Arnie Kantrowitz got sick last winter when the omicron variant swept through New York, despite holing up in his home for most of the lockdown. The author, scholar and gay rights activist died of COVID in January. He was 81. “I’m not really grieving fully yet. That’s going to go on for the rest of my life,” said his long-time partner Larry Mass. “It’s like I’m still caring for him. He’s still with me.” Sometimes when world events make him angry, he thinks about what Kantrowitz 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.”
Luis Alfonso Bay Montgomery worked straight through the pandemic’s early months in Somerton, Arizona, piloting a tractor among 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. When he died, at 59, in July 2020, Bay was on her own for the first time since they’d met as teenagers in their native Mexico. In the months since her husband died, Bay, a taxi driver, 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.”
Jennifer McClung, a longtime dialysis nurse, was a central figure at the nurse’s station in her ward at Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama. In November of 2020, McClung, 54, tested positive for COVID. “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. If only the vaccine had come in time, McClung “might have made it,” friend and fellow nurse Christa House says. 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.”
Larry Quackenbush worked as an audio and video producer for the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination based in Springfield, Missouri. He died in August after contracting the virus while caring for his then 12-year-old son, Landon, who came home from summer camp sick with COVID. “Even when he started feeling sick, he kept taking care of everybody,” daughter Macy Sweeters said.