San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Families cope with deaths as U.S. reopens
They came so close. Cinnamon Jamila Key had just received her first shot. Alexey Aguilar had been reluctant to commit to such a new medicine but was coming around to the idea.
And then COVID-19 took them. On top of the grief and sorrow, their families now also must deal with the unfairness, the eternal mystery of what might have been.
The Americans who have died of COVID-19 in recent days and weeks — the people whose deaths have pushed the total U.S. loss from the pandemic to nearly 600,000 — passed away even as their families, friends and neighbors emerged from 15 months of isolation and fear. The juxtaposition is cruel: Here, masks off; workplaces, shops and schools reopening. There, people struggling to breathe, separated from loved ones, silenced by ventilators.
“The finish line is in sight and if you don’t make it now, it’s like the astronauts who make it all the way home and then their capsule splashes down and sinks,” said Peter Paganussi, an emergency room physician in Ranson, W.Va., who still sees new cases of COVID, the illness caused by the coronavirus, every day.
Even as the number of Americans dying of COVID has plummeted from thousands to hundreds each day, the death toll keeps climbing.
COVID deaths are becoming relatively rare in some places, basically tracking the pace of vaccinations, which varies enormously state to state — 70 percent of Vermonters have received at least one dose, compared with only 34 percent of Mississippians.
But rosier statistics are small solace to families who now find themselves living in communities of reborn freedom and optimism, even as they stumble through a crushing grief, burdened by an overwhelming sense of almost having made it through.
Deaths that came so late, so close to the possibility of protection by a vaccine, “eat at people,” said Therese Rando, clinical director of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss in Rhode Island. “It’s such a violation. They were so close, they weren’t doing anything wrong and for death to take them, it adds to our outrage. It’s very distressing because people were assumed to be right on the cusp of being safe.”
In the centuries-old tradition of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a relative dresses a deceased tribal member in a skirt, moccasins and a handmade top sewn from patterned fabric. But on the crisp, cool May afternoon in Trempealeau, Wis., when Michelle De Cora was buried, her sister was not permitted to follow the tradition. The funeral home’s coronavirus restrictions required that only its employees touch the body, so the staff took care of dressing her.
A hundred mourners came to pay their respects, but that evening, although her daughter Amanda had invited any and all to “bring a tent and stay the night,” no one did.
“She’d always said she wanted us to have a party when she died, but nobody was really feeling like that, because of COVID,” Amanda said.
As May began, Amanda could feel the first wisps of normalcy. “I was finally getting a glimmer of hope,” she said.
Amanda already was fully vaccinated, as was her husband. Their 17-year-old had just received a second shot. Michelle, however, had not gotten around to it.
At 61, Michelle was an obvious candidate to get vaccinated. She had kidney problems. She was diabetic. Her family was nudging her to do it. The Ho-Chunk Nation, the Indian tribe that employed Michelle for many years, has suffered 17 COVID deaths among its 8,000 members and made a big push to get shots in arms.
There were reasons Michelle didn’t get around to getting the shot. She’d stayed fairly isolated through the first months of the pandemic. She lived an hour away from the tribal clinic. She’d tested positive for the coronavirus back in December, and though she never had symptoms and her children suspected it’d been a false positive, she believed she had at least some protection from the virus.
“So she never went,” Amanda said.
Michelle entered the hospital in early May to deal with her longstanding kidney condition — she’d spent many months in the queue for a transplant. But then the coronavirus test that was routinely administered to new patients came back positive.
“Within a couple of days, they went from saying, ‘She’ll be OK, she’ll be home in a few days’ to ‘We can’t do anything else for her,’ ” Amanda said. “We talked on the phone after that, but she was really out of breath, and then they put the (oxygen) mask on her and she couldn’t talk much.”
Amanda still wears a mask to most places, and it angers her to see so many people going barefaced, “fighting what the doctors said to do,” she said. “Everywhere I go now, I’m the only one in a mask. They don’t realize how fast it can take you.”
Cinnamon Jamila Key signed up for a vaccine as soon as Florida opened up eligibility to people 40 and over. She was 41, a mental health clinician and life coach who planned to go back to school and earn a doctorate in grief counseling with a Christian focus.
In early April, she got her first shot of the Moderna vaccine. But on April 8, she was diagnosed with COVID. Whether she became infected before she got the dose or immediately after is not clear. Her mother remembers her complaining of a scratchy throat around when she got the shot.
Cinnamon had a long history of battling back from the edge. She had turned a crippling bout with depression — including two suicide attempts — into a career in mental wellness, focusing on Black and other underserved communities in her area of MiamiDade County.
She was, her friends and family said, as warm and spicy as her name. She loved pencil skirts and 6-inch heels and singing in the church choir at Second Baptist Church near her town of Homestead, south of Miami — leading the congregation in her trademark rendition of the stirring gospel song, “I’ve Got a Reason.”
On April 13, Cinnamon was hospitalized with breathing issues.
“She just didn’t get better and didn’t get better,” her mother, Betty Key, recalled.
Doctors wanted to put her on a ventilator, but Cinnamon resisted, said her mother, who could see her daughter only through a window because of anti-infection rules.
On April 15, “my time for visitation was up and I had to leave,” Betty recalled. Usually, the two would blow kisses. That evening, Cinnamon could only wave byebye.
Not long after, Betty got a call from the doctor. She thought it would be about the intubation.
“She was gone,” the mother said. Cinnamon died of complications from COVID 15 days after receiving her first vaccine dose.
Cinnamon “tried so hard to do the right thing,” her mother said. “She wasn’t going out, and she wore her mask, and she had her gloves, and she got the vaccine as soon as she could.”
Betty said it’s hard for her to hear even good news about vaccines, though she still believes everyone should get the shot. “If a story comes on the news about the vaccine, I walk away,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the success stories. I don’t. Because my daughter is not one of them.”
Claudia Nodal was going into ninth grade at Miami Carol City Senior High in Miami Gardens, Fla., when Alexey Aguilar asked her to marry him.
“I said yes, of course,” Claudia recalled.
They wed two months after she graduated, in 1999. Since then, they had raised three daughters, built careers — he as a corrections officer, she as a third-grade teacher — and now they were planning a retirement close to the beach.
They were concerned about COVID, especially because Alexey’s job in the mental health treatment center at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami put him among a vulnerable population.
“He would double mask, wear double gloves, he never even took off his jacket at work,” his wife said. “When he came home … nobody could talk to him or hug him until he took a shower.”
His yearly physical gave him a clean bill of health. But in March, Alexey caught the virus, probably at work, his wife said. He fell ill a month before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, made vaccine doses available to people over 40.
At that point, Claudia and Alexey weren’t entirely on board with the vaccine.
“We weren’t going out; we felt like we could keep it under control a little longer,” Claudia said. “It’s a very new medication, and you don’t really know the side effects. … We’re not anti-vaccine, we believe in that stuff. But we thought we could wait, let the other people who need it more get it, the older people. I thought I had time.”
Alexey’s cough “got progressively worse,” his wife said, becoming so bad that Claudia made him go to the hospital.
Alexey’s stay stretched to nearly a month. Claudia could see that “he knew he might not come home. I think he was very afraid.” They spoke every day until he went on a respirator.
Alexey died April 23. He was 42. Claudia and all three daughters tested positive for the coronavirus while Alexey was hospitalized, but their cases were mild. They got vaccinated soon after Alexey died.
“And oh my God, I wish it would have been available sooner,” Claudia said.
Now, as life around them edges back toward normal, the grieving seems harder.
“People are acting like it’s over,” Claudia said, “but it’s still with us. We still wear masks and take precautions. Sometimes we feel like we’re the weird ones for wearing masks. COVID is still here. And people are still dying.”