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One Door Down : Profiles from a New York City Apartment Building During the COVID-19 Pandemic Main Menu About Our Profiles George and Kathy Profile Sonia and Paul Profile Mary Profile Leeat and Uwvie Profile Jo Profile Tyler Profile Methodology and Background

George and Kathy Discuss Mary's Death Transcript

Kathy: When Mary was sick the last two weeks of March, there was no way to avoid us being in her apartment helping the aides who were taking care of her.

George: The aides were, were nervous. One was taking care of another elderly lady and when Mary came down with symptoms, she kind of, like, backed off and said “look, I’m, I’m not going to be able to help take care of her,” so it put a burden on the other people, and we had to do some healthcare for her ourselves.

Kathy: It was tough ‘cuz I was still working full-time and, yanno, you (George: Yeah, you’re right.) never stopped working full time. It was difficult… (George: Yeah…) those last two weeks.

George: And it was tough because we, we couldn’t even get the doctor to stop by, she said call 9-1-1 if things get dire but, you know, she got to the point where the doctor diagnosed that, that it was heart failure, probably in conjunction with…

Kathy: Well that’s what they put on her death certificate, but um, like, in the very beginning of the two-week illness before she passed away, yanno, the things that you find out later… She said “this doesn’t smell good, my food,” and she said “it doesn’t even taste like anything, it tastes like sawdust.” So, she wouldn’t eat, and I was the one who had to be the police. George was the good guy I’m the bad guy. The aid had called me and said “you’re gonna have to come up here and talk with her she won’t eat her food.” So I was in her apartment and said “look, you gotta eat you gotta keep your strength up.” and I was trying to convince her this is what she had to do for herself, and I said “you know what happens if you don’t eat,” and she goes “Whattt?” She was being cute with me. I said, “Mary! You know what can happen!” She goes “Tell me!” I said “Mary if you don’t eat and keep your strength up you can die!” She goes, “Oooooo!” puts her fingers in the air. And I said “It’s not funny!” I said “I’m going to call George and make him talk to you!” and she goes “I’m not gonna talk to him. I just don’t want to eat anymore.” And with elderly people once they get like that, you can feed her you can force feed her but she’s still going to have dementia and she’s still going downhill very badly, very rapidly. (George: Yeah,) So, for that two weeks…

George: And then the time that she died we had a problem with the coroner office.

Kathy: Oh, it was a nightmare…

George: Yeah, they- they didn’t respond for eighteen hours.

Kathy: What happened was we called 9-1-1, I said “my sister-in-law has passed away in the house.” And then, of course, the paramedics come and the police come and they came in and had put on hazmat suits and everything ‘cuz they said “What was wrong with her?” …

George: Did she have, yanno, flu like symptoms.

Kathy: We said (Shared between George and Kathy: “yes,”) these are all the things she had.” So they put on all the hazmat suits, they went in, they checked on her… And… the policeman had told us “Because she’s died at home, we have to get the coroner’s office to come.” Which, I guess that’s just routine but, they said “it’s gonna be a long wait a lot of people who died today…”

George: Who had died that weekend.

Kathy: The pickup, though of her body was the worst to me because it’s like…”

George: It was, we had to wait- we were waiting all night. They were, oh okay “they’re gonna come, they’re gonna come…”

Kathy: And a police car… (George: they sat outside all night.) was in front of the house all this time. And then, finally, yanno I called and I said… “it’s been eighteen hours we can’t just let her stay here in her bed dead like this. You’ve got to do something to help us.” Then finally…

George: The coroner’s office called us and she spoke with Mary’s physician who had visited her a couple of weeks earlier and gave her diagnosis of, uh, her passing away, as heart failure. And then they released the body and we were able to, have her body removed… The crematories were overburdened it took us a while just before they were able to get her ashes back to us. And then also uh with the onslaught of a-a-all the uh (laughing) death certificates, it took us a while to get her death certificate. And then also to settle her estate, the uh surrogate courts were closed for a long time, and her apartment was sealed off, because she did die at home and there were no other people living in the apartment so they sealed it off… It was exasperating, needless to say and…

Kathy: So much worse than it had to… (George: had to have been, yeah.) it had already been bad, but this made it that much worse. And I know that, yanno, once somebody is dead they’re not in pain there’s nothing else that’s going on for them it just felt very disrespectful to have her just in her bed waiting all these hours and it gave me such anxiety thinking “I just want this to be on the road to being resolved.”

George: It turned out to be one calamity after another. (Kathy: It was!) With the coroner’s office, with the city providing death certificates, the surrogate courts and-and trying to resolve her estate. Most, you know, m-most of the things eventually got taken care of, but it took a lot longer than, it normally would have.

Kathy: Almost five years of taking care of Mary, from the beginning of when she had dementia up until her death, it was on and on and on. But, yeah at this point it’s like everything just kind of came to a standstill and you felt like that part of your life didn’t move on.

George: We weren’t able to have a funeral service, get-together with other members of the family, or do a burial. I still have Mary’s ashes in our apartment so, were gonna have funeral services at the gravesite. We, we had a stone carved for her, and-and we have a plot in New Jersey at a cemetery where other family members are buried.

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George and Kathy
George and Kathy have lived and rented out apartments in this building for decades. The entire time, George’s older sister, Mary, lived in the unit above them. In recent years, Mary had been diagnosed with dementia, and required care that entailed the assistance of her brother and sister-in-law. In an effort to both make her happy and get her blood flowing, they would take her out to restaurants and treat her to other outings that did not require too much effort on her part. Theirs being a close-knit family, George and Kathy stepped up to the plate when Mary needed them most.
In the early months of the pandemic, Mary developed symptoms that seemed very similar to those of COVID. Unable to get a proper diagnosis due to no doctor being able to come see her, she was diagnosed with complications from heart failure, and after a two-week illness, died at home on March 29th, 2020.
In this clip, George and Kathy recount their experience after Mary got sick, and their role in taking care of her before she died. They go on to talk about the difficulties they experienced after she died, and how it impacted them.

Transcript

During the pandemic, both George and Kathy continued to work, but for Kathy, under much different circumstances. She had been employed in a hospital for over 20 years delivering vaccines to workers, among other employee-centric care duties. She became concerned about acquiring COVID from one of the workers that she would inevitably treat. Kathy had been considering retirement before the onset of the pandemic, but this made the decision simple. She signed all the paperwork for retirement, but was offered an opportunity to continue working part-time in a remote capacity; she accepted.
Taking on this new position placed Kathy within her own home, all by herself while George continued to go to work. Her biggest concern during the transition was facing issues with her computer; at the hospital she could just have the I.T. department fix it, but at home, she depended on a more tech-savvy George, accessible only through a phone call. She began to miss her friends at the hospital, but couldn’t visit on a social call; it was far too busy.
In this clip, Kathy talks about how she made the transition from working in the hospital to working from home, the loneliness it entailed, and how taking in Jo’s cat while she stayed in Austin, Texas helped her to cope with it.

Transcript
George began working at the post office in Queens as a mail carrier, but desired a job working in maintenance or engineering. Carrying mail proved to be a short-lived enterprise, as he worked his way up the ladder to achieve his goal, now handling maintenance for automated processing machinery. He takes pride in his job, as he views the mail service as an integral part of public services. When COVID hit and people began depending more and more on the delivery of packages of varying degrees of importance, from an Amazon impulse buy to life-preserving medications, George and his team were there to ensure that they were delivered.
With the stay-at-home order in place, George recalls the monotony of going to and from work and nowhere else. He was never very concerned by crowded situations as he never came across them; each shift’s crew would give time and space for the previous one to clear out so as to prevent transmission between groups. George’s crew made a heightened effort to ensure they wouldn’t spread the virus, spot-cleaning their work stations before they went home.

Recently, one of Kathy’s friends who remained working at the hospital reached out to her and said it feels like it’s been years since they’ve seen her. Kathy, who claims a distorted sense of time after the pandemic, responded, “For me it’s felt like two months.” She feels as if her mindset right after leaving the hospital has remained with her. George also admits that he has not seen some friends in two years, citing the pandemic as the main cause. George and Kathy’s friends shared an annual Christmas card exchange that saw the two send out close to one-hundred cards a season. Now, they say they’ve only received around twenty.
While their friendships may change, the bond that they share remains strong. On Kathy’s working from home, George is happy to have her around more often. When they both worked in person, they rarely ever crossed paths for more than a few waking hours. Now, they have much more time to spend together.
Vacation-goers, the two have traveled the world together. COVID derailed any plans for them to continue doing so, but they’ve acclimated. In this clip, Kathy recounts how COVID altered her retirement plans, and how they continued to experience exotic places from their couch.

Transcript
From now on, George asserts, any vacation will have to be a road trip.

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