Death during a pandemic U.S. ARMY VETERAN JOHN SPENCER-NOWAK
Taos Living Center resident one of now 20 to die of COVID-19
poses for a portrait with an image of his late mom, Dora Nowak, a longtime Taos Living Center resident, who died after contracting COVID-19. ‘She was fighting it the whole time she was [in hospital] and she started stabilizing,’ Spencer-Nowak said. ‘Then all of a sudden, she was crashing.’
Dora Nowak spent over 10 years as a registered nurse at Houston Medical Center, helping people enter the world and working at the bedsides of others who were leaving it. Funerals or memorials for the patients who died in her care followed in due course, but then, those people didn’t die in the midst of a global pandemic.
When Nowak died of COVID-19 at the age of 68 in Holy Cross Medical Center in November, a nurse was also the last person to give her comfort in her final moments. When it will be safe enough for Nowak’s family and friends to gather to remember her remains a question now two weeks since her death.
She had been a resident at Taos Living Center for five years and was fortunate enough to be in the presence of a family member – her son, John Spencer-Nowak – the day before she died in the intensive care unit at the hospital on Nov. 20.
Nowak is now one of 20 residents at the Living Center to have died of the disease as of Wednesday (Dec. 2), according to Dave Armijo, the nursing home’s administrator. A total of 46 residents have become infected, he said. According to the state, a total of 23 people from Taos County have died of complications related to COVID19, the respiratory disease which stems from the novel coronavirus.
As the outbreak spread throughout the nursing home last month and other residents were sent to nearby hospitals after testing positive, Nowak was taken to Holy Cross after she became ill with a suspected case of pneumonia, another respiratory illness which Spencer-Nowak said she suffered from annually.
Before she was hospitalized, Spencer-Nowak said a nurse at the Living Center told him that his mother had tested negative for coronavirus. Three more tests at the hospital also turned up negative. The fifth test came back positive.
After that, Nowak’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly.
Saying goodbye
As a U.S. Army soldier in Kandahar, Afghanistan, SpencerNowak had seen fellow soldiers die thousands of miles away from their families, so when he received word from Holy Cross on Nov. 19 that his mother might succumb to COVID-19, he moved quickly so that he could be there to say goodbye.
Even though some victims of COVID-19 have died without their families nearby this year, Holy Cross Chief Executive Officer Bill Patten said COVID-19 patients who are critical or on the verge of death are allowed one visitor, while stable COVID-19 patients are “typically not allowed to have visitors.”
Spencer-Nowak saw his mother alive for the last time looking little like his normal self. Outside the emergency department, he dressed in the medical uniform which has become emblematic of this new pandemic era: an isolation gown, mask and gloves.
Inside the ICU, Nowak was heavily sedated and hooked up to multiple machines meant to keep her alive. A BiPap, a device designed to help patients breathe in the advanced stages of COVID19, was working to push oxygen into her lungs.
“I was holding her arm. You could feel muscles twitching and stuff,” Spencer-Nowak recalled.
“They said that she was fighting the BiPap machine. I was telling her it was time for her to go and to not be afraid, to just relax and go home, see our family, my grandparents. I was just going through the line of people that I could remember at the time that she had encountered and loved.”
He used FaceTime to call his children on his cell phone so that they could say goodbye as well. As they spoke, a tear came out of the corner of his mother’s eye, he said.
Affecting the living – and the dead
Spencer-Nowak said losing his mother was tough, but like many other families whose loved ones have died during the pandemic, what has followed hasn’t been easy either.
“This is a very unfortunate and heart-breaking time that we as funeral professionals are going through,” said Joaquin Gonzales, manager at DeVargas Funeral Home in Taos, where SpencerNowak and his family are choosing to have Nowak cremated.
“Not only is COVID affecting the living but it is also affecting the dead,” Gonzales went on. “We are still having funerals, we are still having services, but everything we are doing for the living is completely different. The way we mourn and the way we grieve now is completely different than what we are used to. We as Taoseños are used to family and friends being with each other supporting them and being together. That’s not the case anymore.”
Gonzales said the state has restricted funeral homes to no more than five people to attend a viewing or service inside a chapel at one time, which can be hard on large New Mexico families who place a high value on all being together at once. His funeral home also does not allow viewings for anyone who has died of the virus whose body has not been embalmed.
State health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have dedicated entire sections of their websites to explaining the new procedures for funeral homes and families who have lost loved ones.
“I think most funeral homes were somewhat prepared on how to handle things, you can train and be mentally prepared, but when it hits, it can be an eye opener,” Gonzales said.
Removing the body of a person who has died of the virus in a hospital or a nursing home also requires that he and his team don protective gear and undergo a screening.
Marisa Maez, a public information officer for the state, said that the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator recently procured six refrigerated trucks to store bodies as it deals with a spike in deaths tied to COVID-19 and predicted shortages in burial plots.
“The hope is that these will not need to be used in full, but, of course, our country and our state are experiencing an exponential wave of the virus, and it’s likely that as hospitalizations rise, COVID-19 deaths will rise as well,” she said. “Our understanding is many families are waiting to hold services until they can gather in greater numbers, but some are also holding small, limited events.”
As of Tuesday (Dec. 1), 1,589 people in New Mexico had died of complications related to COVID19, according to the state department of health.
Many families, including Spencer-Nowak’s, are opting to have a body cremated in order to untangle some of the added complexity caused by the pandemic.
“It just throws a big monkey wrench into everything that you would think would be normal and it’s not anymore,” he said. “We had to sit there and wear masks inside the funeral home when we were talking with Joaquin. I was even having difficulty breathing because of the emotional time right then and there.”
Spencer-Nowak’s ex-wife, Perfecta Chacon, launched a GoFundMe campaign last month to raise $3,000 to pay for a funeral for Nowak.
For now, though, they still aren’t sure when that will happen.
‘We as Taoseños are used to family and friends being with each other supporting them and being together. That’s not the case anymore.’
JOAQUIN GONZALES
Manager at DeVargas Funeral Home