Slusher: How many coronavirus deaths would you deem to be unacceptable?

I am alone in my kitchen, trying to load glasses from the evening meal in the open dishwasher and choking back sobs.

My wife sits under amber light at the dining table in the next room, texting furiously. One of our close friends is on a respirator with COVID-19, fighting for his life. Two days earlier, his family was told to "begin preparing." They have not seen their husband and father for two weeks. Tonight, his oxygen levels have improved. His fever has decreased to a little over 100 degrees. His blood pressure is improving. There is hope, slim but real, and I am shuddering.

I have a revelation. The talk on television, on social media and in the newspapers is of flattening curves. Of opening up. Of defining, it seems to me, the number of infections, the number of deaths, that are unacceptable, so we can get below it and start singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Suddenly, I know that number with acute precision.

A week and a half later, I learn some others are comfortable with less-definite math.

I see them in a video and news stories about partyers in Chicago defying the governor's and their mayor's stay-at-home orders. They are laughing and drinking and shouting, standing, in the words of the mayor, "literally cheek to jowl."

They, too, apparently have computed a number that divides comfort from agony, or think they have.

Today as I write, I am reading about the order of a downstate judge declaring that the governor's latest attempt to protect the citizens of the state is an infringement on the rights of a legislator. The lawmaker had sued to restore them. "Enough is enough!" he exclaimed in a prepared statement. "I filed this lawsuit on behalf of myself and my constituents who are ready to go back to work and resume a normal life."

He, too, it seems, along with his constituents, has identified the line at which sickness and death are unacceptable, and has defiantly pronounced that we are below it. Or at least that he and his constituents are.

Hurrah for them, I think. Oh, for such moral acuity, such a head for what Abraham Lincoln called, in another war at another time, the "awful arithmetic."

To do my figuring, I have only my friend and my kitchen and those damned clinking dishes I couldn't seem to load properly and my wife in the next room with her own clenched throat and images of a family I love huddled at home for weeks as they strain for any signal that they may see their husband and father alive again.

I am no stranger to unjust tragedy. Nor to escaping it. No one gets to be 67 years old without being pierced by the cold breath of death or frightened by its proximate approach. Only a year or so ago, I learned at dinner with a friend from childhood, the best man at my wedding and I at his, that he had cancer. Thanks to the advances of science, he would go on to win his immediate battle, and this summer, if the current nightmare ends, we're planning a canoe and fishing trip on the Mackinaw River. So, there I can place this medical numbers game in its profound perspective - the pain of a brush with the unacceptable alongside the gratitude to be part of a people that insists, against all logic and odds, that it knows very well where the line of tolerable tragedy is drawn and will stop at no expense, no level of study, no obstacle of technology, no cynical calculus to get under it.

This people now applies that resolve to an ominous new threat. A simple flu. Thousands, we are told, die of its viral cousins every year. This one has claimed its victims in the tens of thousands already and is trolling worldwide deep into the hundreds of thousands. By some accounting, it eventually may reach the millions.

There is a point, surely, at which we consider the number to be unacceptable. In a Clay County courtroom and a Chicago living room and no doubt hundreds of other locations across the state and nation, that point seems incalculably distant. But there in my kitchen, alone, with a fire in my chest and tears glistening down my face, the computation was only too near at hand.

It remains so still, two weeks on, with my friend now four days back at home with his family and, at 56, learning to breathe and eat and talk and walk, perhaps not yet aware, as will add to his sadness, that John Prine is gone.

I know the number at which unjust misfortune cannot be tolerated. You know it, too, I bet.

It is one.

Would that none of us ever had to be burdened with it, but, if we must, may our thankfulness never cease for those who dedicate their time, their careers and their blessed energy toward erasing that hideous sum.