WE REMEMBER
ONE of the many things the coronavirus pandemic has taken from us is the chance to comfort the grieving. In time, we’ll be able to hug one another again. For now, all we can do is recall their lives through the eyes of those who’ve known them best: family, friends and colleagues. May their good works live after them, inspiring us all to be our best, most compassionate selves in their honor.
James Mahoney, 62 Freeport, LI
A pulmonary and critical-care doctor who worked in Brooklyn hospitals for 40 years, James Mahoney was beloved.
“He was like the mayor, walking the halls of our medical center,” says Dr. Robert Foronjy, Mahoney’s boss at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. “Everyone knew him. He treated everyone equally. He didn’t care for hierarchies or titles.”
Mahoney, who died on April 27, doted on his patients at the University Hospital of Brooklyn and Kings County Hospital Center. He even gave out his cellphone number.
“He was still working from home, telling patients to wash their hands, even as he was getting sicker,” says Natasha Edwards of SUNY Downstate.
The father of three also trained residents and other junior doctors, who adored him, dubbing him “our Jay-Z.”
“Even if it were 3 o’clock in the morning, he would spend an hour training someone else to do a procedure he could do in 10 minutes,” Foronjy says.
That kind of dedication was evident from childhood. “Any endeavor, he went all-out for it,” says his father, Oscar Mahoney. “He put his all into it — he didn’t hold back.”
Mahoney “was humble and spoke to you with respect,” says Olu Akindutire, 30, who worked with Mahoney as a resident from 2014 to 2018. “He really made you feel like your opinion mattered. He was a true superhero to young physicians of color.”
Those he mentored have started a scholarship fund to help AfricanAmerican students attend
SUNY Downstate med school.
After he had to be admitted to the hospital, visitors were banned. But doctors from across the institution stopped by the ICU to visit.
“I told him how much I loved him, and how much everyone loved him,” says Foronjy, who accompanied Mahoney, along with four other colleagues, when he had to be rushed from University Hospital to NYU via ambulance for special treatment. They were with him when he passed. “Unlike so many patients during the pandemic, he died with people who loved him at his bedside. It’s the only consolation we have.”
Suzannah Chandler, 81 Upper East Side
As head of Search and Care, a nonprofit pairing homebound elderly with services, Suzannah Chandler planned many funerals.
Trained in social work, she helped others come up with end-of-life plans, according to friend Molly Parkinson, who was, with Chandler, an active member of the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street.
“For the last 20 or so years, as a kind of philosophical comment, she’s been planning her own funeral,” says Gretchen Buchenholz, another congregant and friend. “But in the last five years, she was doing it earnestly, as if each service were her own. She chose the hymns. She critiqued every sermon — chose some readings and discarded others — and she laughed at herself for all this!”
“Having done all that, I think when the time came, she was ready,” Buchenholz says. Chandler passed away on May 4.
Chandler hunted down folks who needed assistance by asking area supers and shopkeepers about their older residents and customers, Parkinson says.
“She was a pioneering visionary in aging,” says Brian Kravitz, executive director of Search and Care, which Chandler helmed from 1972 to 2006. “All throughout Yorkville and Carnegie Hill, she made sure people aged in place gracefully, had a good quality of life and peace of mind.”
An avid and attentive gardener, Chandler took pride in hosting dear ones in the backyard oasis she cultivated outside her first-floor apartment, Parkinson recalls.
“There are so many people whose lives Sue touched — people she loved, and traveled with, and gossiped with (and about), and made music with, and talked politics with and dined with,” says Buchenholz. “And so many people whose lives were made richer and even possible.”