“I can still see him there,” said Mr. Jones, the pastor. “It never goes away.”
There is a street corner in Plano, Texas that was inhabited by Bob Manus, a veteran who took the kids to school for 16 years until he fell ill in December.
In the Twin Cities of Minnesota, LiHong Burdick, 72, another victim of the coronavirus, is missing from the groups she cherished: one for playing bridge, one for mahjong, and another for brushing up on her English.
The Christmas decorations still hang in her empty mansion. There are maps on the mantelpiece.
“You walk in and it smells like her,” said her son, Keith Bartram. Seeing the chair she would sit in, the random things in the house, it is certainly very unreal. I went there yesterday and was a bit unlucky. It’s hard to be in there when it looks like she should be there, but she isn’t. “
The spaces have been left empty
The virus has reached every corner of America, destroying densely populated cities and rural counties. About one in 670 Americans has now died from it.
In New York City, more than 28,000 people have died of the virus – or one in 295 people. In Los Angeles County, which has lost nearly 20,000 people to Covid-19, about one in 500 people has died from the virus. In Lamb County, Texas, where 13,000 people live across a sprawling 1,000 square mile area, one in 163 people has died from the virus.
Across America, the holes in communities pierced by sudden death have remained.
In Anaheim, California, Monica Alvarez looks at the kitchen in the home she shared with her parents and thinks about her father, Jose Roberto Alvarez.