Loss in the time of coronavirus: Families say goodbye through windows, walkie-talkies
How do you say goodbye to someone dying from the coronavirus without risking infection?
For most, it involves a few degrees of separation.
Doctors and nurses permitted to enter hospital rooms with COVID-19 patients in isolation are finding ways to give their loved ones some sense of closure — whether it be through a glass window and a walkie-talkie or a FaceTime call from 2,000 miles away.
By April 1, close to 200,000 cases of the virus have been reported in the U.S. More than 4,000 people have died.
Here’s how their family members said goodbye.
Washington
A nurse at Swedish Issaquah hospital in Washington used her personal cell phone to help a woman say goodbye to her 75-year-old mom, Carolann Christine Gann, CNN reported.
Gann was “nearing the end of her life” when the nurse called her daughter, Michelle Bennett, to let her know. Then she put on protective gear and brought the phone into the room with Gann.
“I’m going to put the phone up to her face so you can tell her you love her and say your goodbyes,” Bennett said the nurse told her, according to CNN. “She will not be alone, we will stay with her till the end.”
Bennett said she was able to tell her mother she loved her and it was OK to go before she passed.
At Providence Regional Medical Center, six siblings said goodbye to their mom with a walkie-talkie, BuzzFeed News reported. Hospital staff propped up the receiver on her pillow.
Sundee Rutter, 42, was a single mother and breast cancer survivor, according to BuzzFeed.
“I’m about to lose my best friend and she can’t even hear me,” her son Elijah Ross-Rutter told BuzzFeed after the hospital put his mom in isolation.
When she died on March 16, all of her children as well as her mother and sister were outside the room with the handheld radio, BuzzFeed reported.
California
A 52-year-old woman’s children were able to say goodbye through a glass window at the hospital after a nurse opened the blinds for them, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Susana Garcia, 52, was on a ventilator and sedated the last time her kids saw her, according to the newspaper.
They had spoken to her before hospital staff told them she needed the vent.
“We let her know, ‘Mom, it’s going to be OK. We’re going to be waiting for you here once you get your lungs healthy again and we’ll all be able to be together at home soon,’ ” her 27-year-old son Hector Juarez told the L.A. Times. “That was the last time we spoke to my mom.”
Florida
Tom Sheehan and his wife were on a cruise to Italy, Spain and France when cases of the coronavirus broke out on board, the Miami Herald reported.
By the time they got back to Sarasota on March 20, the Herald reported “Tom’s breathing was ragged and he’d lost about 20 pounds.” He and his wife tested positive for COVID-19 at a hospital the next day.
She was able to go home, but Sheehan stayed. His condition worsened until a nurse called to help his family say their goodbyes, according to the Herald.
They told him they loved him over speakerphone.
North Carolina
A man was taken to Southampton Memorial Hospital in Franklin, Virginia, to have his appendix removed after spending 10 days at an assisted living community in North Carolina where an outbreak of COVID-19 has since been reported, the Raleigh News & Observer reported.
James Glascock, 65, later tested positive for the virus.
His daughter watched him die “while looking through a sliding glass door into a negative-pressure room,” according to the News & Observer. She used a walkie-talkie to talk to him in his final moments.
“I told him the normal stuff, that I loved him, and I was right here even though he couldn’t physically feel me,” she told the News & Observer. “They said when I spoke, his heart rate fluctuated, so maybe he heard me.”
Texas
Cecil “Mac” Hargrove had just returned from a trip to Spain with his wife and children when he tested positive for the coronavirus, according to an NBC station in Fort Worth.
The 84-year-old from Dallas wasn’t able to make it home before he died at a hospital in Pennsylvania — where his son lives — on March 27, NBC DFW reported.
His family in Texas used FaceTime to say goodbye.
“I always assumed when my granddad died, we’d all be around him,” Hargrove’s granddaughter, Hannah, told the station. “We’d all be circling him holding his hands. I’m so grateful for the FaceTime phone call.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 11:06 AM with the headline "Loss in the time of coronavirus: Families say goodbye through windows, walkie-talkies."
