Text messages capture heartbreaking goodbyes of COVID-19 victims
Daughter: “Just wish I could see you in person.” Mother: “I wish that more than anything in the world right now.”
Sisters Dana Cobbs (on left) and Darcey Cobbs-Lomax lost their father and paternal grandmother to COVID-19 last spring, the deaths occurring only a week apart.
ByKatie Sanders
Email
Nearly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, almost 500,000 American families know firsthand the grief of losing a loved one, many in conditions that restrict bedside goodbyes. These circumstances piled on top of the many unknowns of COVID-19 layer enormous pain, guilt, and grief on top of the already-traumatic process of saying goodbye to someone we love.
Isabelle Papadimitriou was finally a grandma. The baby girl, Lua, was born in August 2019 in Brooklyn. Though Papadimitriou lived in Coppell and worked as a respiratory therapist in Dallas, she’d been able to visit her granddaughter in New York twice, and in June 2020, she was eager to visit again. “Lua was her everything; it was all about Lua,” says Fiana Tulip, Papadimitriou’s daughter and Lua’s mother. Then, COVID-19 cases spiked in Texas and the trip no longer felt safe. They called it off, and the 64-year-old Papadimitriou started to put in extra shifts at work instead. Later that month, around the time she was supposed to be visiting family, Papadimitriou caught the coronavirus. After a weeklong struggle, she died on July 4.