A FAMILY DEVASTATED
1 watched dad die; 1 sat with ill mom; 1 grieved in isolation
Mona Butler stood in a makeshift foyer, scrubbing up to watch her father die.
Nurses helped her put on a light-blue gown, two layers of gloves and a hairnet. She slipped on plastic shoe covers.
She already had a mask.
She entered her father’s makeshift isolation room at the Memorial Hermann hospital in Memorial City and, for the next 6½ hours, sat with the dying man who had competed in diving well into his 80s, put her and her sisters through Baylor University and had a booming voice left over from the years he’d spent in the pulpit. Her father had been put on a ventilator days before and never came back.
Pat Lowry died on March 27 at age 88. His death certificate lists “ACUTE RESPIRATORY FAILURE” and “COVID-19 INFECTION” as the causes.
Coronavirus tore through the family and left the survivors to grieve alone.
Butler, 56, is the youngest of his three daughters. Her middle sister, at high risk from the virus because of an autoimmune disease, would only be able to call and FaceTime from her home.
Her eldest sister had to break the news to their mother, diagnosed with COVID-19 and being treated in the same hospital.
Along with his wife and three daughters, Lowry is survived by seven grandchildren, an inscribed brick at section 12 of the Baylor University football stadium, the congregations he preached to as a Baptist minister and generations of girls he coached in soccer. His death is number 13 on the official Houston COVID-19 death toll.
Lowry was cremated. His ashes remain in the funeral home until the family can gather for a service, encased in an urn inscribed with a verse from 2 Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
His daughters still talk about him in the present tense.
“At this point, getting our family together is all that we care about,” said Jina David, 59, the middle sister. “It’s that finality — we haven’t had closure. Which kind of helps because it makes it seem surreal. Like, maybe this isn’t happening.”
The pandemic had crept into the family’s lives with a wedding.
Butler’s son was scheduled to get married on March 21 in front of 250 people. To accommodate increased restrictions on social gatherings, they cut the guest list to under 50, moved the wedding a day earlier and streamed the ceremony on Facebook.
Lisa Schwartz, the eldest of the sisters at 61, drove their parents to the event, an hour outside Houston. Both sisters noticed something wrong: Their father said his back ached. He had chills. He was winded. He couldn’t walk without getting short of breath. He’d brought his camera — he loved to take pictures — but when he held it up, he shook.
They knew something was wrong. They just didn’t think it was from the new coronavirus.
On the way back to Houston, Schwartz persuaded her parents to stop by a clinic to get her father’s vitals checked. It didn’t accept his Medicare. The over$2,100 out-of-pocket cost, they decided, wouldn’t be worth it. Only later, after everything, did Schwartz remember a sign in the clinic window: It didn’t treat COVID-19 patients.
Besides, he insisted he would be fine. Their mother would monitor him over the weekend.
That was Friday. On Sunday, about 9:30 p.m., Butler got a call from her mother: She was taking Lowry to the hospital.
By Tuesday, he was in the intensive care unit. Then hospital staff put him on a ventilator.
Lowry’s family spent that week on conference calls. Butler and her husband camped out in Schwartz’s living room in the Memorial neighborhood on her darkred couches. David, already staying in her home in Houston because of her own health, called in.
Their mother was the only one allowed to see their father. They spoke to a doctor daily. The women’s husbands brought them food.
Toward the end of the week, they began to discuss whether to take him off the ventilator.
Lowry, his daughters said, was a life-of-the party type. They had just renewed season tickets for Baylor football. He’d spent years as a high school art teacher and yearbook adviser. He was always a Roman soldier in the church’s Christmas play. When he met their mother, he was a college cheerleader.
They knew he would want a full quality of life, or nothing.
Butler, Schwartz and their mother agreed to meet at Schwartz’s house at 8:30 that Friday morning. Butler and her husband showed up on time. Their mother didn’t.
“Have you heard from Mother?” Butler asked.
Schwartz hadn’t.
When they finally managed to reach her, she said she just felt a little dizzy, she’d be fine if she ate something, but perhaps she shouldn’t drive — could the girls pick her up?
She didn’t sound right.
When the sisters entered their parents’ house, Schwartz called her mother’s name two or three times. She didn’t answer.
Their mother staggered out of the master bedroom. She could hardly walk. Her words slurred. She had tried to put on makeup, a daily ritual done to perfection. That day, it was all over her face.
Schwartz grabbed her mother under the arm and drove her back to her house. She called 911.
“She begged me not to,” Schwartz said. “She said, ‘I don’t need to go to the hospital,’ and I said, ‘Oh, yes you do.’ ”
The EMTs had the sisters bring a chair outside and sit their mother on the front porch instead of risking entering the house.
Butler, Schwartz and their mother called David. On speakerphone, waiting for the ambulance that would take their mother to the same hospital as their father, they made the final decision to take their father off the ventilator.
Everyone thought Lowry would pass quickly once they took him off the ventilator. It took 6½ hours.
Someone, Schwartz and Butler were told, needed to be there when they removed their father from the ventilator. Butler went.
Scrubbed up in protective gear, she sat with her father as he died. Those hours, she said, are private. They were emotional. She feels lucky to have had them. At times, sitting in the room with him, a part of her wanted to leave. But what if she left and he died alone? She stayed.
Her father died at 7:08 p.m. “I’m the baby,” she said. “Which was very hard to be the one that had to be with my dad, you know, because it shouldn’t have fallen to me. It should have been my mother.”
When she left, the nurses took her through the same process in a foyer-like space outside of her father’s room. Off came the double-gloves, the shoe covers, the gown and the hairnet. She kept her mask and washed her face and her hands.
Butler walked out of the ICU alone. She called her husband to pick her up, and called Schwartz, still in the hospital room with their mother.
The sisters’ mother, Schwartz said, is a “force to be reckoned with.” She’s independent and strong-willed and when they got sick she used to slip them hot toddies behind their father’s back. Schwartz had never seen her mother cry until she told her that Lowry had died.
Their mother declined to comment. Her grief, she said, is private.
Her coronavirus test came back positive the next day.
David and her parents went out to their last lunch 15 days before her father died.
It was their Thursday tradition. Her father always opened the car doors for David and her mother when they arrived at the restaurant. David always chose where they ate.
Because of her own vulnerability, that was the last time David saw her father.
“It’s a lonely disease,” David said. “You grieve alone, and you die alone.”
Five days after her father died, Butler got her own test result: positive. She’s tired, but her case has been mild. Her husband, who has asthma, tested negative. But his temperature spiked, and he started coughing. Then he had trouble breathing.
Two weeks after her father died, Butler took her husband to the hospital.
Their mother is back at her own home now, on oxygen. Her doctors agreed her recovery would be best where she felt best.
“She was damned and determined to get out of that hospital — no matter what, she wanted to go home,” Schwartz said. “She was tired of the hard bed, tired of the hard pillow, she hated the food.”
Schwartz had to try to find a home health agency with the right protective equipment for a recovering coronavirus patient. One morning, an aide who was supposed to show up at 10 a.m. simply didn’t arrive.
When she feels her anger rise, she reminds herself that everyone’s doing the best they can. She’s grateful for the care her parents got at the hospital. The sisters all have a deep faith in God, and Schwartz knows her father is in heaven, finally without his hearing aids. But it doesn’t make his loss easier.
“How in the world do you go so fast? How do you go from a bad backache to being on a ventilator?” she said. “It’s like — why my dad? How did this virus find my father?”
David has cried every day since her father was admitted to the hospital. She thinks of him when she looks outside and sees birds. Her father watched the birds that flocked to the feeders he put up and had ordered a pamphlet on birds of Southeast Texas. He loved the cardinals.
“At this point, getting our family together is all that we care about.”
Jina David