COVID-19 tore through this Winslow family. They’ll never be the same
WINSLOW – Lock Wilke could hear the announcements over the store intercom as he worked at the pharmacy inside Safeway.
The repeated suggestions to buy mom a nice bouquet.
Just as Lock, 29, had done for his mom the previous year.
It was Mother’s Day. He was working a shift at the same pharmacy where his mother had worked, with some of her co-workers.
It was where she likely was exposed to COVID-19, the disease that would end her life. Her co-workers had been infected with the virus, too, but didn’t die from it, Lock said.
The stream of announcements made him think of his first Mother’s Day without his mom.
“It was hard. It was disheartening,” he said. “It made me hate the holiday just a little bit, I think.”
More than 1,000 people in Arizona have now died from COVID-19. They leave behind loved ones, some of whom have seen the illness firsthand, sometimes battling it themselves, and they know how devastating it can be to a family unit.
The Wilkes are one of those families. On March 25, Lock’s mom, Patty Wilke, a longtime Winslow pharmacist, and beloved mother and wife, was one of the first people to die of COVID-19 in
Navajo County.
“When you see such a glut of information thrown at you, you kind of lose sight that each one of those numbers is a person, is a family, is a whole little ecosystem of civilization that is changed forever because of this event,” Puzzle Wilke, another of Patty’s children, said.
“And people just don’t realize that sometimes.”
Once or twice a shift, someone will come up to Lock and offer condolences and tell him how much his mother had meant to them.
“That always makes me a little sad, but I get over it,” he said. “It’s also kind of fascinating in a way to get a good impression of how many people she really did help out.”
How COVID-19 moved through the family
COVID-19 tore through the Wilke household in late March. All four of the family members who live on the 10-acre property outside Winslow got it, starting with Patty, who was 63.
Within about two days, her husband, Hayden “Ted” Wilke, and the two adult children living there, Lock and 20-yearold Jubilee, also started showing symptoms.
Ted said Patty died on the seventh or eighth day after she got sick, while the rest of the household was right in the middle of battling it themselves.
Ted, who has rheumatoid arthritis, said the pain in his joints was unbelievable. He was so tired and dizzy, he couldn’t think straight. His fever approached 103 degrees. He kept hallucinating. He lost nearly 15 pounds fighting the disease.
“I wondered whether I was going to make it or not, either,” Ted said. “My daughter stayed with me the whole time. She was pretty sick, too, but she kept checking on me every few hours, making sure I was still alive.”
At that time, back in March, doctors were advising people not to go to hospitals unless they had severe respiratory symptoms. None of the Wilkes did, so they didn’t go to the hospital.
Jubilee said battling COVID was rough. She said she was “very incoherent.”
“My poor daughter was complaining about how bad her hips hurt because it was like having Legos in your joints,” Ted said.
It was unlike anything they’d ever experienced.
Lock said, “If it feels like something you had before, that’s not it.”
Patty, who had diabetes, was very tired and experiencing a lot of diarrhea and dehydration, but she didn’t have the typical respiratory symptoms. When family members called the hospital, they said only to bring her in if she had trouble breathing.
The disease came in waves. Aches, fevers, chills, then feeling better, then back to bad again.
The day she died, she said she was feeling better and just wanted to rest. She left the family and went to sleep.
“So we left her alone,” Jubilee said. “And went to check on her to see if she needed any blankets or anything, and she wasn’t breathing.”
She never woke up.
“I thought she was going to turn the corner,” Ted said. “We were all so very, very surprised. Went to check on her and she was gone.”
Patty was only tested for COVID-19 after she died. The rest of the family was never able to get tests, which, in March, were incredibly scarce, so scarce that the state health director told doctors to stop testing and treat people as if they had the disease anyway.
They got regular calls from contact tracers checking in on their conditions. They stayed home for much longer than the recommended time after their fevers passed.
They would have felt horrible if they infected anyone else with this disease that cost them Patty and wreaked havoc on their bodies.
What life is like at home
The Wilkes live two miles outside Winslow. There are no trees in sight, just red dirt, brush and open sky. They use solar panels, a well for water and compost their trash. Clothes hang on the line, drying.
There’s a main house, an old trailer that Ted is working to fix up.
Three of the Wilke children have their own small shacks on the property as well that they’re working on individually. Ted homeschooled all four children while Patty worked as a pharmacist in town. Three of their four children now work in the pharmacy industry.
Winslow sits near the Navajo Nation, which has experienced the nation’s highest per-capita outbreak.
On the drive into the Safeway where Patty worked, there’s now a sign by a statue of a bulldog, the Winslow High School mascot, that reminds people to stay 6 feet away from each other and wash their hands.
Every part of the Wilke compound holds memories of Patty. Her blue Toyota Prius still sits outside the main house.
When Ted walks around the land, he points out projects they had in the works, plans they had to fix the place up when she retired in the next year or so.
They were coming up on their 40th anniversary this year. The kids were all finally grown. They had the kind of plans that come from so many decades together, when a couple is so intrinsically tied that there’s no singular plan, but always a collective one. They talked about traveling. He wanted her to see the Northern Lights.
“Half the things I used to do, I used to do for her. Now, I’m kind of almost a little lost,” Ted said.
How they handled her burial
Charm and Puzzle are the two Wilke children who now live in Phoenix.
Puzzle got the phone call from Ted at the home where both Charm and Puzzle live.
Their mom was gone.
Puzzle had talked to Patty just a day or two before she died. She was coherent. They didn’t talk about anything major; he called just to let her know a store she liked in Phoenix was closing. That was the last time they spoke. Puzzle broke the news to Charm. They got time off work, grabbed gloves, masks and clothing they could dispose of, and headed home to care for the others. It was hard to find supplies at that time, when stores were being overrun by people all seeking the same items.
Families become isolated by design when one catches the disease. They cut themselves off from the outside world and battle it out largely on their own, with an occasional supply drop on the front door from a loved one.
The Wilkes are already a bit isolated because they live on a rural property outside town. But the disease forced some of them, the two who didn’t get sick, to stay away from the others who had.
Charm and Puzzle stayed outside the main house and didn’t come into contact with their siblings or father. They put supplies on the steps. They disinfected anything that came out of the house. They let their own clothes bake in the sun for a few days, just in case.
“I wanted to go and hug my dad and help them out and just do wherever we could to help out,” Charm said. “But we were aware that just, you know, running blindly in there and exposing ourselves, that wouldn’t really help anyone in the long run.”
“I couldn’t even give my grieving father a comforting hug to help him get through these bad times,” Puzzle said, “because we couldn’t risk exposure.” They did not get sick. Decades ago, the Wilkes’ daughter Faith died just shy of 2 years old of Trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality. Ted didn’t want to bury her in town, far away from the home she knew. He filed all the paperwork at the time to bury her on the property and was approved to be a burial site. A few others are now buried on the site: an aunt, a grandmother, Ted’s mother’s husband.
Patty joined them in the family’s burial site after her death. Ted can’t walk out there now without bursting into tears.
A pile of dirt sits there now, although the family plans to spruce up the site.
Charm and Puzzle helped bury their mom.
They had to return to Phoenix after their initial visit but then went back to Winslow when their mother’s body had to be picked up and buried. By then, she had tested positive for the disease. Word had spread that she had it, making it difficult to get someone out to the house to help with the burial for fear of exposure.
A man with a backhoe came out and dug her grave. He was terrified he would catch COVID-19 himself. He let Charm and Puzzle tie the box holding Patty’s body to the backhoe and lowered her into the ground.
They couldn’t open up the box to say their goodbyes for fear of exposing themselves to the disease.
“We’re just like saying our final goodbyes to a cardboard box,” Charm said. It was all surreal, Charm said. “I think I’m still a little bit in shock with the whole thing. I haven’t given myself a chance to like sit down really process all of it,” he said.
He said his mother-in-law died almost 10 years ago, and he still gets tearyeyed sometimes when he thinks of her or sees her photo.
“I can only imagine how long I’m going to be feeling this for my own mom, when I finally sit down and actually process it.”
Ted was thankful Puzzle and Charm didn’t get COVID-19. He still worries they will get it eventually, though, with them in Phoenix, where restrictions are relaxed and lots of people are moving around now.
What they have left: Grief
Despite a large and rising death toll and growing numbers of cases across the state and country, many Americans remain untouched by COVID-19.
Most still haven’t had the disease. Many don’t know anyone who has. And some still aren’t taking the devastation seriously or using precautions in public to avoid getting sick or infecting others.
It’s frustrating to watch, Charm said. He works as a pharmacy technician at Fry’s in the Phoenix area. A lot of people aren’t wearing masks or distancing.
“It’s just like, ‘You guys do realize that it’s still happening, right?’ It just seems like no one cares,” he said.
Earlier on in the pandemic, people wore masks when they went out to run errands, Puzzle said. Now, he said he seems to be the only one who is, aside from the workers who are obligated by company policies to wear them. People seem to have moved on, he said.
“Nobody ever thinks it’s going to happen to them. And that’s kind of the issue,” Puzzle said.
While the world has started to move on, the Wilkes are trying to manage the immense grief of Patty’s unexpected death alongside the logistical hurdles of how a death affects a family.
A mountain of paperwork accompanies a death. Patty wasn’t a great recordkeeper, the family acknowledges, but none of them really is. They’ve gone through piles of records, trying to sort out what needs to be canceled, who needs to be notified and how to move forward.
The family still doesn’t have Patty’s death certificate, and a lot of that paperwork requires the official document.
Ted needs it to apply for worker’s compensation, for insurance, for canceling accounts. He had to file for Social Security for himself because Patty’s job was the main source of income, but he couldn’t find his own birth certificate. Patty had it somewhere.
Charm saved his money from the federal stimulus just in case he needs to help out his dad. He set up a GoFundMe that made about $600.
Puzzle hopes they can have a ceremony someday, where people from the town she served for decades as a pharmacist can come to remember her.
“She was a big member of the community. Everybody knew Patty. She was the pharmacist. She was not just a pharmacist. Everybody would talk to her. They loved her. And she gave them the care and attention they deserved,” Puzzle said.
Outside of the paperwork, the family is trying to stay busy, but when they get to talking about Patty, they’re overcome.
Ted hugged her a lot and told her he loved her, but he wishes he had done it more. Charm wishes he called more often since he moved away from home more than 10 years ago.
Charm misses her smile. And the way she was always open to talk about anything. Her cheery demeanor. Charm heard the Mother’s Day announcements at the Fry’s where he works all that day, too, and it felt like rubbing salt into the wound. He called his dad that day, and he listened to him cry and cried back to him.
Puzzle misses his mom being there, especially the way she was there for Ted; you could tell they were true partners, best friends, he said.
Jubilee misses how they would talk on their drives.
But as much as there are specific things about Patty that her family misses, the missing isn’t that specific.
“I’m not sure I could say any one thing I miss most about her,” Lock said. “I just miss her.”
“When you see such a glut of information thrown at you, you kind of lose sight that each one of those numbers is a person, is a family, is a whole little ecosystem of civilization that is changed forever because of this event. And people just don’t realize that sometimes.” Puzzle Wilke Whose mother, Patty Wilke, died of COVID-19 on March 25