Cindy and Mark Bezzek at their Sanford home on December 17.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Cindy Bezzek and her husband built their home in Sanford, North Carolina, as an oasis, with bonsai trees, turtles, and a koi pond with waterfalls. The place called Tranquility Ranch was Bezzek’s sanctuary after years of turmoil. Her mantra when 2020 began: “Look for the beauty.”
Then the spring came, when Mark Bezzek, a physician, began treating patients so sick they died, no matter what he did. When Mark’s mother contracted Covid-19 and died. When a healthcare facility stopped Cindy’s visits to her own mother, Louise Hope. When the 92-year-old stopped eating and languished.
Then, as Cindy had long feared, her 33-year-old daughter, Marley, overdosed for the last time.
The pandemic that started 12,000 kilometers away in a corner of a Chinese market engulfed the defenses of Tranquility Ranch. With her four-year-old husband plunged into medical crisis and unable to freely visit friends and family, it left Bezzek, a 62-year-old retired mother of three, to grieve alone.
Photos of Cindy Bezzek’s late mother, Louise Hope, and daughter, Marley Atamanchuk.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“I stay outside a lot. It just feels like you need the air because your grief is so great. When you’re inside, it feels like you’re going to choke, ”says Bezzek, who has the elongated vowels of a life in North Carolina. ‘My daughter is gone. My mother is gone. And I am still here. “
Around the world, 2020 was a year of loss: of education, jobs, health and lives. The US, whose federal government has refused aggressive measures to deal with the pandemic, has seen more than 19 million cases of Covid-19 and 333,000 deaths, mostly among the elderly and people of color. This year, as many as 130,500 Americans are expected to die from other causes, above the historical average. At least one factor: With people cut off from family members and support systems, drug overdoses and mental health crises have exploded.
But despite all that families like the Bezzeks have endured, 2021 will begin like the year that preceded it. According to one model, there could be 209,000 deaths in the US by Covid-19 in April. When calculating the impact of lives lost, productivity, and health, economists and academics predict long-term effects on the mental health of those who experienced the pandemic. Families in the US are already grappling with that toll.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in December, Bezzek has a video visit with two of her three sisters. The eldest, Bonnie Allen, continues to cough – actually hacking. She doesn’t smell or taste and it drives her crazy, she tells her sisters. The symptoms have spoiled a plan to visit her granddaughter in Pittsburgh, who is having a sixth unicorn-themed birthday party.
Cindy Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“Maybe it will change,” Bezzek tells her sisters. “Maybe the vaccine will be wonderful and things will just open up and we can get back to a better life.”
Maybe, Allen says. But she read that even after a vaccination, we still need masks and social detachment.
“I’m just trying to find some hope for 2021,” says Bezzek.
“We only have three weeks left,” says Allen.
“Fortunately,” Kari Crow of Katy, Texas, still the family’s baby at the age of 50, pipes.
The day after they speak, Allen’s test result comes back: positive.
Covid-19 has been running in families for months. In April the sisters had gathered when their mother contracted the disease.
Assuming this was the end, the assisted living facility in Pittsboro, North Carolina, had them visit, Bezzek says. When Louise Hope gathered, the house stopped visiting again. Then she stopped eating. Her daughters think she felt abandoned and isolated. Bezzek was able to visit her in her mother’s last days, but arrived too late on the afternoon of July 22 to be with Louise when she died.
“Covid didn’t kill her, but the broken heart did, I guess,” said Allen.
A memorial stone for Cindy Bezzek’s deceased daughter, Marley, in the family yard.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Louise Hope had seven children and raised them in Alabama and then North Carolina, where she and her daughters joined the insular Worldwide Church of God, which some have called cult-like. There, an 18-year-old Bezzek met her first husband and married the father of her three children, including Marley.
After a divorce, she left the church, remarried to a real estate developer, and helped manage properties they rented out to students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That marriage collapsed in 2015, eroded by years of efforts to help Marley. She met Mark Bezzek online that year and messaged the 62-year-old emergency room doctor because she liked his smile. They got married a year later and moved to Tranquility Ranch in 2018.
They lost Mark’s 82-year-old mother in June. Already suffering from Alzheimer’s, she contracted Covid-19 in a nursing home in New Jersey, and died a week later. Until they got the call, they didn’t even know about the diagnosis, he says.
Mark Bezzek, stoic, with white hair and a broad, rough face, has been surrounded by the disease for months, often without adequate protective equipment. Even with the trauma in his family, the job has kept Mark from taking days off. His hospital is seeing more Covid-19 patients than ever, and with a limited number of nurses, every staffed bed is full.
“It is difficult to process the losses at home and at work. You are just surrounded by death all the time, ”he says. “One of the things I have about Cindy is that I worked with death. I have been surrounded by it all my career. You end up, I wouldn’t say, stone-hearted, but you become a little less passionate about death. “
Cindy, meanwhile, had been haunted for years by the prospect of a special death. Marley Atamanchuk had become addicted to opioids in her late teens. She married, had children and became a beautician. Nothing stopped the cycle of treatment, recovery, and relapse.
Cindy and Mark Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
The pandemic has not quelled America’s addiction crisis – instead, driving forces such as economic despair and social isolation have intensified. The number of overdose deaths, which is already on the rise, appears to be accelerating, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned. According to the agency, more than 81,000 such deaths occurred in the year through May, the highest number ever in a 12-month period.
Marley was fired this year and Bezzek saw signs that she was in decline. Insurance through the Affordable Care Act paid for a program, but Marley returned to a world without in-person support meetings and struggled to find the same connection through Zoom offerings.
Just two weeks after the death of the grandmother who gave Marley her middle name Louise, she overdosed on heroin and died days later.
The Hope sisters revisited North Carolina in August while Marley was in a hospital bed. But when it came time to collect her ashes from the funeral home, Bezzek was alone. She drove herself and tied the urn to the passenger seat. Neither Marley nor Louise Hope had a funeral.
Lately, Bezzek has been spending her days meditating and reading books about death and the afterlife. For the rest of the year, she gave herself a free pass: to eat sugar with every meal, or not to wash her face. But in January she has to get up and move again; maybe start some volunteering, if Covid allows it.
She hasn’t chosen a mantra for 2021. She thinks it’s about coming home to herself. Finding ways to keep moving forward.