Widowed by coronavirus
He ‘never got the chance to say goodbye’ after taking wife to hospital
Her name was Vitalina — and a word that means vital and alive suited her well, her husband said.
When they met in 1998, she was walking toward the train station in Salem and David Williams was riding a bike. He was 31, she was 28, she would later tell him.
But at 4 feet, 11 inches, she was so tiny that he dared not whistle at her, for fear that she was merely a child. So he cycled on ahead of her, Williams said, and when he circled back, the two began to talk.
After a three-year courtship, he discovered she was actually six years older than he was.
“She could pull off a nine-year difference,” Williams said. “She was that full of life, that beautiful, that vibrant.”
On April 4, Vitalina Williams, a 59-year-old part-time cashier at Market Basket in Salem and a full-time employee at Walmart in Lynn, died of COVID-19 after a week at Salem Hospital.
Her husband took her there on March 28 after she ran a slight fever and began to have trouble breathing.
“I had to leave her there,” David Williams said. “I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t visit her.”
The hospital staff almost immediately put her on a ventilator and called before they sedated her, he said, but the call didn’t go through.
“I never got the chance to say goodbye,” said Williams, who works at Market Basket in Danvers. “She must have been so scared. The last memory I have of her is when she was in the emergency room, wearing her coat and blue hat.”
The Market Basket where Vitalina worked provided gloves to employees who wanted them, he said, but as far as he knows, it didn’t give them masks.
“Nobody’s to blame, and everybody’s to blame,” Williams said. “How can you give something you can’t get?”
Vitalina worked two jobs so that she could send money home each month to her family in Guatemala, he said.
“One reason I liked foreign nationals was her attitude wasn’t: What have you done for me lately?” Williams said “It was: What can we do together?”
Together, they bought a two-family house in Salem, the city she loved for its bustle.
Now, when he wakes alone in bed, he finds himself confronted by the memory of what was and the reality of what is.
“The horror of it hits you like a wave,” Williams said. “My whole life is going to be different now.”