COVID-19 has left an estimated 194,000 children in the U.S. without one or both of their parents. It has deprived communities of leaders, teachers and caregivers. It has robbed us of expertise and persistence, humor and devotion.
It began even before the threat had really come into focus. In February 2020, an unfamiliar respiratory illness started spreading through a nursing home outside Seattle, the Life Care Center of Kirkland.
By any account, Lawyer — known to his family as “Moose” — lived a very full life. Born on a Mississippi farm to parents whose mixed-race heritage subjected them to bitter discrimination, he became the first in his family to graduate from college. When his energy for performing diminished, he visited clubs to hear his grandson play guitar. At weddings, he joined his sons, grandson and nephew to serenade brides and grooms in a makeshift ensemble dubbed the Moose-Tones.
Then deaths in the Northeast began to soar. President Donald Trump dropped talk of reopening the nation by Easter. In April, the U.S. surpassed Italy as the country with the most COVID deaths. The eldest, Julie McCulloch-Brown, recounted childhood nights falling asleep to the sound of her mother’s bridge parties, “everybody laughing and a sense of being safe, that all was right with the world.” The youngest, Drew, thanked his mother for the energy she gave to raising them, sometimes working multiple jobs to pay the bills.Her death came at the height of a North Carolina spring.
He died on July 18, a day that saw the U.S. toll surpass 140,000. And for the first time since they’d met as teenagers in their native Mexico, Bay was on her own. Others, “he’s in the bedroom, watching me,” she says, in Spanish. Driving past the fields he plowed, she imagines him on his tractor. At a memorial service, McClung’s body lay dressed in nursing scrubs at her family’s request. The following day, heading home after getting her first shot, nurse Christa House became so upset she had to pull over.
In southwest Missouri, where immunization rates had stalled at around 20 percent in some counties, hospitals were swamped by a surge among unvaccinated residents, people like Larry Quackenbush. He died on August 3, as the U.S. toll topped 614,000. In the days that followed, Sweeters and her husband moved back to Springfield from Texas to help care for her brother.
After nearly two decades on patrol and working in the county jail, he was a fixture in the courthouse, where he was the sergeant in charge. Every Saturday, he manned a barber chair at best friend Gerald Riley’s shop, dispensing small talk along with haircuts, and admonishing young customers to stay out of trouble.