Freeman Elementary holds memorial for 1 of 9 who died of COVID-19 in Genesee County in 1 day
The youngest was 30. The oldest was 91. The average age: 70.
Several worked for decades in Flint’s automotive factories. One was a beloved elementary school security officer. Another served as a nursing assistant at a retreat for retired Jesuit priests.
They raised families, spent time with grandchildren. Married. Divorced. Traveled west, or south.
For most of them, their medical histories were long. Diabetes. Cancer. Lung disease.
COVID-19 was among their final diagnoses.
Nine people, almost half of the 20 deaths recorded, died of or with the viral illness Jan. 28 in Genesee County, according to death certificates obtained from the county clerk’s office in March and again on Monday, April 18. In all but one case, COVID-19 was a primary cause. Of those who died without COVID on Jan. 28, the average age was 71 and the most common principal causes were cardiac issues and Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
Most recent state records indicate there were 11 COVID deaths that day in Genesee County but the reason for the discrepancy is unclear; all the death certificates might not be finalized, or maybe an incorrect date or county of death was recorded in the disease surveillance system and the data, provisional and fluid, has not yet been updated or corrected, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said.
Family members talked of difficult decisions to remove husbands, a mother and a son from ventilators. They described final words they had to believe could be heard despite the drugs and tubes that made their relatives motionless and mute.
Three died in nursing homes. Two were at home. Four died in hospitals.
At least six were unvaccinated against COVID-19.
Their ends came during one of the deadliest months of the pandemic.
In January, 2,872 people died of COVID-19 in Michigan. This was about 1,000 more deaths than there were in January 2021, reported the state health department. More people – 3,738 – died in April 2020 than any other month.
Fatalities have since slowed, but they continue. There were 1,487 in February. About 482 died in March. So far this month, by date of death, there have been 46 deaths.
The virus, as of April 13, has killed 33,000 people in Michigan since the start of the waning pandemic. In the United States, the toll is more than 984,000. Worldwide, about 6.2 million people have died.
But in an era of circulating conspiracies and skepticism, people question the data, the classification of a death as a confirmed COVID-19 case, even when other factors contribute.
Lisbeth Quintero, 64, is pictured, left, with her granddaughter, and right, as a younger woman. She died Jan. 28 of uterine cancer. COVID-19 pneumonia was another significant condition.
Lisabeth Quintero, 64, wanted treatment. She had hoped they could fix her.
But the cancer was advanced and, instead, her condition worsened. Chemotherapy seemed to ravage her mind and body. She rapidly deteriorated, her oldest son said. Her kidneys failed.
A planned surgery was unsuccessful or made impossible by her fragile state; John Quintero isn’t sure, but during that final hospital visit, the doctor said she could live for hours, or minutes.
Her daughters headed to Michigan from their homes in Florida. They arrived too late.
John Quintero said Lisbeth went into home hospice care about 5 p.m. Jan. 27. She survived until midnight and was officially pronounced dead before 4 a.m.
“We were talking to her. She opened her eyes and looked and just all a sudden she was just gone. You could tell like the breathing changed,” said John, 37.
Uterine carcinoma was the cause, according to her death certificate, but COVID-19 pneumonia was listed as an “other significant condition.”
Lisbeth, leery of the COVID vaccines’ newness and unvaccinated, tested positive when she went about Jan. 20 to Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor.
He had called an ambulance because his mother could not get out of bed. She could not eat. She was coughing. Was it the chemo, the cancer, COVID? John didn’t know. He still doesn’t.
He quit his job as a hotel valet to be her caretaker after Lisbeth, divorced, was diagnosed in the fall.
It had not been outwardly evident to him that Lisbeth was ill, but she was experiencing bleeding. Worried, she sought solutions. She got answers, but not a cure. It was stage IV, the final progression, they told her.
Lisbeth retired last summer as a certified nursing assistant at Colombiere Retreat and Conference Center in Clarkston, home to a Jesuit healthcare center and retired priests and brothers. She had worked too at Crittenton Hospital in Rochester, her son said.
She would cook, watch soap operas and camp. “Even when the season wasn’t right and nobody was camping, she’d be there walking around the campground.”
Lisbeth, a mother of five, would hurry to her daughter’s house, then in Lapeer, to help with grandchildren, and spent time in Florida with her family there. She always wanted the best, her son said. “And keeping the best, and pushing, pushing everyone else to have things, giving inspiration to people. Like, ‘you’re going to be like this one day. I see you being like this.’ Just a mom that you would imagine.”
He was standing on a Thursday in the doorway of their home on Flint’s east side. Though the neighborhood shows signs of decline, she liked the brown bungalow. She thought it was cute, he said.
John led a reporter inside. Her bed was covered in pictures, neatly arranged. A youthful Lisbeth, captured in black and white, smiled from a wooden frame. In a loose print, she held her granddaughter’s hand on a sunny boardwalk.
A worn, red bear from Lisbeth’s childhood sat among the pillows. It had a sad face, a single plastic tear on its cheek.
Herbert Stewart as pictured on the cover of his memorial program. He died Jan. 28 of COVID-19 and other issues, including asthma and hypertension.
Maybe a week earlier, Herbert Stewart signaled he was ready. Most he had known were dead. Much of his family was gone. His children were OK, he told his son.
“He never talked about it, but daddy said he was tired,” Ken Stewart said.
Herbert Stewart, 91, died about a week after he and his family learned he had COVID-19, and advanced stage cancer. It was his second night at a Grand Blanc hospice facility, and he was gone before dawn.
“I mean it happened just like that, fast as hell. Up. Down. Over. Never suffered. He was never sick. He was never on no machines,” said Ken, 66, who works in receiving for Meijer.
Stewart’s death certificate lists COVID-19 as the first cause. Beneath it are acute respiratory failure, asthma and hypertension. Prostate cancer is the other significant condition.
He lived on his own. Until the end, he was up and around every day. He fed himself. He never complained. So, when Ken’s brother called to say Herbert was in bed, the siblings were alarmed.
An ambulance took Stewart to Hurley Medical Center in Flint, where the family learned he had contracted the virus while the cancer had spread all through his body.
Reluctant to receive care, he was unvaccinated.
His relatives had tried to take him for check-ups and doctor visits. “He was a strong man, an honorary man, and he didn’t want it. And I respect his wishes,” Ken said.
Herbert worked more than 40 years for General Motors at the since shuttered Buick City plant. About three decades, he was in the foundries, often on the night shift. In his final years, he test drove vehicles fresh off the line.
Stewart grew up in Arkansas, two generations removed from slavery. He headed north for factory work and had seven sons and three daughters. When they were young, he managed their little league teams. He took them to Tigers games. He was a sportsman, enjoying golf and bowling.
He had strong opinions and father and son would argue. Ken misses that.
“He’s stubborn, intelligent, beautiful man. Loving man. Family man. Fun man,” Ken said.
It was the second time Jessie Willie Smart had tested positive for COVID-19, and this time the virus was unforgiving.
“It just came hard, like hardcore. And it took him out fast,” said Rajah Smart, the second of Jessie’s three sons.
Rajah, who lives in Tennessee, received a call about the positive test two days before Jessie Smart, 74, died in a Genesee Township nursing home. COVID-19 is the only listed cause.
His father, who was vaccinated against the illness, hadn’t been eating or drinking, Rajah was told, but his son had questions. For one: How did he contract the virus?
“It just kind of makes you think about was there some due diligence applied to this situation? And maybe his life could have been saved.”
In August, Rajah received word from the state that Jessie had COVID-19, but at that time, he was not especially sick and the nursing home reported he was negative. The second time, both entities verified the diagnosis.
Jessie served in the Army and worked more than 30 years for General Motors as a supervisor and superintendent within Buick City and Fisher Body, both now closed.
He was a swanky, stylish dresser who moved about Flint with what Rajah, a writer, called a “handsome arrogance.”
But his health had been failing. He went to live in 2020 in an assisted living facility. He had dementia and diabetes.
The diabetes had taken both his legs, a hit to his pride, his son said.
“Along the way, he just started to kind of fade,” said Rajah, who took a very different life than his father, earning a doctorate and working as an assistant dean at Tennessee State University.
He never felt connected or close to Jessie, absorbed in “shop culture,” though it was Rajah who stepped up after his mother had a stroke.
Rajah last saw his father several months earlier.
Jessie was lucid, teased Rajah for not calling.
“I did not think COVID was going to take him out. I didn’t.”
Ruby Jane Reynolds, 87, died Jan. 28 of COVID-19 and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbation.
Ruby Reynolds was running around, playing with the children just a short time before. Within weeks, or days, her family was hand-feeding her. She lost her speech.
“It was like a switch,” said Reynolds’ son Frank Reynolds of Grand Blanc.
Ruby Reynolds, 87, died at 9:39 a.m. of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease “exacerbation” and “COVID-19 viral illness” at the home she shared with her son and his family. Other conditions were lung cancer and dementia.
She was not vaccinated. Ruby did not like needles, her daughter-in-law said. When a doctor doing house visits planned to give her the COVID-19 inoculation, she was sick.
“She didn’t go out much. And when she did, I kept her in the vehicle,” said Frank, a former truck and heavy equipment mechanic.
They are not certain how COVID found her; they had a note posted on the door, instructing sick people to stay away. They sanitized. They masked.
“It worked for almost two years,” Lisa Reynolds, Frank’s wife, said.
“It did. I think we might have lightened up a little bit and it got by us,” her husband added.
The couple and their 7-year-old son, their youngest, also tested positive for the illness.
Ruby and Frank, who was vaccinated after one bout of COVID nearly killed him, went to an emergency room. They waited eight or nine hours and received monoclonal antibodies, laboratory-produced molecules shown to reduce the chances of COVID hospitalization and death.
The doctor feared Ruby, who had already been in and out of hospice care, would not survive. The antibodies did not help.
She had been on oxygen at night. With COVID, she used it 24 hours a day, at maximum power. Her cough was “unbelievable,” her family said.
Ruby returned to hospice care. Frank, himself hospitalized with a COVID-related heart issue, almost missed her final moments.
The months since have been his first without his mother.
They always lived together, he with her and then vice versa. When he moved to California and Arizona, she came too. At one time, he and his mother and father, who died in 2014, lived in a camping trailer after Frank sold his Michigan farm and they planned to go to Alaska.
They walked or rode bikes. When he was younger, she went to all Frank’s baseball games, and Frank, who grew up in Clarkston, recalled biking to Ruby’s hometown of Pontiac. “She was a very active person.”
In later years, she would sit for hours with her grandchildren or great-grandchildren, coloring or watching an iPad. They played Memory. The 7-year-old, born with a rare genetic disorder, loved to assemble puzzles.
It was that time with the boy, Lisa believes, that prolonged Ruby’s life.
Jeanette Bateman holds a photograph of her husband, Thomas, who died Jan. 28 of COVID-19 pneumonia.
She relayed long, meandering details of their lives together with affection and, often, composure.
But to tell this part brings Jeanette Bateman to tears.
“I told him I loved him, and I always would. I told him to wait for me,” Bateman said, recalling the 12 minutes she held on to Thomas Bateman, 72, before he died.
It had been her choice to remove her husband from the ventilator at Ascension Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc Township. She was told his lungs were “leathery,” that staff had tried to lower the oxygen. At one point, they had to shock his heart because it ceased beating. “We don’t think there is anything more we can do.”
He died at 1:31 p.m. of COVID-19 pneumonia. It is the only condition listed as a cause of death. His three daughters and Jeanette were with him. Each of his grandchildren had talked to him by speaker phone.
“I wonder: Did I do the right thing? Should I have left him on it? Would he have gotten better?” Jeanette said recently outside their home in Davison.
She had returned there that day to find the boiler went out. Then, the dryer broke.
“It was just like everything was coming in me, and I didn’t know how to handle it by myself.”
It had been two months since Thomas died, but she often referred to him in the present tense. The house, the land, the intentions, they were all theirs, never hers.
They planned to move to their Florida home, rented until they were ready, on a canal in Cape Coral. He was working on their boat, taken on family adventures at their tiny, 100-year-old cabin on the Saginaw Bay, where they fished, swam and picked berries. They purchased national park passes with plans to visit South Dakota and Yellowstone.
About Christmas time, the two were sick. Neither was vaccinated – “It’s not been tested. It’s not been fully approved. I don’t want that in my body,” said Jeanette, who says she has premonitions. (The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, first granted emergency authorization, have since been fully approved.) “I just didn’t feel safe with it. I just felt it was going to do more harm than good.”
They both went to the hospital, but an ambulance took Thomas. As the paramedics loaded him, he smiled. “He was a jokester. He loved to joke. He would find a bright spot in everything that went on in life,” Jeanette said.
“I’ll see you at the hospital, babe,” he told her.
A smoker into his 50s, he suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was struggling to breathe. He felt he couldn’t stand in the shower without falling.
Both tested positive for COVID-19, but Jeanette, displeased with the comments nurses made about her vaccination status, was discharged without admission. Thomas stayed. He went into intensive care, improved and then went back into critical care.
Until he was placed on the ventilator, Jeanette, unable to visit, talked to her husband by phone twice a day.
A photo from Jeanette and Thomas Bateman's wedding day more than 50 years ago sits atop a pile of photographs. Bateman, 72, died Jan. 28 of COVID-19 pneumonia.
They had been married 52 years. She met him while she was a music student at Michigan State University. He convinced her to accompany him to a party, even though she already had a boyfriend and was recovering from wisdom teeth extractions.
Together, they raised two daughters and took in a third, a neighbor with a troubled background. They hosted an exchange student from Norway. She too became part of their family.
Thomas was an Eagle Scout – Jeanette proudly displayed his old uniform and badge-covered sash – and served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army, spending time in South Korea. He worked in the steel business, first in the plants and later as a salesman and auditor. Jeanette was an accountant. They’d traveled to Hawaii, the Dominican Republic, Europe.
She isn’t sure about the treatments her husband received. To her, they seemed only to worsen his condition. “I don’t think they were trying to make him better. I think they just wanted to be a statistic,” said Jeanette, skeptical of the news, of the interventions, of the virus she believes is manmade.
“I am not even sure it was COVID.”
The two had a “good full life,” she said. “I can’t complain, but I can.
“We just don’t think we got to live it out to the fullest extent that we could have.”
A phlebotomist who had long worked in the medical field, Linda Anderson knew the big red “crash” cart was an ominous sign.
James Stephen Jr.’s heart had stopped beating. For 20 to 25 minutes, hospital staff tried to resuscitate him. He was not responding.
“Don’t give up on my husband. Don’t give up on my husband,” Anderson repeated.
Stephen, a 54-year-old father and elementary school security guard Anderson called “Mr. Flint”, died at 2:59 p.m. at McLaren Flint. He had been admitted 11 days earlier with COVID-19.
His death certificate lists the viral illness, acute hypoxic respiratory failure, pneumonia and a kidney transplant.
Stephen had uncontrolled high blood pressure in his 40s and his kidneys failed. For about a decade, he was on dialysis. In 2015, he received a new kidney at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor.
He got the Moderna COVID-19 shots, but was on immunosuppressants because of the transplant. He and his wife, also vaccinated, never got around to getting the booster dose.
Stephen continued to work at Freeman Elementary School in Flint, a contracted security position that became his personal post. He was supportive, went to games and once bought a child sneakers when the boy’s family couldn’t. He was so well-loved, the school honored him last month with a memorial service. The students and staff all wore blue and gold for Stephen, a devout University of Michigan sports fan.
Tearful, Anderson held a yellow carnation and accepted a student-decorated bird feeder. The mother of a once-struggling kindergartener described how grandfatherly “Mr. James” encouraged him to class every day. In a shy voice, the boy announced he donated his piggy bank change for a Stephen benefit.
“We love you, Mr. James,” the students said in choreographed unison.
Stephen had gone on Jan. 17 to an urgent care center because he was not feeling well. He tested positive. Get to a hospital, they told him. By Jan. 20, he could not breathe. He was placed in intensive care and intubated. For days, Anderson, unable to visit, called to hear only that he was “stable” – a word she’d rather never hear again.
Early Jan. 28, his prognosis changed. He was not well, they told her. She went to McLaren and they allowed her to stay.
“I was talking to him. I was able to pray with him. I was able to communicate something even though he didn’t respond. But in my mind, he heard me.”
She and Stephen married in 2019, but they had been together 20 years. Both were previously married and divorced.
Anderson met him at a barber shop. Her son was getting his hair cut, and the barber vouched for Stephen.
Compared to a prior relationship, Stephen was like “fresh air.” “He was all around good. He just cared. And it’s hard to find people that legitimately care in this day and age.”
While she is moody, he was even-tempered, calm in any scenario. It was Stephen who mediated disagreements among family members or at school, listening and negotiating resolutions.
It took them a while, though, to fully integrate their lives. When they finally did, promising forever in a backyard ceremony before Stephen’s minister cousin, they planned the rest of theirs.
Their children were grown, and they could travel, see concerts, catch a game at the new Little Caesars Arena in Detroit.
Stephen, known for preparing cookout staples like lemonade and grilled hamburgers, insisted on putting a pool behind their house for gatherings with the grandkids. Anderson doesn’t even swim.
“And that’s how I feel cheated. I do,” Anderson said from her kitchen table. A window behind her revealed the impressive inground pool, still covered for the winter. “Forever doesn’t last long. Forever just doesn’t last long.”
The oxygen was blowing so strongly through the breathing device it had disfigured her face. It was lopsided. Her mouth was distorted. Her eyes were puffy and swollen.
“It’s very horrific. That night, I could not get her face out of my head. I could not do it. And believe it or not, still to this time, I am having a hard time remembering other times with her because I still can’t get past her last moments there,” James Widdis, 51, said last month.
He had been with his mother, Bonita Franklin, when hospital staff removed the bi-level positive airway pressure machine that was keeping her alive. Franklin, 70, had refused intubation when she was hospitalized with COVID-19.
She did not wish to be resuscitated and died at 4:06 p.m. at Ascension Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc Township of “acute hypoxia respiratory failure secondary to COVID-19 pneumonia.” Also listed are respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome, occurring when fluid builds up in the air sacs of the lungs, according to the death certificate
Widdis was there with his sister, two close cousins, a church friend and Franklin’s minister. He had a moment and told her about his two children, her granddaughters. Feeling guilty, he explained again why he had kept them from her during the pandemic.
She and her son had very different ideas about COVID-19. While Widdis and his wife are vaccinated and boosted, Franklin was not despite health concerns that put her at risk of severe disease.
Because their children are too young to be inoculated and Widdis too has a complicated health history, they took the “ultra-safe” route and kept their distance from Franklin, who was guided by strong religious beliefs and anti-vaccine messaging from Christian and conservative networks.
Before the pandemic, Franklin was actively involved in her church, volunteering with the food outreach program, driving the church bus or teaching Sunday school.
She heart and kidney problems and diabetes. Resulting vascular issues assured she often had gaping wounds. A one-time factory worker relegated to disability, she was overweight and lived an unhealthy, sedentary life, her son said.
He had tried to convince her to get vaccinated. She responded with “literally all the right-wing Christian talking points.”
He acknowledges the vaccines might not have saved her, but he believes inoculation would have given her a “fighting chance.”
Instead of mild symptoms, she had an extreme case, likely contracted from a New Year’s visitor. Her oxygen levels dropped. She was unable to breathe, stand, move or sleep.
At the hospital, the staff was barely able to keep her comfortable, said her son, speaking one night from his house in Linden.
It was after 7 p.m. and his daughters had gone to bed. Evidence of their daytime play – and their central position in the household – was scattered through the living room.
Widdis, a medical debt collector and atheist, spoke frankly about his mother and the upbringing that turned him away from religion.
Despite the chasm in their beliefs and a strained relationship, they spoke regularly by phone.
She was always interested in what the family was eating and their health concerns. She would ask about his or his wife’s appointments.
After a doctor gave him a recent “pretty good, clean” bill of health, Widdis, who lost 200 pounds after a weight loss procedure, was driving home and felt a wave of depression.
“I can’t talk to my mom about my medical problems anymore.”
Chris Zimmicky is pictured at his father Michael's house on a recent Thanksgiving. The 30-year-old went to Ascension Genesys Hospital just after Christmas and died Jan. 28 of COVID-19.
Christopher “Chris” Zimmicky was a survivor, his mother Ileta Sullins said, telling stories of her mischievous son trapped atop a three-story play structure and stepping as a toddler past a steep drop-off along the Lake Huron shore.
He had camped in subzero Colorado temperatures, walking miles to safety wrapped in a sleeping bag because his clothes were frozen straight, and escaped two fires, once texting his mother he was unharmed when his car burst into flames, backing up traffic on I-75.
“I was just so certain with the love that we showered on him, that he would get through,” Sullins said.
But Zimmicky, 30, couldn’t survive this.
Sullins and her family watched Zimmicky die at 5:58 p.m. He had been removed from a ventilator maybe an hour earlier.
It felt more like an eternity.
He would lay motionless for a while, and then breathe again, his father Michael Zimmicky said.
When it was over, the treating doctor held Sullins in a firm embrace, apologizing that he couldn’t do more, that he couldn’t save her son.
Even the nurses, who had come to know the young man, intelligent, kind and polite, were crying, Sullins said. They all cried.
The physician who signed his death certificate noted acute hypoxia respiratory failure secondary to COVID-19 pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Chris lived with his brother, a teacher, in Flint. They both tested positive for COVID-19 in December. Daniel recovered in about 10 days without becoming terribly ill, but Chris struggled. He was unsteady on his feet and unable to walk to his second-floor bedroom without a break, Michael said, recalling Daniel’s account.
Though Chris was reluctant to go, his brother took him to the hospital, where Chris’ blood-oxygen level was well below normal and would keep dropping.
He spent 31 days at Ascension Genesys. For 14 days, he was on a ventilator.
Long before the virus threatened his life, Chris refused to get vaccinated. His brother did too; he still does. “I couldn’t talk them into it. Nobody could talk any sense into them,” Michael said.
Chris did not have underlying diagnosed health conditions, but he was overweight, and he vaped, his parents said. Michael called him a smoker.
“We were hoping that something would happen where he would start to recover and he just kept getting worse and worse,” said his father, sitting before an ornate stone fireplace in his Flint living room.
The doctors and nurses had tried to cut down the volume of oxygen and paralytic medication he was receiving, but his body would not do the work on its own. Any attempt at modification ended in failure. More than once, he crashed and the staff had to bring him back to life.
Michael, Sullins, and Daniel came to an agreement, necessarily unanimous; they would remove Chris from the ventilator.
“We didn’t want to pull that plug on him. We really didn’t,” Sullins said.
The idea they could donate his organs helped. While they sent off Chris, doctors prepared for surgery and waiting patients received his kidneys and liver.
In those moments, Sullins apologized for the mistakes she made as a parent. “I asked for forgiveness. And I told him I loved him. And I said thank you.”
In the last eight days, allowed visits, they spent long periods with Chris, careful to speak with and not about him.
They are grateful for that time. It wasn’t the second chance they wanted, but they seized on it, and so did Chris, putting aside any past bitterness and making it clear before intubation he wanted his family with him. Three times after, his mother says, he shed two tears.
For years, he lived in various western states, including California, Montana and Arizona, stayed in tents, hostels or apartments, and communicated only sporadically with his parents.
A victim of school bullying, Chris linked his suffering to his home state and left Michigan with a few $100s and his backpack.
“I thought, ‘Oh, they will eat him alive,’” Sullins said. “He made it.”
He did miscellaneous work, at restaurants, as a housekeeping supervisor for a timeshare. A dropout, he took it upon himself to earn not his GED, but his high school diploma. Interested in sculpture and graphic arts, he was learning welding and his father purchased him an Adobe products subscription.
While in Arizona, he started going to college, but he lost his job at a call center for a sporting apparel company, his apartment burned and he headed home just as the pandemic took hold.
“That really hurt… when he didn’t survive the COVID. That was really bad, because he started to make these plans where he was really going to get himself together and become alive again,” Michael said.
It isn’t fair how COVID brings some only minor illness and inconvenience, Sullins said.
“It’s a hell of a deal. Horrible, horrible. COVID is just a horrible thing.”
But Sullins seems to focus more on the peace than the pain.
One of the nurses took a picture as Chris took his final breaths. The sun was setting, and the rays filled the fourth-floor hospital room.
“Everyone just kind of thought it was Chris, just Chris shining.”
An 87-year-old man died at 8:48 p.m. of pneumonia and COVID-19 at Symphony Linden, an assisted living and short-term rehabilitation facility south of Flint.
The illness onset only days earlier, according to his death certificate.
Other significant conditions included: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, an irregular heartbeat and peripheral vascular disease, a progressive circulation disorder.
He was an all-state basketball player at a Catholic high school and worked for 35 years for General Motors, his obituary states.
In the months since, 91 more people have died of COVID-19 in Genesee County, home to about 400,000 people. In total, the virus has killed 1,545 residents there, according to state data. This month, the total is down to one.
Hospitals are no longer overwhelmed with COVID patients. Even health authorities are taking international vacations. Most shoppers wander about Meijer or Kroger bare-faced.
Linda Anderson goes to work for McLaren, as she has for nearly 30 years, collecting vials of patients’ blood.
“It’s something that I have to go through,” she said on Thursday, finishing her shift. “I still have to get up every day.”
Widdis finds himself making the arrangements his mother didn’t, securing a niche in a pretty mausoleum – and finding the money to pay for it.
Michael Zimmicky and Ileta Sullins are going through pictures. There are about 7,000 on Zimmicky’s computer. In many of them, Chris is smiling, notes Michael as he scrolls.
Sullins, recovering from a recent concussion, bounced from memory to memory. From childhood – Chris, unable always to express his intelligence academically or traditionally, emerging from beneath a Sunday school table to recite the names of the three wise men. To those many hours in the ICU.
When he was intubated, Sullins, a massage therapist, massaged her son three times.
She would place one hand on his heart, and the other on hers. She is sure the beats were synched.
“He was my heart. That will never leave me... Part of your child is with you. They grow in you, and they stay with you.”
The family is planning a memorial for April 30.
Sometime later, they will travel to Montana, see the places Chris explored, distant from the pains of his adolescence.
They will leave his ashes there.
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