Pictures stored on a phone part of remembering for Tinley Park mother
One year ago, on March 16, COVID-19 claimed its first victim in Illinois, 61-year-old Chicagoan Patricia Frieson. The virus has been a dread force ever since, taking as many as 238 lives in a single day, sparing neither children nor centenarians.
More than 20,000 have died in the state, but that number, horrifying as it is, doesn’t begin to capture the loss felt by those left behind.
To them, it looms each day through text messages that don’t come, homes that feel barren, memories that arise from old jewelry or new tattoos. Even as vaccines promise an end to the pandemic, their pain isn’t going anywhere.
Deborah Simental mourns the loss of a chance to see what her 18-year-old daughter, Sarah, would have done with the rest of her life.
The teenager and her loved ones were robbed of that future when she died the day after Christmas of respiratory failure after contracting COVID-19. Her mother said no doctor has been able to explain why the virus took her seemingly healthy daughter, a senior at Lincoln-Way East.
Lately, Deborah finds herself talking to her daughter and turning to her phone for pictures of Sarah. People often ask the mother how she’s feeling.
“I truly don’t know how to answer that question most days. There’s no words to describe what her loss has done to me and ... her father as well,” she said.
She remembered her daughter as a fun, caring person who would grab a favorite box of candy for a friend who was feeling down. The teenager was a hostess at a local restaurant and cared for her goldendoodle, Bailey, who hasn’t set foot in Sarah’s bedroom since she died.
Her mother does not even know how Sarah got the virus. The teen was careful, and she was grounded for getting a speeding ticket until a few days before she got sick. Deborah doesn’t know of any contacts with people who tested positive and acknowledges that knowing how Sarah got the virus wouldn’t mean much now.
Deborah appreciates the availability of vaccines. Still, she can’t help but remember that her daughter died just as the first shots were being given. She wonders whether medical science would have moved faster if “we would have taken this more seriously or with a sense of urgency when” it first appeared.
“I find myself angry some days that ... why wasn’t this done sooner?” she said.