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This Is Us
‘You Can’t Kill a Legend’: My Mother’s Battle With Covid-19
She’s known as the Uninformed Correspondent — but to me, she’s Mom
My mother and I are close. Sometime around my 21st year on this Earth, my mother shifted from the matronly figure who raised me to my best friend who I can always confide in. People tend to become absurdly close with their parents once they recognize what little shits they’ve been their entire lives. I fell hard into that camp — and man, was I a little shit.
I work for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Sitting in my boss’s office in May 2018, I was panicked because I didn’t have any pitches for the upcoming midterms. I do not like being caught without ideas. So, I thought back to the numerous conversations I’ve had with my mother. My mom has a giant heart, but her worldview only spans the entirety of her 55-inch television screen. Sadly, that screen is often littered more with Showcase Showdowns than the nightly news. Often, when she’d ask me about work, we’d talk about Trump and politics and the conversations would veer off into very surprising territory.
I’ve often thought pigeonholing uninformed voters as malignant idiots is small-minded in itself. I snapped back into my boss’s office with an idea: Take an uninformed voter and try to teach them why they should care more about voting and current events. With that, my mother became Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s Uninformed Correspondent.
My mom and I have done five segments together now for the show. We covered the midterm elections in 2018, the Russia investigation, Comic-Con (gotta have fun once in a while), the Chinese trade war, and most recently we decided to cover the global pandemic of the coronavirus.
I arrived at my mother’s house with a camera crew on March 9. Nothing in the United States had been canceled yet. Jokes were still flying about the severity of this virus. Wuhan, China, was under siege, but it was still inconceivable that the virus would ravage the United States. I say this out loud sometimes because the guilt I have felt since March 9 has been oppressive, and it often feels like it’s going to swallow me.
