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Echoes of one million lost in the spaces they left behind

A chair sits at the nurses station where Jennifer McClung worked as a longtime dialysis nurse at Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Ala., Monday, March 7, 2022. In November of 2020, McClung, 54, tested positive for COVID-19. "Mama, I feel like I'm never coming home again," she texted her mother, Stella Olive, from a hospital bed. Her lungs severely damaged by the virus, she died just hours before the nation's vaccination campaign began on December 14. Today, a decal with a halo and angel's wings marks the place McClung once occupied at a third-floor nurses' station. "It still just seems like. She could just walk through the door," McClung's mother says. "I haven't accepted that she's she's gone. I mean, a body is here one day and talking and laughing and loving and and then, poof, they're just gone." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A microphone stands as David Lawyer plays the piano in his living room where his father, Neil Lawyer, would have sung along time to time in Bellevue, Wash., Sunday, March 20, 2022. The elder Lawyer died at age 84 on March 8, 2020, among the first residents of a Seattle area nursing home who succumbed to COVID-19 during the outbreak. At weddings, he joined his sons, grandson and nephew to serenade brides and grooms in a makeshift ensemble dubbed the Moose-Tones. Last October, when one of his granddaughters married, it marked the first family affair without Lawyer there to hold court. The Moose-Tones went on without him. "He would have just been beaming because, you know, it was the most important thing in the world to him late in life, to get together with family," David Lawyer says. "I can honestly tell you he was terribly missed." (AP Photo/David Goldman) Professional editing equipment stands next to an empty stool in the studio where audio and video guru Larry Quackenbush worked as a producer for Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination based in Springfield, Mo., Tuesday, March 22, 2022. Quackenbush died from COVID-19 on Aug. 3, 2021 after contracting the virus while caring for his son, Landon, who had tested positive along with Landon's mother. So it was no surprise that Larry jumped in to care for his son, not worried about his own fragile health. "Even when he started feeling sick, he kept taking care of everybody," daughter Macy Sweeters says. "It just hurts so much. He was my best friend." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A chair sits at the nurses' station where Jennifer McClung worked as a longtime dialysis nurse at Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Ala., Monday, March 7, 2022. In November of 2020, McClung, 54, tested positive for COVID-19. "Mama, I feel like I'm never coming home again," she texted her mother, Stella Olive, from a hospital bed. Her lungs severely damaged by the virus, she died just hours before the nation's vaccination campaign began on December 14. Today, a decal with a halo and angel's wings marks the place McClung once occupied at a third-floor nurses' station. "It still just seems like. She could just walk through the door," McClung's mother says. "I haven't accepted that she's she's gone. I mean, a body is here one day and talking and laughing and loving and and then, poof, they're just gone." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A tractor sits idle among the fields plowed for years by Luis Alfonso Bay Montgomery in Somerton, Ariz., Saturday, March 19, 2022. Montgomery had worked straight through the pandemic's early months, piloting a tractor through lettuce and cauliflower fields. Even after he began feeling sick in mid-June, he insisted on laboring on, says Yolanda Bay, his wife of 42 years. He died at age 59 on July 18, 2020 and for the first time since they'd met as teenagers in their native Mexico, Bay was on her own. In the months since he died, Bay has worked hard to keep her mind occupied. But memories find a way in. Driving past the fields he plowed, she imagines him on his tractor. "It's time to get rid of his clothes, but ...," she says, unable to finish the sentence. "There are times that I feel completely alone. And I still can't believe it." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A chair sits empty under a portrait of Walt Whitman at the desk of Arnie Kantrowitz in his New York apartment, Thursday, March 17, 2022. When the omicron variant swept through New York last winter, Kantrowitz got sick. At first, it seemed like a cold and a fever, but then the coronavirus infection derailed his diabetes. Author, Walt Whitman scholar and gay rights activist, Kantrowitz died Jan. 21, 2022, at age 81. "I don't want to be one of these people who walks around talking to the dead," says his longtime partner, Larry Mass, but he does ask Arnie's advice, even now, when world events unleash in him an anger that feels unmanageable and damaging, an anger that's just looking for a place to land. He will think about what Arnie would have said to bring him back to earth. He was always good at that. "He's not totally gone," Mass says. "He's there in my heart." (AP Photo/David Goldman) An empty bench overlooks the Hudson River where Fernando Morales used to sit and eat tuna sandwiches with his younger brother, Adam Almonte, in Fort Tryon Park in New York, Wednesday, March 16, 2022. On the deadliest day of a horrific week in April 2020, COVID-19 took the lives of 816 people in New York City alone. Morales, 43, was one of them. Walking through the park, Almonte visualizes long-ago days tossing a baseball with his brother and taking in the view from their bench with sandwiches in hand. He replays old messages to just to hear Morales' voice. "When he passed away it was like I lost a brother, a parent and a friend all at the same time," says Almonte. "That's an irreplaceable type of love." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A path winds off into the distance at the North Carolina Botanical Garden where Mary Jacq McCulloch enjoyed outings from her nursing home with her daughter and granddaughter in Chapel Hill, N.C., Thursday, March 10, 2022. McCulloch's death from COVID-19 on April 21, 2020 at 87, came at the height of a North Carolina spring. Now, with the season arriving again, daughter, Karen McCulloch, is reminded of their drives together around Chapel Hill to gaze at the trees in blossom. Mary Jacq's favorite were the redbuds. "They are stunning magenta," Karen says. "I can't see one in bloom without thinking, 'Mom would love this.' Kind of like her, brightly colored and demanding attention." (AP Photo/David Goldman) A lopper lays on the table where Eddy Marquez used to trim plants at US Evergreen Wholesale Florist for 33 years in New York, Wednesday, March 16, 2022. Marquez, died from COVID on April 8, 2020 during one of the deadliest weeks in New York City. The father of three loved plants and the yard of their home is filled with the bushes and trees he tended. He died days after his brother-in-law who lived in the same house. His daughter, Ivett Marquez, recalled her dad working long hours, but reserving Sundays for family time. "He was an amazing father. He was an amazing husband, an amazing person. My father was just our best friend. You know, I guess his daughter's first love," says Marquez. "That was what he was. He was everything to us. A supporter, a friend, just everything. He loved his job. He loved this family. He loved his house, his plants. That was just Eddy." She now tends the plants in his place. (AP Photo/David Goldman) Wrestling action figures sit on a bureau in the bedroom of Donovan James Jones in Buckeye, Ariz., Saturday, March 19, 2022. Jones was born with sickle cell anemia and died at age 13 from complications of COVID-19 on Nov. 12, 2021, as his mother battled the virus herself in the hospital. Teresita Horne didn't get a chance to say goodbye to her only son. "I remember the first time I came in here and I probably screamed the loudest that I've ever screamed in life," says Horne. "I come in here just to kind of sit and sometimes think and it sometimes calms me down. But it also sometimes makes me really sad. And I think that's why I haven't been able to do anything with it because I don't want to get rid of anything or move anything. Just sometimes I just feel like he's going to come in from school, and I just want it to be how he left it." (AP Photo/David Goldman) The barber chair where Sherman Peebles used to cut hair on Saturdays sits empty at Overflo Beauty and Barber Shop in Columbus, Ga., Wednesday, March 9, 2022. In late September, as Peebles, who also worked as a sheriff's deputy, lay in a hospital bed, COVID-19's toll reached 675,000, surpassing the number of Americans killed by the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago. He died at age 49 the next day. Months later, his best friend and shop owner, Gerald Riley, still arrives at the shop each Saturday expecting to see Peebles' truck parked outside. At day's end, he thinks back to the routine he and his friend of 25 years always followed when closing. "I love you, brother," they'd tell one another. How could Riley have known those would be the last words they'd ever share? (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Echoes of one million lost in the spaces they left behind