THE CRUELTY OF COVID-19
He wanted to share his culture with his true love, then virus hit
Jose Gomez had hoped to take the love of his life home to his native Guadalupe for Easter.
It is a special time for members of the Pascua Yaqui nation, and Gomez wanted his girlfriend of four years, Anjelita Apachita, whom he called “Likki,” to see his culture and experience the elaborate ceremonies that lead up to the day of the resurrection.
The ceremonies, a mixture of Catholic and Native
American rituals, have been handed down for 400 years. The participants — Deer Dancers, Chapayekas (soldiers), Fariseos (Pharisees), Pascolas (greeters) and Matachin dancers (to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe) — come together during Holy Week to create stylized reenactments of the trial and death of Christ, culminating in a flower-strewn procession on Easter morning.
It is a cultural point of pride for the Pascua Yaquis, a small tribe from northern Mexico with communities in Guadalupe, south of Phoenix, and near Tucson.
But Gomez never got the chance to share that part of his life with Likki.
Yaqui tribal leaders placed the nation on lockdown because of COVID-19, and ceremonies this year were limited only to participants, with no observers.
Gomez thought he might be able to take Likki next year, but that won’t happen either.
Gomez was working as an EMT on the Alamo Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, one of three satellite reservations, about 85 miles southeast of Albuquerque. The day after Easter, Gomez’s boss called him in.
His boss told him he would be tested for COVID-19 as a job requirement as the Navajo Nation, including its satellite communities, was one of the hardest hit areas in the United States.
“On Wednesday, he calls me and says, ‘Likki, I got bad news,’” Apachita said. “I said, ‘What’s wrong, my love?’ He said, ‘Come pick me up at work,’ and he told me he had tested positive. We went home and we stayed there and we prayed.”
“On Wednesday, he calls me and says, ‘Likki, I got bad news.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong, my love?’ He said, ‘Come pick me up at work,’ and he told me he had tested positive. We went home and we stayed there and we prayed.” Anjelita “Likki” Apachita
Girlfriend of Jose Gomez
At first, Apachita, who is Navajo, tried to care for him using prayer, traditional herbs, teas and sage, but he kept getting worse. She wanted him to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, but he said he didn’t think he could stand it.
The following Sunday, she found out she too had tested positive. Though she was sick, the symptoms had not hit her as hard.
Apachita camped out in the living room of their small home in New Mexico, while Gomez stayed in the bedroom. She tried to care for him, but he was more interested in having her care for herself.
At night, she could hear his labored breathing and the sounds of the television.
“On Wednesday night, late at night, I couldn’t hear anything from the room,” she said. “Normally I would hear him change the channel, but the house was all silent, so I decided to go check.”
She found him with his EMS kit open, trying to use his ventilator bag on himself.
“I ran towards him and said, ‘My love, are you OK?’ He hugged me and said, ‘I don’t want you to get worse. Don’t worry about me, go get some rest.’”
She went back to sleep, and a few hours later, Gomez woke her.
“He said, ‘Likki, call EMS. I can’t breathe.”
It was 2:15 on Thursday morning. “He looked OK walking to the ambulance, but was still having trouble with his breathing,” Apachita said. “He told me, ‘Likki take care of yourself, I’ll be OK.’ I said, ‘OK, my love. Keep fighting it. I love you.’ He said, ‘I love you too.’”
Gomez was airlifted to a hospital in Albuquerque.
The next day, Gomez called her from the hospital and asked for help paying some bills over the phone. Again he told her not to worry.
After a few days, Apachita began to get her hopes up. They talked almost every day on the phone and after awhile, one of his doctors told her he was taking “baby steps” toward recovery.
Gomez had several “comorbidities.” He was 54 and had lived a hard life that included drug and alcohol abuse, a bout with hepatitis C and a gunshot wound. While swimming in a canal near Guadalupe as a child, he’d cut his stomach on a piece of sheet metal that was sticking up from the bottom. The cut was so deep that his intestines could be seen through the abdominal wall. He’d also acquired a lung condition and other issues.
“He had it tough, growing up here in Guadalupe,” said his daughter, Prescilla.
Gomez grew up poor and got in a lot of trouble, and he wanted a better life for Prescilla and her four brothers and sisters, she said.
Part of the way he did that was by turning his life around, overcoming his addictions and earning his GED.
“He was always a part of our lives, even when things weren’t going well for him,” she said. “He taught us always to see the good instead of the bad,” she said.
“Even though things weren’t great, there was always food on the table,” she said.
But while he wanted his children’s lives to be better, it was also important to know where they came from and to be connected to their Yaqui roots.
“He lived here most of his life and was part of the culture here,” she said. “Every Easter we would go to the processions and watch, and he would explain what was happening to us.”
About five years ago, Gomez moved to New Mexico with his wife at the time, and began working part time as a special education teacher at the Alamo Navajo Community School.
He also began working as an ambulance driver and eventually earned his EMS certification.
He and his wife split up, and Apachita, who also worked at the school, thought he seemed lonely and in need of someone to talk to.
Gomez had two friends, both named Lloyd, so she approached one of them, and asked him to pass along her phone number.
Gomez texted her a few days later. While she hadn’t intended anything romantic — Gomez was 14 years older — the text turned into long talks, which eventually turned into a date.
Eventually they moved in together, and he accepted her two children as his own.
“He was a good dad to my kids,” Apachita said. “My kids really had respect for him.”
When Apachita and Gomez got sick, they sent her children to stay with her mother while they faced the virus.
After Gomez was hospitalized, the only real updates the children got were from relatives who brought Apachita food — updates that Apachita had gotten in her daily calls with Gomez and his doctors and nurses.
But Apachita herself didn’t have the full story: Gomez had told his medical team not to tell her much in order to keep her from worrying.
Soon, her daily calls to Gomez became short and clipped.
“I’d call him and it would last just two or three seconds, with him saying, ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’”
But he wasn’t.
On Mother’s Day, Apachita received a call from the doctors.
Gomez had suffered a heart attack, his second one, and it was bad.
Gomez had never mentioned the first, which happened several days earlier, and the doctors said they did not believe he would survive the second. They wanted Apachita to confer with Gomez’s family to decide whether they should discontinue life support.
After a call with one of Gomez’s daughters and his brother, “we decided we should let him pass peacefully,” Apachita said. “His lungs were already deteriorating. We don’t want him suffering, we don’t want him hurting.”
Gomez died that afternoon, the birthday of Apachita’s 12-year-old daughter, Sháńdíín, whose name means sunshine in Navajo.
“It was so hard for her,” Apachita said. “She said, why did my dad have to die on my birthday?’ She said she never thanked (him) for all the stuff he did for me, never got a chance to say goodbye.
“As a mom, I didn’t know what to say. Finally I said yes, it’s Mother’s Day, and it’s your birthday, but we’ve both received the greatest gift you could have received. Today he became your beautiful angel.”
Gomez’s body was brought back to Guadalupe, where he received a traditional funeral, which like the Easter ceremonies, marries Catholic and Yaqui traditions.
One night after the service, Apachita began scrolling through Gomez’s phone, not really sure what she was looking for.
When she was still sick and he was in the hospital, she’d receive knocks on the door at odd times from Gomez’s friends and co-workers checking up on her or bringing her food.
His phone showed those visits corresponded with texts he’d sent those friends asking them to make sure Apachita was OK.
She also found his last text to her. “The last thing he texted, he said he loved me. … I texted back that, ‘I miss you too and I love you too,’” Apachita said.