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By Peter Jamison 
12h ago
Every day, Landon Spradlin was weakening, and now, on the morning he would leave New Orleans for the last time, the 66-year-old blues preacher and guitarist couldn’t load his bags into the white Ford F-250 he was supposed to be. take it home.
Ric Lyons, a fellow musician who for weeks had played and prayed with Spradlin amid the crowds of Mardi Gras crowding Jackson Square, packed up the truck. Spradlin’s wife Jean settled in the driver’s seat. Spradlin got into the taxi next to him. Tormented by coughing fits, the ordinarily talkative street minister said little when the Ford rolled east on the Twin Span Bridge across the wide, shimmering expanse of Lake Pontchartrain.
The world had changed since the Spradlins crossed the same bridge weeks before to begin their annual street ministry in New Orleans. The couple from rural Gretna, Virginia, had arrived on February 18, several days before President Donald Trump declared on Twitter that the new coronavirus was “very much under control in the United States.” They left on March 16, the same day the president would recommend that Americans stop meeting in groups of more than 10.
New cases of covid-19, the deadly disease that was once confined to central China, was rapidly emerging in the United States. Cities and states were beginning to close. After an overwhelming Mardi Gras, New Orleans had canceled its bustling St. Patrick’s Day celebration. The French Quarter was almost empty.
And the Spradlins were sick.
This happened to them almost every year: After the crowds and music, conversations, and prayers with countless strangers, they came home from Louisiana with some kind of mistake. Landon had lung problems, and when he started wheezing in the days after Mardi Gras, he assumed it was one of the periodic visits for severe bronchitis, pneumonia, or asthma. Jean, 63, suffered a mild fever and shortness of breath.
But there were, as always for the Spradlins, ample reason for hope. An Air Force veteran, Landon had sought help at the New Orleans Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He was tested for coronavirus and the result was negative. Doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics.
Spradlins also had more power than a Z-Pak or a bottle of Albuterol. His fervent brand of charismatic Christianity held that God regularly intervened in the world to alter the course of believers’ physical ailments.
“I don’t think there are incurable diseases. God can heal anything,” Landon said during an interview at a 2016 motorcycle rally in Daytona Beach, Florida. “There are documented cases of God curing AIDS. God can make limbs grow where they have been severed. God can raise the dead.”
A new illness had arisen when his Mardi Gras ministry ended last month. But not everyone recognized his threat. Three days before leaving, Landon, an avid Trump supporter, posted a meme on his Facebook page about the coronavirus, which at the time had killed some 40 people. The media, he warned, were trying to “manipulate your life” by creating “collective hysteria.”
When the truck sped up on Interstate 10, the pastor who believed in the prophecy had no idea what awaited him: isolation, unanswered prayers, and a horrible death that would make his Facebook post the subject of widespread mockery.
When Jean entered a North Carolina gas station to use the bathroom, Landon had been quiet and thought he was asleep. “You have to go too,” she said, opening the passenger side door to help him.
Instead, it collapsed on the ground.
“Sorry.”
“I love you.”
They were the last words Jean heard her husband say. Barely conscious, he managed to speak around the fan tube coming out of his mouth. She looked into the blue eyes that had greeted her at church nearly four decades ago. It was the last time I saw those eyes open.
Landon was awake just 10 minutes before a nurse came in and told Jean, who was dressed, gloved, and masked for her husband’s bedside visit, that she was raising her blood pressure. Soon hospital staff told him more: For the safety of others, he had to be quarantined immediately.
Atrium Health Cabarrus, the hospital operator, repeatedly examined her for the virus and rented a house for her. Friends sent snacks, socks, and coloring books. Hospital staff offered to bring pizza if they wanted. She lost 15 pounds.
“I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was numb,” she recalled. “I couldn’t remember taking my morning pills. I didn’t know when the last time I had a drink of water. I was sitting there waiting for news from the hospital that I was better.”
Almost 400 miles away, Lyons was also in quarantine, also waiting for good news. The 53-year-old guitarist who had helped pack the truck in New Orleans and who regarded Landon as his best friend, had been tested for the coronavirus after arriving at his home in Kimball, Tenn. It would be two weeks before Lyons received his positive. As a result, but because of his symptoms, fatigue and shortness of breath, “sicker than he had ever been,” he stayed indoors.
Landon, shortly before collapsing, had called Lyons from the road, managing to gasp a question about how his friend was feeling. He called again from the hospital, before being intubated, asking Lyons to pray, which he did.
“We believed that God was going to heal him,” Lyons said.
Landon’s plight had spread through his network of believers, and people began to pray for him throughout the country. There were prayers on the plains of North Texas and in the dying hill towns of southwest Virginia.
“We knew it was going to come out of this,” Mullen said.
Supernatural acts of healing are central to Christianity, from the evangelical accounts of Jesus restoring the blind and lame to the cures attributed by the Catholic Church to the intercession of the saints. Almost all Christian congregations pray for the sick.
What sets many charismatic Christians apart is their belief that such miracles are not extraordinary but routine, said Bill J. Leonard, professor emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and an expert in southern Protestantism. Those believers see faith healing as a practical measure to combat pain or illness, which is sometimes accomplished by laying hands on the sick or anointing them with oil.
A deadly contagion like the coronavirus poses special challenges to such convictions, Leonard said.
“By making these claims, you promise too much in the name of God,” said Leonard. “And that can be discouraging for the faithful.”
At Concord, the nurses who checked in daily with Jean made no promises. “It doesn’t look good,” he heard on the phone, night after night.
While Landon lay unconscious and alone, Jean underwent three rounds of tests to detect the virus. The first was inconclusive, the following two negatives. The results were puzzling, given her classic onset of symptoms and proximity for weeks to her infected husband.
On March 24, seven days after the collapse of the Landon Highway, Jean was asked to authorize a dialysis port in his groin. There was no way to disguise his condition. Landon’s kidneys were closing, and doctors hoped his heart would stop soon.
Jean approved the procedure and asked the hospital employees to do their best.
“Give him every opportunity for a miracle,” he said.
The next day, around 4 a.m., he died.
The first Thursday in April was bright and windy in Gretna, warm in the sun and cold in the shade. Lent, the six weeks of repentance and sacrifice that began immediately after Mardi Gras, was coming to an end. But for the handful of people on a hillside next to a shell station in the nearly empty city, a much longer deprivation season was just beginning.
The Spradlin family estimated that, in better times, a thousand people could have attended Landon’s funeral. Instead, there were fewer than 20, distributed according to the requirements of social distancing that had become commonplace. Gerry uttered the eulogy, recalling Landon’s “anointing”, the magnetism he exuded when playing Christian music.
Jean had seen him up close, one last time. His face was swollen and the morgue had stained his beard. They warned that touching the embalmed corpse, even a week after death, could be risky. But wearing a scarf, she put her hand on his chest anyway.
“It just felt like a rock,” he said.
In the days after Landon succumbed to covid-19, his death brought words of sympathy from people who knew him, and ridicule from people who did not. The New York Post, the Daily Mail and an atheist blog published articles in their Facebook post on March 13. Landon was posthumously attacked as a victim of mistaken beliefs, in the guarantees of his president and the protections of his God.
Jean received caustic messages from strangers on social media about her husband’s policy. His children, who managed his father’s Facebook pages, received notifications for each new vitriolic comment.
“What surprised me is that people would laugh at that,” said her daughter Jesse Spradlin, 29. “People literally left comments saying, ‘Ha ha ha ha ha, I’m glad you got what you deserved.'”
Others who downplayed the coronavirus have also been vilified after dying of covid-19. Last week, the family of an Ohio victim who had criticized social distancing measures before contracting the virus canceled the live broadcast of her funeral after a torrent of online abuse.
“I don’t care who you are,” Jesse said. “I don’t understand finding joy in the sadness of a family.”
Their attackers cared little that when the Spradlins went to New Orleans, they acted indifferently from most other Americans, including those much better informed about the risks of communicable diseases.
John Barry, a scholar of the 1918 influenza pandemic who teaches at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, lives in New Orleans. He was closely following the spread of the virus and would become an active critic of the Trump administration’s response. Even he did not take precautions when the crowds arrived in his hometown in February.
“I did not avoid the parades because I was concerned about the virus,” Barry said in an interview. “I ignored the shows because I didn’t feel like going to a show.”
For those that Landon left behind, an enigma persists: Why did Jesus not intervene on behalf of the man who so often embraced the healing power of the Lord?
“Dude, I don’t get it,” said Lyons, who has fully recovered from his covid-19 fight. “We prayed for him and we believed that we would all improve. And I improved a lot, despite everything, and I think God touched me. And I don’t know the difference.”
For Jean, recalling the last days of her husband’s life, the false assurances of the country’s highest government officials, the Mardi Gras crowds unknowingly carrying her deadly contagion, faulty VA test, and misdiagnosis: there is only one force that is worth the blame.
“I know that Jesus was against this,” he said. “I am not angry. I know who did it. It is the demon who comes to steal, kill and destroy.”
Jean now packs her and her husband’s belongings at the farm they rented in Gretna, preparing to move to Texas, near their daughters. For the most part, it ignores the news about how far the virus has spread, who else it has killed, and how it could stop. A limited focus on the job of moving has helped her overcome her pain.
But on Easter Sunday, the family’s mourning was interrupted by the cheery music from Landon’s upstairs recording studio. Three of Spradlin’s children, all musicians like their father, broadcast songs of praise live to Granite Creek Church in Claremont, California.
Landon Isaac Spradlin, the only son, is one of the pastors of the church. In the video, he comes into view, flanked by sisters Jesse and Naomi, a smiling 32-year-old man who is carrying an acoustic guitar and sways on his heels. Jesse, who also holds a guitar, begins to sing. Landon closes his eyes.
“Even during this crisis, God, even during quarantine, Lord, I thank you that we still have the ability to be part of what you are doing,” he says.
He looks at each of his sisters in turn. The first song on her set is a staple of contemporary Christian rock, called “Happy Day.”
“Ready?”
Landon Spradlin’s children begin to play.
The Washington Post
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