7. Gary's Final Days

February 21, 2022·14 min·1 clip

A statue's missing genitalia leads to a story about lockdown disparity and a friend who died believing Covid conspiracies.

Marianna Spring meets Adam Birch, an artist and friend of Gary Matthews, at a bench opposite Shrewsbury School near a statue of Hercules. Adam describes the visible economic disparity in Shrewsbury and how lockdown hit those living alone — like Gary — far harder than those in larger, affluent households. He explains that Gary lived alone with no garden, suffered serious mental health consequences from lockdown isolation, and was on social media constantly, describing the internet as 'a mirror that gives you what you put in.' Adam saw Gary for the last time about a week before his death, at a cafe 100 metres away, and found him 'weird in every way' — off, not himself — though he cannot pinpoint whether it was lockdown stress or early illness. Spring explains that Gary's immediate family have been left heartbroken, and she has accessed documentary footage filmed by Gary's cousin Tristan, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, in which Gary's sister Emma and mother Kate describe his final days. On January 7, Gary called family saying he felt ill but thought it was the flu. From the 7th to the 10th of January he became increasingly ill. On the 10th he told his mum he was going to get tested. He walked to the Shire Hall testing centre — a round trip of around two miles — while struggling to breathe, and refused to let his parents bring him groceries for fear of spreading the virus. On January 12, the day before he died, he called to say the test was positive. His family advised him to take paracetamol and rest, expecting recovery as they had seen in others. The next morning, Gary's father went to check on him and could not get in; the building's undertakers let him in, and Gary was found dead on his living room floor, likely having collapsed a couple of hours earlier. After Gary's death, his sister Emma examined his online search history and found he had been looking up COVID symptoms — evidence, Spring argues, that his denial crumbled in his final days. Spring and Gary's cousin Tristan conclude that Gary's beliefs did change at the end: he knew enough to protect his family from possible contagion, even if he did not seek medical help. The episode closes with Adam's tribute to Gary as a gentle, pure, and intelligent man who had no malice and bypassed the cynicism most people develop in their teens. Adam still refers to Gary in the present tense, finding the loss surreal. He raises the role of social media algorithms in Gary's radicalization, noting that personal responsibility is not the whole story.

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