MISSION — Michael Gavin’s initial message was simple, but it would come to mean more in the weeks ahead.

“I think I have the ‘vid.”

On July 18, Michael dropped the revelation into a group text reserved for him and his siblings. He had spent the previous day with his family, reuniting after a trip to Bible camp while Jill-Marie, his younger sister, and other family members attended a memorial for their uncle, Chet Tias, the reservation’s first COVID-19 death. Michael left the gathering not feeling well, but his sister didn’t pay it too much heed at first. A cold had been circulating through the family.

Michael’s text prompted a round of testing at Yellowhawk Tribal Health Center, not only of Michael, but the other members of his household, mother Shawna and uncle Michael Ray Johnson, and his visiting sister and her four children.

When Jill-Marie and her kids tested negative, she started to exhale. Maybe it was a cold after all. But her relief was short-lived. Michael’s COVID-19 test came back positive, as did Shawna’s and her uncle’s. Shawna and her brother were vaccinated. Michael was not, and was further at risk from his diabetes and high blood pressure. It was July 20.

“My mom got pretty sick, not sick enough to need to go to the hospital, but pretty sick,” she said. “My uncle was almost asymptomatic. But Mikey kept getting sicker and sicker.”

On July 26, Michael admitted his health was worsening, coughing constantly and frequently finding himself out of breath. His family convinced him to go to the hospital, and Shawna volunteered to take him. Despite going through her own battle with the virus, Shawna didn’t want to expose Jill-Marie.

Even as he was admitted to Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Walla Walla, Michael downplayed his condition to his family. But Jill-Marie remained worried. She urged her mother to call his doctors. The doctor’s assessment was more grim: Michael was now in the intensive care unit.

Doctors presented intubation as a possibility early in Michael’s stay, but the option scared him. To Michael, breathing tubes were portentous of something darker.

“He was worried that if he was intubated, he would never wake up,” Jill-Marie said. “So he decided to stay awake and fight. And that’s what he told us: ‘I want to stay awake and fight.’”

For a few days, it seemed like Michael might emerge from the other side. He was able to breathe with less assistance from a machine. On Aug. 5, he was able to sit in a chair and eat a meal. He called old friends and started updating his social media. With the worst seemingly behind Michael, Jill-Marie traveled to Portland to be with her other brothers, Derek and Lee.

The following day, Michael went silent over his usual modes of communication, the only response he could muster was a message to Shawna that he was too tired to talk. Michael’s condition deteriorated rapidly. The hospital called Shawna to tell her that doctors had intubated Michael. Shawna put out the news to her children, who cut off their plans to rush back to Pendleton. Midway back, they learned Michael was going to be flown to Portland to receive additional care.

But as medical staff attempted to transfer Michael to a gurney, he went into cardiac arrest. They tried to revive him for 45 minutes before getting in touch with Shawna, who knew what Michael wanted.

“My mom knew that he didn’t like being in the hospital, he didn’t like being on machines,” she said. “And so she told them to let him go. She was worried about the damage to his body. So we let him go.”

It was Aug. 7. He was 39.

Every number is a tragedy

Michael’s death marks the Umatilla Indian Reservation’s second loss and also the second loss for the Gavin family. Shawna lost her brother, Chet Tias, in July 2020, when the reservation and the rest of the region experienced its first spike in the novel virus.

Shawna and JIll-Marie not only bore the responsibility of taking care of their families, but the CTUIR as a whole. Jill-Marie is an at-large board member on the Board of Trustees while Shawna sits on the CTUIR Tribal Health Commission and serves with her brother Michael Ray Johnson on the General Council. Collectively, they worked with an incident command team to coordinate the emergency response to the pandemic. The early days of COVID-19 brought unprecedented measures to the reservation. The Wildhorse Resort & Casino closed its doors and the tribes suspended many cultural and spiritual practices that brought tribal members together in close quarters. Jill-Marie remembered the sleepless nights she had during this time, worried that tribal elders were spending the last years of their life without the celebrations, gatherings and powwows that are woven into CTUIR tradition.

The restrictions slowed the spread of COVID-19, and before the spread of the delta variant, the reservation had mostly tamped down new cases. As time went on, Jill-Marie and Shawna would hear from people about how fortunate the tribes were to lose only one person to COVID-19. Those comments stung, especially as Michael came down with the illness, the virus seemingly tracking the Gavin family specifically.

“It’s hurt so badly that we spent the last 18 months trying to keep people safe and I wasn’t able to keep my brother safe,” Jill-Marie said. “The rules that are in place are not to infringe on their personal rights. They’re there to keep people from having to bury their brothers, and their uncles and their mothers and their grandmothers. And while I’m so happy that our death toll has been lower than most reservations, people can get lost in the numbers and not realize that every single one of those numbers is a tragedy for some family.”

Michael wasn’t vaccinated, despite his family’s encouragement. Jill-Marie said he wasn’t firmly against the vaccine, but wasn’t comfortable getting the shot yet. The family didn’t want to dwell on it or turn Michael into a talking point, but did reflect on what his death might mean for others.

“I don’t want it to be a hardcore message,” Shawna said. “Just please reconsider your stance on vaccination.”

Michael was a Christian and a youth pastor at Pendleton’s Bethel Church. Not everyone in his family shared his faith, but they drew comfort that he knew where he was going.

This is the first of a two-part story. The second part will explore Michael Gavin”s identities as a Christian and a tribal member in the Saturday, Aug. 21, edition of the East Oregonian.