“I’ve seen a lot of coffins.”
Karl-Anthony Towns of the NBA Minnesota Timberwolves made that jarring statement while talking about how COVID-19 has taken the lives of his mother and six other family members in 2020.
“I’ve been through a lot, obviously starting out with my mom,” Towns said during an interview with ESPN. “Last night I got a call that I lost my uncle. I feel like I’ve been hardened a little bit by life and humbled.”
Towns’ 2020 turned horrific in March as he posted a video that went viral about how his mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, was placed in a medically-induced coma and was on a ventilator because of COVID. She died on April 13 at the age of 58.
Unfortunately, that was merely the beginning of a dreadful year that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
“I’ve seen a lot of coffins in the last seven months,” Towns said. “I have a lot of people who have — in my family and my mom’s family — gotten COVID. I’m the one looking for answers still, trying to find how to keep them healthy. It’s just a lot of responsibility on me to keep my family well-informed and to make all the moves necessary to keep them alive.”
The few bright spots for Towns is the fact that his father, Karl-Anthony Towns Sr., also contracted the novel coronavirus but survived.
Towns has shared several videos about the impact of losing his mother and other family members to persuade people to take this pandemic seriously.
“I didn’t want people to feel the way I felt,” Towns said. “I wanted to try to keep them from having the ordeal and the situation I was going through. It just came from a place that I didn’t want people to feel as lonely and upset as I was. I really made that video just to protect others and keep others well-informed, even though I knew it was going to take the most emotionally out of me that I’ve ever been asked to do.”
