DEADLY DECISION
After parents’ deaths, family struggles to understand why they didn’t get shots
Family struggles to understand why a couple who left behind four kids refused vaccination.
Even before COVID, piano teacher Lydia Rodriguez began avoiding vaccines. Her youngest child, Nia, had had some of her shots, but then something changed Lydia’s mind about vaccinations. Her cousin Dottie Jones still wonders what that was.
Dottie, a nurse-practitioner, lived in La Marque too, and since their kids were close friends, the two moms saw each other several times a week. Sometimes Dottie tried to talk Lydia into updating Nia’s shots.
Lydia, Dottie said, never argued. She’d just nod, stay quiet as Dottie talked, and not budge. “I could never get out of her why,” Dottie said.
Lydia believed in healthy eating, but she was uncomfortable with medicines and doctors and hospitals. Her husband Lawrence and their four kids took their cues from her. Once, when one of her sons hurt his ankle, she wouldn’t even let him take an Advil.
“She wouldn’t go to a doctor unless she absolutely had to,” Dottie said. “And even then, she wouldn’t do what he suggested.”
Lydia’s own mother, in a nursing home, died of COVID. When vaccinations became available, Lydia’s extended family all got theirs — but not Lydia, and not her family.
Not Lawrence, who worked in IT for Service Corporation International, a guitarist who loved Christian music and classic rock. Not their boys, 18-year-old twins Nathan and
Ethan and 16-year-old Adam.
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And not 11-year-old Nia.
Dottie tried every argument she could think of. She told Lydia that COVID was far more dangerous than the flu. She told her that it didn’t just affect the elderly and infirm, like Lydia’s mom. She told Lydia how bad things were at the hospital where she worked.
And again, Lydia just nodded. She and her family masked up, but they didn’t get vaccinated.
Too late
Lydia and Lawrence were active in Texas Avenue Baptist Church. Lydia led the music ministry, and Lawrence was a deacon. Dottie thinks that it was probably at a church youth camp, one week in late June, that Lydia and the kids caught the virus.
The boys seemed fine; they knew they’d had COVID only because the tests came back positive. Nia had flu-like symptoms.
But Lydia and Lawrence grew seriously ill.
Dottie and the rest of Lydia’s family found out just how sick they were on July 12, the day Lawrence drove Lydia to UTMB-Victory Lakes. The hospital admitted them both. Lawrence was put on oxygen, and Lydia, even sicker, was admitted to the ICU. She needed a ventilator.
In the hospital both Lydia and Lawrence asked to be vaccinated, but it was too late.
Just before Lydia was intubated, she asked her sister Nelda Taylor to be sure that her kids got the vaccine.
‘So preventable’
Lawrence got worse, and was transferred to the ICU where Lydia was. There, they both stayed heavily sedated. They ran high fevers and had extreme lung damage. Lawrence’s kidneys began shutting down.
Lawrence, 49, died in early August.
Lydia, 42, died two weeks later.
They were cremated. The family hasn’t set a date for their funeral. “We want it to be at the church,” said Dottie, “but with delta soaring, this isn’t the best time.”
Lydia’s family is still figuring out what to do with the boys, where they’ll all stay. But those three are either grown or almost grown, all of them in school and working together at Discount Tire. So that’s not the hardest part.
Nia, 11, will live with Nelda.
Before Lawrence and Lydia died, Dottie set up a GoFundMe for the family. It’s raised more than $80,000, which sounds like a lot until you think about medical costs, and the bills that went unpaid while Lawrence and Lydia were in the hospital, and what four kids will need to get established in the world. Nia, Dottie said mournfully, has years of growing up left.
Dottie swings between sadness and anger. She hurts for Lydia’s kids. And at the hospital where she works, with the delta surge in full swing, she sees how tired the nurses are, and how all the beds are full of unvaccinated people.
Every chance she gets, she tells Lydia’s story to the media — or to anyone, really. “It was so preventable,” she keeps saying.
Dottie is comforted by texts and social-media posts from people who say that Lydia’s story inspired them to get vaccinated. One stranger told Dottie she was afraid to be vaccinated. Dottie was thrilled to explain why she shouldn’t be. “Those things keep me going,” Dottie said.
It’s too late for her to convince Lydia. Maybe other people will listen.