In Memoriam: Remembering Those Lost to COVID

Lisa Duryea Thayer remembers the moment she said goodbye.

It was early March 2020, and she was standing with her mother next to her father’s bedside at Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport. They greeted the infectious disease expert, brought in from Stony Brook University Hospital, who rushed into the room and politely, yet promptly, threw them out.

In the hallway, she remembers wondering aloud, in a hushed voice, whether this was the virus that they had heard about on the news.

On their way back to the room, she stopped in the open doorway and made eye contact with her 96-year-old stalwart — a man who always supported her, pushed her and treated her as an equal.

And she waved.

“That was our last …” Thayer recalled, her voice trailing off, almost three years later to the day.

She never saw him again.

“It was really shocking not to say goodbye, and you felt like you had abandoned the person, because you loved the person and you want to be able to say goodbye and hold their hand,” she said. “We were just totally, all of a sudden, out of the picture.”

On March 19, 2020, John Cortelyou Duryea died from complications due to COVID-19, marking one of the earliest deaths in the region due to the novel coronavirus.

For the families left behind to grieve, a new narrative emerged from this traumatic experience — one defined by fear, isolation, a lack of closure and a feeling of profound loss of not only their loved ones but any mourning traditions that could have brought them peace.

It would be eight months before Duryea’s wife of 72 years, Raemary, could visit his grave at Edgewood Cemetery in Bridgehampton. It was too risky given her age, Thayer said, noting that she is now 97 and still lives at Peconic Landing.

“Mom felt cheated,” she said. “She believes in traditional things. She would have loved a wonderful church funeral. To not be at the burial was heart-rending for her and very difficult.”

Thayer compares the pandemic to a storm that sat like a cloud over the United States for at least a year before the light started to shine through again.

For the Williams family, they thought they were on the road to normalcy, too, until their patriarch, Mark Kevin Williams of the Shinnecock Nation, began to feel ill in early December 2021.

“He was a big man — literally a big man — but he had a big heart, too,” his daughter, Nishwe, said. “He was like a big teddy bear — big in size, big in love, big on family, his culture. He was such a warrior, like a Shinnecock man. And he taught that and instilled that in us growing up.”

When she took him to the hospital to get tested, he asked for a COVID-19 vaccination, she recalled, but it was too late. His results came back positive on December 6, 2021. Six days later, he died.

“This year, with my dad, has just taken my breath away,” she said. “It’s something I just was not ever expecting, something so quick. We did precautions. We weren’t allowing people in our house, we were social distancing, we were masking up. And then, just like, bam, you catch it and you’re gone in a week. That was too shocking for me.”

The last conversation Williams had with her father was the day before, on a Saturday, she said. He had asked her what she was making for Sunday dinner — and she assured him that his favorite, macaroni salad, would be on the table.

“I got up that morning and texted him, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling? I’m starting the macaroni salad now,’” she recalled, “and I didn’t hear back from him.”

But she did hear from her mother, who had decided to call an ambulance. And by the time she and her brother arrived, he was already gone, she said.

Later that night, they ate the macaroni salad as a family — and in his memory.

“I have not deleted my voice messages from him, or text messages, anything like that,” Williams said. “Yeah, I still listen to them.”

On a daily basis, Geralyne Lewandowski finds herself immersed in the art of her longtime friend and former partner, Charles Waller — a man she remembers as lighthearted, humorous, talented and intelligent, with a dash of sarcasm. As much as getting his work shown is a way to honor it, the process has also helped her through her grieving, she said, after he died from COVID-19 complications on January 16, 2021.

“I think he was a great artist and a lot of people do like his stuff,” she said, “and I just want somebody to cherish it.”

After a small New Year’s Eve gathering, five of the seven guests — Waller among them — tested positive for COVID-19. While Lewandowski felt concerned, the numbers were largely on his side, she said.

“We’re all trying to be positive. Charles seemed okay,” she recalled. “And the next week, he really took a turn for the worse.”

On January 15, 2021, Lewandowski called 911 and asked for a check-in on Waller at his home in Springs. She and a friend met the police officer there, and watched from a distance as the artist answered the door — a silhouette framed by light behind him — and declined a trip to the hospital.

The next morning, when a friend checked in on him, he was dead.

To celebrate what would have been his 67th birthday the following summer, Lewandowski put together a “send-off” on the beach, “a place that he used to love to go,” she said. And, to her surprise, upward of 150 people showed up to remember their friend.

“Through what I’m doing, what I really see is so many people really loved Charles,” she said. “There’s people that I didn’t know that well, and they all came through and shared their stories. I was just blown away.

“I just kind of feel bad that he missed that opportunity to maybe bring more love into his life. When you acknowledge that people care about you, that helps all of us, instead of feeling like we’re all alone here.”

During her father’s final days, Thayer was able to connect with some of the nurses at Eastern Long Island Hospital, who would put the phone next to his ear and allowed her mother to speak to him. On their 73rd anniversary, she said, “You know, if this COVID hadn’t been around, we would have made 75 years,” her daughter recalled.

Looking ahead, Thayer has made her mother one promise: When she dies, she will eulogize her alongside her father — giving them both the funeral they never got to have.

“I’m hoping that will kind of make us feel better. I think we just feel that we’re missing something,” she said, adding, “The change of COVID was a change that was so huge that it will be with us for our lives. Adapting to change used to be a lot easier. I have a great respect for time and life now.”

There are moments when Williams feels herself get stuck in her grief, she said — moments she misses seeing her father riding his scooter around the Shinnecock territory, moments she simply longs for his presence.

At the Shinnecock Nation’s annual Powwow last year, it was the first Grand Entry in her life that she didn’t see him standing there, right at the front — either as security or a tribal member, enjoying the festivities, his community, his people.

“I just want him to be known not just for COVID, but just that he was a family man,” she said. “He loved his family, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his brothers, his sisters, everyone. He was such a big part of our family, our culture, our tribe, our community, everything — and that’s what we lost.”

She paused, her voice shaking. “That’s what COVID took from us.”