Fernando Morales died on one of the deadliest days of April 2020, when 816 people died of COVID-19 in New York City. “When he passed away, it was like I lost a brother, a parent and a friend all at the same time,” said his brother, Adam Almonte.
Two years and nearly 1 million deaths later, his brother, Adam Almonte, fingers the bass guitar Morales left behind and visualizes him playing tunes, a treasured blue bucket hat pulled low over his eyes. Walking through a park overlooking the Hudson River, he recalls long-ago days tossing a baseball with Morales and sharing tuna sandwiches. He replays old messages just to hear Morales’ voice.
“By the time he got to the hospital they allowed us to put on these space suits and go in and see him,” son David Lawyer says. “It was pretty surreal.”When the elder Lawyer died of complications from COVID-19 on March 8, the U.S. toll stood at 22, although any accounting of the lives lost is likely incomplete. Eventually 39 Life Care residents and seven others linked to the facility perished in the outbreak.
After Lawyer and his wife retired to Bellevue, Washington to be near two of their children, he embraced his role as grandfather of 17. Still, the idea that the toll could reach 1 million was “almost certainly off the chart,” he said at the time. “Not impossible, but very, very unlikely.” When the 87-year-old became sick late that month, her children, all grown, gathered at her bedside and by phone.
Luis Alfonso Bay Montgomery had worked straight through the pandemic’s early months, piloting a tractor through the lettuce and cauliflower fields near Yuma, Arizona. Even after he began feeling sick in mid-June, he insisted on laboring on, says Yolanda Bay, his wife of 42 years. In the months since her husband died, Bay, a taxi driver, has worked hard to keep her mind occupied. But memories find a way in.Some evenings she imagines Luis Alfonso sitting on “his” living room couch, boots and backpack on the floor, asking the kids about their day at school.
At Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, staffers knew McClung, a longtime dialysis nurse, as “Mama Jen.” When new nurses started, she took them under her wing. When staffers on other floors had questions, they called her for advice. Some nights, she woke up crying with worry about her patients, her family says.“Mama, I feel like I’m never coming home again,” McClung texted her mother, Stella Olive, from a hospital bed.
“I can hear her laugh. I can hear her voice,” McClung’s mother says. “I just can’t touch her. It is the hardest thing in the world.”By early last summer, lines at vaccine sites had dwindled and daily COVID deaths had declined by tenfold. Then the virus reinvented itself. Like many in the area, the family wasn’t vaccinated. The shot made Cathie nervous. Mindful of her husband’s heart problems and Parkinson’s disease, though, she gave Larry permission to get it. He never did.In July, first Larry, then Cathie were rushed to the hospital. She was able to return home a day later, but her husband remained, tethered to a ventilator.
The 49-year-old Peebles was widely known in Columbus as Uncle Sherman, devoted to community, church and family.After nearly two decades on patrol and working in the county jail, he was a fixture in the courthouse, where he was the sergeant in charge. Every Saturday, he manned a barber chair at best friend Gerald Riley’s shop, dispensing small talk along with haircuts, and admonishing young customers to stay out of trouble.
And so, at 7 p.m. every evening through the spring of 2020, Larry Mass and Arnie Kantrowitz threw open the windows to thank them, joining New York’s symphony of pan banging, air horns and raucous cheers.
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