In the year since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, millions of families have suffered the ups and downs of the U.S. revolution – waves of illness that leave wounds unattended long after hospitals ebb and flow.
For the Aldaco family in Phoenix, it has ruined a generation of brothers.
The three men – Jose, Heriberto Jr. and Gonzalo Aldaco – lost to covid, each at different times in the pandemic: first in July, then in December, and last last month.
The death is now among more than 530,000 in the United States, where, even as millions are vaccinated, families are still mourning the loss of a new loved one every day.
“Those three men, they chased away the family. They were like the strong pillars, the bones of the family. And now they’re all gone,” said Miguel Lerma, 31, who was raised by his grandfather Jose Aldaco as own son.
To Lerma, death feels like a great American story of suffering, courage and hard work cut short. All three came to the USA from Mexico and over the decades made their families home.
“They literally showed that you can’t come from nothing and struggle through all that and build a life for yourself and your children,” Lerma said. “It just excites me that this is the way their story has to end.”
Jose’s daughter, Brenda Aldaco, said with so many Americans gone, the magnitude of each death and the reactions are profound.
“When you really think about each individual, each individual, what did that person mean to someone? It’s just awful. It’s horrible,” she said.
Family ‘ready to make memories’
Jose Aldaco, 69 when he died, arrived in the Southwest in the early 1980s when Brenda was still an infant, following his sister, Delia, and older brother, Gonzalo, who had both recently left Mexico. .
“They came out here for a better opportunity – I don’t even want to say a more comfortable life – but a more accessible, elevated life than they had,” said Priscilla Gomez, Jose’s niece and Delia’s daughter.
Gomez thinks of the three brothers as key figures – symbols of strength – for herself and the extended extended family.
“They were so consistent, the most consistent male figures for me,” Gomez said.
Large family gatherings were a major way of life in Aldaco homes.
“Those three men, when they were in the same room, it was just a good time,” said Lerma, a dance teacher in Phoenix.
Events and holidays would often grow into joyful, musical events, where Gonzalo, the eldest, would play the guitar and the family would dance and sing together to the wee hours of the morning.
“If it was someone ‘s birthday, they would sing’ Las Mañanitas. ‘… They were just always ready to create memories for us,” Gomez recalled.
Lerma said that what Jose was cultivating was mostly a family where love and affection were the mainstay. “He’s the one who taught us to be so funny,” Lerma said. “He was that warmth. He was that love for us.”
Wave after wave in Arizona
After a calm spring, the pandemic hit Arizona with a terrifying force – the first of two waves tore through a state where a slow pandemic warning was coming and disappearing rapidly. Lerma said his family heeded the warnings.
“We were like a family that embraced the real pandemic,” he said. “We really paid attention.”
Jose and his wife, Virginia, lived at the home of their daughter Brenda, where they helped raise their teenage granddaughter.
Brenda’s father worked a few days a week at his job in a hotel restaurant, but he was mostly retired. “It was really possible – doing gardening, cooking every day, moving three times a week at the park,” Brenda said.
Despite the family’s efforts to stay safe, the virus found its way into their home that summer. Jose was the first to become ill, but soon the four were ill and lonely in their bedrooms.
They waited for test results. The two elders were getting worse. When the bedroom door was open, Brenda’s son could hear his grandfather.
‘My son used to say,’ Mum, Abuelo that’s not good. … He seems to be dying, ‘”he recalled Brenda.
She was paralyzed, however. Her mother was convinced she did not want him to go to hospital.
Finally, Lerma, who lives apart and was not covid, put on a mask and came to Virginia and Jose ‘s coax to go to the hospital. Lerma found Jose lying in bed, covered in a sheet, with a high fever in the sky.
“He was taking a quick breath trying to get any air he could into his lungs,” Lerma said. “That’s when I started showering out and missing it.”
Virginia and Jose were admitted to the hospital. A few days later, Virginia was doing well enough to go home, but Jose ‘s situation only got worse.
The last time Lerma saw him he was past FaceTime, while Jose took him out through the hospital for life support. “Losing my father, seo this is heartbreaking, ”said Lerma. “The songs are about the sad songs.”
Three brothers – ‘men of a family’ – are gone
By the time Jose died, the virus had already killed about 150,000 Americans. Like so many other families, the Aldacos were unable to have a proper burial.
“It felt like his death had just been crushed under the rug, just like any other statistic,” Lerma said.
Priscilla Gomez said she will never forget hearing her mother take the phone call when she found out about her brother’s death.
“Not being there in person to comfort or sustain them when they feel like they just want to throw themselves on the ground and just sob… you feel completely helpless, “she said.
As the pandemic spread into the winter months, a new wave of diseases and deaths engulfed Arizona and much of the rest of the U.S. By the end of December, the total U.S. death tax had gone up. over 300,000, and Heriberto Aldaco Jr. – the youngest. late 50s – now also in hospital with covid.
“You think you’ve gone to a certain point in your grief, and then it wasn’t done – here it comes again.… Now my father’s baby brother is sick,” said Brenda Aldaco. “Then it passes.”
Less than two months later, worse news would come to the family.
The last surviving brother, Gonzalo Aldaco, the oldest in the early 70s, was taken to hospital by covid. He died in February.
Brenda Aldaco described her father and brothers as above all other “family men.”
“They were totally and utterly committed to the people they loved – always present, always someone you could count on,” she said.
At times, she still expects her father to come home from hospital: “I found it hard to even get hold of the idea of ’It’s gone’… that the three of them are now gone and under the same circumstances and within a period thereafter six months. “
This story is from a narrative partnership between NPR and KHN.
|
|
