'His Life Had Purpose': Remembering Coronavirus Victims

When the coronavirus took the life of Francis Devin on May 1, his daughter Therese Royce didn't want to tell her mother. She told her brothers she believed her mother would soon succumb to COVID-19. Her brothers told her she was being morbid.

Within a week, Anne Devin had also died.

Stories like the Devins', while tragic, have become all too familiar across Massachusetts, with the first such reported death happening on March 20, 2020. An 87-year-old Winthrop man became the first reported COVID-19 victim in the state. Since then 16,426 more deaths have been reported in the Commonwealth.

Patch asked readers to give us a look into their lives and the people they lost to the virus — how they lived and what the scar of a COVID-19 death looks like on loved ones. “It just happened so fast,” was a phrase echoed in nearly every interview. Whether the virus attacked with force in less than a week or relegated loved ones to a ventilator for 39 days, not a single person could say they had enough time to say goodbye.

The Devins: Inseparable Couple Until The End

While families across the country tried their best to quarantine together to stay safe, some were caught in the virus’ grips together. Francis and Anne Devin of Framingham were one such couple.

At 90 and 86 years old, respectively, the Devins were rarely seen apart — from grocery shopping to casino trips, you wouldn’t see Francis without Anne or vice-versa. The couple was so inseparable, that when Anne’s Alzheimer’s took a dangerous turn and Francis suffered a nasty fall, the two entered a nursing home together in 2018.

“It was easily the hardest year I’ve ever had in my whole life,” said Therese Royce, the Devin’s only daughter.

Family was everything to Royce’s parents. They lived for and through their sons and daughter and grandchildren. Sunday dinners were non-negotiable and even when Anne couldn’t cook her famous roast beef dinner, the family would go out and gather at a restaurant to close out their week.

“They were so cute together,” Royce said. The Devins were as dedicated to catching the Red Sox games as they were to their grandkids’ hockey tournaments. There wasn’t a match they missed. All four of the Devin’s children stayed close by, either in Framingham or in surrounding towns like Marlborough. The initial isolation that the pandemic brought to nursing homes, was tough for the family to deal with.

Nursing homes were some of the first facilities to close in March 2020. The elderly and vulnerable populations in them made it a dangerous place for the virus to spread. Seemingly overnight, nursing homes and long term care facilities stopped visitation and locked down in an effort to keep the virus at bay. In total, 4,635 nursing home residents died of COVID-19 in Massachusetts, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network data.

“We had almost two months of them not being able to contact us,” Royce said. The few minutes they could steal on a FaceTime or phone call were strained at best, as both Royce’s parents struggled to understand them virtually.

When May rolled around, Royce said the virus was sweeping through the nursing home and her mother got sick first. She was taken to the hospital and Francis was left alone. By May 1st, Francis had quickly contracted and died of COVID-19, but Anne was still battling the virus in the hospital.

“We never told my mother that my dad died, we just knew she couldn’t handle it,” Royce said.

While planning the restricted funeral service for her father, Royce mentioned to her brothers that maybe they should wait, she had a feeling her mother would die soon too. They told her she was being morbid.

Less than a week later, Anne died of COVID-19.

The hardest part, Royce said, was knowing that her parents couldn’t get the big Catholic funeral they wanted. A proper mass and procession at St. George’s Church in Framingham would have been perfect.

“They were just the most loving parents, and grandparents — I felt like we didn’t do them justice,” Royce said.

Cynthia Watkins: Always Bringing The Family Together

Francis and Anne had been married 63 years and Royce doesn’t think they could have lived without each other. For people like Kevin Watkins in Peabody, that reality came sooner than he ever wanted to imagine when his wife, Cynthia Watkins, died of COVID-19 in June.

“We celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary in the hospital,” Kevin said, “I thought there still might be a chance she would be okay.”

Like so many other cases, the virus’ grip on Cynthia strengthened quickly. In a matter of weeks, a seemingly healthy 61-year-old teacher was airlifted from Beverly to Burlington Hospital and intubated. The woman that Kevin knew as the former cub scout master and host of every family party was fighting for each breath, and he could only watch from a passing FaceTime and hope for the best.

Cynthia had been teaching virtually since March 17, 2020, when public schools closed, along with most of the 70,000 other teachers in the Commonwealth. Teachers and schools have been vital parts of the conversation around vaccines and a “return to normalcy.” Teachers became eligible for vaccines on March 12, 2021, nearly a year after schools closed and nine months after Cynthia died of COVID-19.

There’s no clear way to describe what life looks like for Kevin now, but he feels like he’s starting from scratch without her. “It felt like getting hit with a brick,” Kevin said. He’s learning to cook and sitting in the silence that their house brings. It feels so much bigger now — Kevin’s never lived alone before.

Kevin had heard the stories of the virus moving quickly, but they had been so careful — Cynthia was teaching over Zoom, and they only went out for groceries. He still gets emotional talking about his late wife, but Kevin said he still has to think of the future and one without Cynthia leaves holes he’s trying to fill.

“In terms of keeping the family together all the time, I don’t know how that’s going to happen — my wife was always the one that did that,” Kevin said.

Whether it was Thanksgiving, Memorial Day weekend or just a nice enough weekend to bring the family together, Cynthia was ready with open arms and a table full of food. Kevin wants to try to fill that role, but said it's much harder without her by his side. Seven months after Cynthia passed, Kevin lost his cousin in Texas to COVID-19 as well.

Cynthia was always the one who went out of her way for others, whether it was her autistic students or Kevin’s parents who she insisted on taking in — Kevin said he hopes to bring that to his life now.

John Karamas: He Lived to Work and He Absolutely Loved it

Debra Karamas never thought she would have to live without her partner either, much less be the deciding factor in his passing.

“I know what it’s like now to lose your life partner, which I didn’t know before,” Debra said, her voice shaking.

Debra and her husband John didn’t talk about death often, but when they did, she would slyly joke with him and say “Please let me go first.” She feels now how much truth there was in that joke as she never wanted to live without him.

“There was nothing he wouldn’t do for me,” Debra giggled, “He was serious, but he was a big teddy bear.”

John Karamas couldn’t walk down a street in Peabody without greeting or catching up with someone. After 30 years working construction for the city, there wasn’t a facet of the Peabody’s infrastructure he didn’t know and not a person within it who didn’t know him.

The whole of Peabody may have known and loved John, but not better than Debra did.

“He just had a heart of gold, he was the person that always put himself last,” Debra said, “That man lived to work, he absolutely loved it.”

So when she saw him on a ventilator for 39 days, clinging to life with the help of whirring machines and relegated to a bed, unconscious, she knew the decision he’d want her to make. Debra and her family chose to take John off of life support and agreed, it was a decision he would have supported.

“This disease destroyed a healthy man,” Debra said. “Never in a million years would I have thought that this would happen.”

Anna Pezzella: “Her hobby was people.”

No matter the age, losing a parent is an unnerving experience. For Maria Iraci of Medford, losing her mother to COVID-19 was like a free-fall into grief since she didn’t have her father, who passed in 2018, to console her.

“The whole thing was just horrible,” Iraci said, “It’s not that I went through it alone because my husband is great and both my boys are wonderful — what got me at that point was I couldn’t even hug my brother.”

Iraci’s mother, Anna Pezzella died of COVID-19 on April 17th in a nursing home. Looking back at that time, Iraci remembers fears about the virus being at an all-time high and information being at a low. She knows now that her mother was likely one of the first COVID-19 related deaths in the nursing home, but Anna passed before testing reached her.

Over the course of the year, testing efforts rapidly expanded and over 17,500,000 tests have been administered in the state. Now, a similar rollout is being pushed for vaccine distribution in the Commonwealth. So far, over a million people have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 in the state. As Massachusetts moves forward with its plans to reopen and COVID-19 cases begin to fall across the state, a morsel of hope stands before the families of the virus’ victims.

“I feel guilty because I let her die alone,” Iraci said. But Anna would tell her daughter and son throughout their childhood to let go of grudges, repeating the phrase “life is short.” Her words still swim through Iraci’s mind when she’s feeling guilty.

Iraci admired that most about her mother – her ability to put others before herself and enjoy life, no matter how short it may have seemed. A traditional Italian mother, Anna compiled her love into dishes for her family and friends to enjoy at her table. Iraci fondly remembers the nights she spent watching her mom entertain.

“Her hobby was people, she was a social butterfly,” Iraci said.

When she wasn’t putting together her famous “gravy pasta” or chatting up friends on the block, her full attention was on her children and grandchildren.

“She loved us more than she loved herself,” Iraci said, “I used to tell her all the time, ‘I hope I’m half the mother you were.”

Robert Costello: “He just made everything easy.”

Just a town over in Malden, Susan Costello-Perez is learning to live without her father, Robert Costello. He was a family man through and through, filling the role of dad, grandpa and ‘family rock’ as Costello-Perez likes to call it.

Costello-Perez was a single mom, and when she was in need, her father swept right in to take care of her and her kids and never stopped living for and through them. When Costello-Perez told her parents she was pregnant they were thrilled and her father was there in the delivery room for the birth of her children.

“He just made everything easy,” Costello-Perez said, “He wanted to make sure we were taken care of.”

Robert was 78 when he died and aside from the early dementia that brought him to the nursing home he died in, Costello-Perez thought he was otherwise healthy. So much so, that he was one of the few residents in the facility to regularly check in and out to visit friends and family. The virus’ tight grip on her father shocked Costello-Perez because her father had worked with chemicals for W. R. Grace & Company in Cambridge for 41 years. He never complained of breathing or respiratory problems, she said.

The time between the nursing home officially cutting off visitors around March 11th and her father’s death on April 30th feel like a blur to Costello-Perez. The family walked by and caught glimpses of him through his window and watched him struggle to breathe over FaceTime.

Like Iraci, Costello-Perez said fears about the virus’ spread forced the grieving process to be distant and lonely. She couldn’t have the service for him that she wanted. Just six weeks before, Robert was coming out of the facility for dinner with the family, looking healthy and happy. Costello-Perez couldn’t wrap her head around how quickly things changed.

“What I want people to know is that he had purpose, his life had purpose — and we were robbed of him,” Costello-Perez said.

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