronavirus at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit-- not when they were busiest and things were the worst, but in the weeks since, as the number of cases steadily declined. What you're hearing this hour is when things were less awful. I should say, before we go any further, that, of course, this past week, COVID-19 cases across the country have been on the rise, including in Michigan.

Anyway, in the first half of our show, we focused mostly on the staff of the hospital. In this half, we turn to the people that they tried to save. We've arrived at Act Two of our show-- Act Two, "Stan's Good Day."

And we found out about the patient in this story from a recording made by a young doctor named Stan Linder who worked in the intensive care unit during the second year of his training at Henry Ford, studying his specialties, nephrology and critical care. He said that he would binge Oreos to cope with the stress. "I am not going to make my summer body goals," he told one of our producers.

Anyway, our producer Emanuele Berry put this together. It begins with a voice memo that Stan recorded for us on his phone.

Emanuele Berry

This is Francesca Miranda Aquino. She worked as a chef at PF Chang's. She's originally from Puerto Rico. Now she lives in Mexicantown, Southwest Detroit, with her husband, who's a preacher, their two-year-old son, and now her newborn daughter, who does not seem to appreciate what her mom went through to bring her into the world.

Francesca remembers a few things from her time in the ICU. She remembers how hopeless the place seemed when they wheeled her in. It felt like breathing in death, she says. She remembers how, days later, when she came to, no one else in her pod was awake. And she remembers the moment Stan talked about, where she refused to be re-intubated. It was the morning of the 21st. The tube had only been out for a few hours.

Emanuele Berry

Billions and billions of people have had babies. Millions have gotten COVID. Very few people, like Francesca, have done both at the same time.

They decided to induce labor, and she chose to do it alone because she thought it would be too dangerous for her family to come to the ICU where everyone had COVID. Remember, she'd only been off the ventilator for two days. She was incredibly weak and could barely raise her legs by herself.

At this point, she's still on oxygen. The doctors wanted her to hold her breath and push, but breathing in general was still tough. And then, once the baby was born, after 25 hours of labor--

Emanuele Berry

Francesca was still recovering from COVID and still in the ICU, so she and the baby were separated. When Francesca was well enough to be moved from the ICU to the general floor, she was told she would have to wear a mask and gloves, but she could hold her child for the first time.

Emanuele Berry

Francesca is at home now. She's not working because she doesn't have childcare, but she's happy that she's no longer being poked and prodded with needles at the hospital. Arisbeth is doing great. She's perfectly healthy. Francesca says she loves kisses from her big brother. She's sleeping through the night and already trying to roll on her tummy.

Ira Glass

Emanuele Berry.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Granger in a Strange Land." So Robert Granger was in Pod Four for three weeks. He got close with one of the nurses, Sarah Davis. She's the nurse that you heard earlier who saw two people die in a single day, the nurse who talked about becoming less of an optimist.

She had a special connection with Mr. Granger and attached a lot of hope to his case. They talked about his wife, who died of cancer in January, and how hard his family had taken it. He also talked about his grown daughter, Jocelyn. And as he got sicker, Sarah really pushed him to phone Jocelyn. Here's Sarah.

Ira Glass

Emanuele Berry put together this story about Robert Granger and his daughter Jocelyn.

Emanuele Berry

Jocelyn's in her 20s, and her dad's in his 60s. He works for the city fixing buses. And he called her one Friday and said he needed to go to the hospital.

Emanuele Berry

But she can't take him home. He has COVID, and he's taken to ICU Pod Four. As the days pass, he gets worse. The medications don't seem to work. His breathing becomes more labored. And then, on Jocelyn's birthday--

Emanuele Berry

This is her dad, Robert, though I'm going to call him Mr. Granger, because that's what Sarah Davis called him. And it's just a solid dad name. The nurses told us they often wondered what this all looked like from the patient's side. Here's how it looked for Mr. Granger. When he was rolled into the ICU, he says he felt like he was inside a fishbowl. Lots of windows, lots of people staring at him through those windows, including Sarah Davis.

Emanuele Berry

On that phone call about the ventilator, dad was trying to protect his daughter by being tough. Daughter was trying to protect dad by doing the same thing. But neither of them is conscious of this until Sarah, the nurse who was getting to know them both, pointed it out. Here's Jocelyn.

Emanuele Berry

For 10 days, he's on a ventilator, and she wonders if she'll ever have more time with them. Jocelyn described this thing that really stuck with me, that when you call into a hospital every day, when you cannot see or talk to your loved one, you live with a sort of picture of them in your head that you're holding onto, even though what's happening to them may be completely different than that image. There's this disconnect.

So when she calls to check in on him a week or so in, in her head, he's sleeping on a vent. But the nurse who answers the phone says, oh, he's off the vent. And he was. She gets him on the phone.

Emanuele Berry

After four weeks in the hospital, Mr. Granger was discharged to a rehab center. When he was well enough to come home from there, Jocelyn went to pick him up. She made sure to get all her crying done in the car before she got there.

Emanuele Berry

Mr. Granger's at home, but still in recovery. When I talked to him, he could walk up to 9 minutes at a time. He's hoping to make it around the block soon without a walker.

Ira Glass

Emanuele Berry.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "Mr. Eastside." Some of the first COVID patients to arrive at Henry Ford were police and others who'd attended a community breakfast in early March called Police and Pancakes. And we were especially interested in the story of that breakfast and those patients because it illustrates the scale of loss outside the hospital walls, the scale of loss in the city of Detroit.

Aaron Foley is from the city. He used to work as the city's chief storyteller, a position in the mayor's office that focuses on Detroiters telling their own narratives. He has this story of the breakfast, and of one man in particular who ended up at Henry Ford.

Aaron Foley

I'm going to take you to the East Side of Detroit for a minute, which is hard for me to do as a West Sider, but I'll let it slide, because I want to tell you the story of someone who embodies everything the city's East Side is made of, Marlowe Stoudamire.

The East Side is were some of the first Black Detroiters were able to legally purchase homes, and that includes some of Detroit's best attractions, like Belle Isle, which is something like our Central Park. But it also includes ZIP code 48205, which, in addition to diehard loyalists, has had one of the highest crime rates in the city.

The policing in that ZIP code, and in the rest of the city, included so much excessive force that the Detroit Police Department, the DPD, was put under a consent decree for years. And ever since, police have been trying to establish a better relationship with the community. The Police and Pancakes Breakfast was part of that.

The precinct there, the Ninth Precinct, held the breakfast to highlight the progress that they'd made and to try to get more voices in the conversation about police, like young people, pastors, and business owners. It was at Fisher Magnet Upper Academy-- a table in the entryway for name tags, and long buffet tables where heated trays of hash browns, eggs, and, of course, pancakes are waiting.

About 100 people were at the opening session-- police officers, of course, but also residents, representatives of the mayor's office, state legislators, and some high-achieving high school students, like senior Harley James. He's wearing a suit on a school day. His principal texted him the night before asking if he could come. He's a good public speaker, with a full ride to Michigan State this fall. When he arrived, the crowd was exactly what he expected it would be.

Aaron Foley

Letty Azar, who works in the Mayor's Office handling community affairs on the East Side, was speaking that day. When she arrived, she saw Harley and gave him a big hug, not surprised that he'd be out of the classroom for an event like this.

Aaron Foley

She's looking around the crowd to see who's here, looking around at all the different police, worried that the message of the breakfast won't come across.

Aaron Foley

Marlowe is a community staple in Detroit. He had been tapped to help organize this event and host one of the portions of the breakfast as well. Letty worked with him a lot last year, side-by-side in intense community meetings where he put people at ease and got their trust. But she hadn't seen him in a few months.

Aaron Foley

One of the other people Marlowe ran into was my friend, Adam Hollier. We went to high school together. Now he's a state senator, representing part of the East Side. So he's always at events like the pancake breakfast. But today, he wasn't giving out any hugs.

Aaron Foley

And then he saw Marlowe, and he forgot all that.

Aaron Foley

Everybody has a story about Marlowe, and Marlowe seemed to know everybody who was trying to make life better for Black Detroit. He'd host these people on a makeshift talk show he did on Facebook Live.

Aaron Foley

I first met Marlowe when we were both invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-- for a panel about Detroit, of course. I had just started working for the mayor's office as chief storyteller, and I was getting some backlash because the mayor is white, and I'm not.

I had a long career as a journalist, and the mayor hired me during an election year. People said I sold out. I heard rumors about me that I was just hired on to finesse the mayor's image. And because of that, I didn't know who in Detroit I could trust.

That very first time I met him, Marlowe sensed something was wrong with me during that trip to Boston. So he got me to open up. He was disarming, and I shared with him some of the mixed emotions I was having about what people were saying about me back home.

He told me, and I quote, "That really pisses me the fuck off that people would say that about you. And if anybody has anything to say about it, we're going to deal with them." I never forgot that. Marlowe told me to "fuck 'em"-- his words. He told me that folks are rooting for me, folks are watching me, folks are wanting me to do well, and that he was excited for me and he was counting on me.

Just weeks after the breakfast, Marlowe Stoudamire would become the first person in Detroit publicly identified as dying from the virus.

Aaron Foley

Here he is the day after the Police and Pancakes Breakfast, discussing the event on his makeshift talk show, which he hosted every Saturday on Facebook Live.

Aaron Foley

On that video, he also talked about his health. This was before COVID really hit Detroit. It wasn't on most people's minds. And he chalked it up to his lifestyle-- hustling, grinding, always going hard, 24/7.

Aaron Foley

No one knows exactly how COVID started spreading through Detroit, but law enforcement was hit hard in the beginning, and dozens of officers were at Police and Pancakes. At its height, more than 500 DPD employees were quarantined to contain the spread-- about 1/5 of the force.

As COVID spread through Michigan, I remember looking at what people in Detroit were sharing on Facebook. There are a lot of requests for prayer. But there are a lot of jokes, too-- some about how Vernors, the popular ginger ale, was all Detroiters needed to beat this deadly virus.

After Police and Pancakes, the Detroit Health Department began letting attendees know that they may have been exposed to the virus. People started wondering if they were carriers and who they might be passing it on to. Harley had left Police and Pancakes and went back to school. Letty left for another community event in District 4. Adam went to mingle with some pretty big names.

Aaron Foley

The lieutenant governor.

Aaron Foley

He didn't get sick.

Marlowe once worked at Henry Ford as community and diversity manager, and later, director of international business strategy. When he got there in March, he was one of the first patients treated for COVID-19 in Pod Four in the ICU. His time there was short. He died on March 24. Someone from work, a mutual friend, called Letty with the news.

Aaron Foley

Over the next few hours on that day, tributes started to pour in across social media about Marlowe, about how Detroit lost a giant, a champion, whatever your preferred term may be, and there was now a void that couldn't be filled. Who do you call now when you need advice or when you need mentorship? Who calls you when you need to be checked on? Who among us did he leave, and what would he be doing now in this moment when racial inequities have been laid bare, not just by the virus, but also by the killing of George Floyd?

In Detroit, another name you hear at the demonstrations these days is Aiyana Stanley-Jones. She was a seven-year-old girl from the East Side who was killed in a police raid while she slept on a couch back in 2010. Adam Hollier-- my friend, the state rep-- says Marlowe would be jumping in right now to help realize the goals of Black Lives Matter, wherever the biggest need is.

Aaron Foley

James Feagin IV is another one of those connectors in Detroit who I know knows everybody. Anytime I see him out, he's in a blazer and a button-up shirt. But now--

Both James and Marlowe are around 40. They both grew up on the East Side during that chaotic time in Detroit when crack started to ravage the city. They both built their careers in Detroit, dedicated to Detroit.

Aaron Foley

When I talked to Marlowe's wife, Valencia, she didn't want to discuss the final days of her husband's life and says their two children are still adjusting to life without their dad. But she told me this story about an overseas trip they took just this past fall.

Aaron Foley

Last year, Marlowe did this thing for 50 days straight where, each day, he'd write a Facebook post about two Black people in Detroit he saw potential in, which he later turned into a website called Roster Detroit. This came after a Chamber of Commerce official said that Amazon didn't choose Detroit for its new headquarters partly because the city didn't have enough talent. Marlowe's response was this list to say, here's what you missed out on.

Right now, the list of people we've lost to COVID is too long. So, too, is the list of people we've lost to police brutality. These lists are about Black death. But at this moment, I like to think about Roster Detroit, Marlowe's list of Black talent-- a list that's about Black people, living.

Ira Glass

Aaron Foley. He's about to become the head of the Black Media Initiative at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Miki Meek and Emanuele Barry. The people who put together our show today includes Bim Adewunmi, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Aviva DeKornfeld, Hilary Elkins, Noor Gill, Damien Graef, Michelle Harris, Lina Misitzis, Stowe Nelson, and Katharine Mae Mondo, Lisa Pollock, Nadia Reiman, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Christopher Swetala, and Matt Tierney. Our managing editors are Diane Wheeler and Sarah Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to Michael Eichenhorn, Sara Hegab, Jackie Pflaum, Kristen Chasteen, Kim North Shine, Patrick Bradley, Brittni Brown, Lamont Jones, Tatiana Grant, Melinda Madrigal, Imani Mixon, John Raniszewski, Jeffrey Rowe, Sonia Russell, Marcus Thirkill, Angela Wicks, Sarah Alvarez, Todd Bettison, Pamela Chen, Toni Davis, Gillian Grafton, Emily Ioco, Scott Kaatz, Toson Knight, Ricardo Marble, Carrie Morgan, Betty Morris, Varidhi Nauriyal, John Roach, Driadonna Rowland, Steve Poloni, Stacey Prantera, Zachary Smith, Jeff Wattrick, and Stateline, a journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he actually met Donald Trump once. This was years ago. Kind of a weird story.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.