SEDRO-WOOLLEY, Wash. (AP) – With dish soap, brushes and plastic water jugs in hand, Carole Rae Woodmansee’s four children cleaned the tombstone their mother shares with their father, Jim. Each scrub gleamed in engraved letters with their mother’s name and the days of her birth and death: March 27, 1939 and March 27, 2020.
Carole died on her 81st birthday.
That morning it had been a year since she died of complications from COVID-19 after contracting it in a choral practice that sickened 53 people and killed two – a superspreader event that would become one of the most pivotal transmission episodes to understand the virus.
For the siblings, the gloomy birthday offered a chance for closure after the pandemic hampered their grief. They finally held a memorial that reflects their mother’s footprint in the community.
“The hardest part is that there was no goodbye. It was like she just disappeared, ”said Carole’s youngest child, Wendy Jensen.
After cleaning, the siblings reminisce. They say their father should be happy to be back with his 46-year-old wife. They thank them for being good parents and remember how their mother always said “my” before mentioning their names and those of other loved ones.
“I was always ‘My Bonnie’,” Bonnie Dawson tells her siblings. “I miss being ‘My Bonnie’.”
“She had been missing Dad for a long time,” adds the eldest sibling Linda Holeman. Their father, Jim, died in 2003.
Of the more than 550,000 people who died of the virus in the United States, Carole was among the first. Her death came just weeks after the first reported outbreak at a Kirkland nursing home about an hour south of Mount Vernon. Carole, who had survived heart surgery and cancer, fell ill at her home. Bonnie took care of her until they called the paramedics.
“You try to say goodbye to your mother, and they say you have to come back. It was a very difficult, emotional … to have to shout, ‘I love you, Mom’ as she is being driven out the door with men standing ten feet away in our yard because they are not near wanted to be our home, ”said Bonnie.
The rehearsal of the Skagit Valley Chorale, a community choir made up mostly of retirees and not associated with the church where they practiced, took place two weeks before Governor Jay Inslee closed the state. The choir had taken precautions known at the time, such as distancing themselves and disinfecting. But someone had the virus.
“The choir called us directly and they left a voicemail. The voicemail said a positive person in the chorus, 24 people who are now sick, ”said Lea Hamner, chief of communicable diseases and epidemiology for Skagit County Public Health. “It was immediately clear that we had a big problem.”
Hamner and her team went to work interviewing choir members, often repeatedly, and those they interacted with after the training, a total of 122 people. They meticulously pieced together the evening, keeping track of things like where people were sitting and who was eating cookies or stacked chairs.
That level of access and detail is rare in outbreak research, Hamner said, so when cases receded in the county a few weeks later, she sat down to write a report.
“There was a lot of resistance to call it an airborne disease,” Hamner said. “But we have found a middle ground of this disease that can be droplets as well as airborne. So that was a big shift. After the paper, the CDC began to recognize airborne transmission. “
The outbreak had gained notoriety after an article in the Los Angeles Times prompting other researchers to study the event, confirming the conclusion that the virus was traveling through the air during rehearsal.
“I think this outbreak is seen in the chorus … as the one event that really woke people up to the idea that the virus could spread through the air,” said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech professor and expert in the field. air transmission. Marr was one of 239 experts who successfully lobbied the World Health Organization to change transfer guidelines.
The other person who died from the choral practice was 83-year-old Nancy “Nicki” Hamilton. Originally from New York, Hamilton settled north of Seattle in the 1990s. She placed a personal ad in the Everett Herald, which is how she met her husband.
“We went to the bowling alley in Everett,” said 85-year-old Victor Hamilton. “We picked it up from there.”
Hamilton has not been able to keep a memorial to her. Their families are all over the country, and he would like to have it in New York City if possible. He’s looking at June 21 – her birthday.
In nearby Mount Vernon, family and friends pour into the Radius Church, staring at an installation of several dozen photographs of Carole that the siblings have put together. Wendy also shows a quilt her daughter made using Carole’s music camp T-shirts.
Pastor Ken Hubbard tells those in attendance that the service is not really a funeral, but a memorial, an opportunity to share stories about Carole.
“I’m pretty sure her prayers saved my life a few times,” says grandson David Woodmansee.
Loved ones remember Carole’s commitment to her family, faith and music. Others remember how she welcomed them into her family, gave piano lessons, and volunteered for her church.
They sing “Blessed Insurance,” her favorite hymn. The text was one of her last words to her children from the hospital.
After the service, the family returns to the cemetery to lay flowers. They also sing again and end the day with a spontaneous, smiling rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.
Wendy later reflects on the choral practice where her mother contracted the virus, noting that knowledge has been gained that contributed to taking preventive measures.
“As far as we know, that was God’s plan to help her do that.”
“I think my mother would be willing to give up her life to save lives,” Bonnie said. “That was the kind of person she was.”