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SANTA NELLA — The Hartwig children grieved in disbelief at a veterans cemetery Friday, on a windswept hilltop so far from the grave site they couldn’t even see their parents being lowered into the ground.
“See that little blip? That’s the casket,” said Edward Hartwig, 29, the youngest of Richard and Mercedes Hartwig’s children, as a cart carrying a flagless coffin disappeared behind a row of trees.
His father had always wanted a proper military burial since returning from fighting in Vietnam, a sign of the respect and gratitude he never received when he came home. But there was no honor guard at his grave. No playing of taps.
Coronavirus had not only taken his life but that final dignity.
It took his wife, Mercedes Hartwig, too. Her ashes were supposed to be tucked into the coffin next to his body. But under strict, new pandemic rules that even caught their funeral director by surprise, the casket couldn’t be opened at the cemetery so the urn was buried next to it. Their family couldn’t watch the burial at the grave site. And coronavirus travel restrictions kept the family priest stuck in Rome, leaving the couple without a Catholic blessing for their final passage.
More than 1,500 Californians have died since the coronavirus pandemic swept through the state early this year, but few families have suffered and lost as much in these last two months as the Hartwigs.
While public health departments are backtracking and struggling to pinpoint even the first victims to die, Richard and Mercedes Hartwig appear to be one of the first married couples in Northern California to perish from the COVID-19 virus.
Since they died in different hospitals, in different counties, health officials didn’t even realize their connection: Married for 33 years, the 72-year-old Dutch immigrant with a droll sense of humor and the 61-year-old Salvadoran spitfire met on a Santa Clara assembly line making Memorex tapes. They had endured overwhelming emotional and financial burdens during their lifetimes, suffering through the lingering traumas of war, losing a home to the foreclosure crisis.
“They were both definitely survivors,” their 32-year-old daughter, Naomi Hartwig, said. “So it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around that this is what ended their life — some random illness that no one knew anything about.”
And their deaths are only part of the story of how a little-understood infectious disease ravaged an American family.
Within the Hartwig family alone, the virus appears to have sickened at least five other members, including all three of the couple’s children, a daughter-in-law and Mercedes’ beloved 51-year-old sister who remains intubated in a San Jose hospital.
“I feel like we’ve been cheated. I feel like I was robbed by all of this,” their eldest child, Rene, said. “Not just me, but a lot of people who lost their families because of this virus. We were robbed.”
‘If we had known more’
No one knows for sure how they all became infected. Maybe it was the family birthday party in San Jose in late February or a smaller gathering in early March. But on March 9, both Mercedes at home in Lathrop and daughter Naomi at her apartment in San Jose fell ill with fever, body aches, chills and a cough. Could this be coronavirus? they wondered.
They didn’t know that during what public health officials now consider the “lost month” of February, the virus was spreading in the Bay Area undetected for a woeful lack of testing. By early March, only a few cases had been reported in Santa Clara County and the closest outbreak — the 21 passengers and crew infected on the Grand Princess cruise ship — was still floating off the coast of San Francisco.
Naomi and her partner took a trip in mid-February to Hawaii as planned and she traveled to Utah the previous weekend for a music teachers conference.
The day she and her mom developed symptoms, Santa Clara County was taking its first major action over the virus, banning large gatherings of more than 1,000 people.
“If we had known more of the details from the get-go,” Naomi said, “maybe none of this would have happened; my parents wouldn’t have gotten sick because we would have taken better precautions.”
Instead, Naomi, whose cough was so bad she nearly threw up, was never tested for coronavirus and instead diagnosed with pneumonia. Her brother, Rene, with whom she shares an apartment, would come down with the same coronavirus symptoms, followed by his wife, Fon, who weeks later was granted the rare privilege of a test, and proved positive.
But the COVID-19 virus spread so quickly through Northern California that public health officials couldn’t track the path of each infection so they weren’t aware of the Hartwigs’ mounting tragedy.
Sixty miles away in Lathrop, Naomi’s younger brother, Edward, would bear the responsibility of tending to his parents’ fast-moving and confounding illnesses. He had followed in his father’s footsteps as a machine technician and lived with his parents in the San Joaquin Valley.
At first, his mother was prescribed an antibiotic. By the following Sunday — March 15 — with his father starting to feel sick and his mother’s fever refusing to break, Edward drove them both to the emergency room at Sutter community hospital in Tracy, fearing they had coronavirus. Nurses scanned thermometers across their foreheads. His mother registered a fever of 101.4; her father 99.8. Edward waited outside.
“When they came out 30 minutes later, they said my dad’s symptoms were extremely minor and my mom’s weren’t serious enough to be admitted,” Edward said. “They prescribed an inhaler and sent them home. They said they didn’t have any tests to give them.”
Two days earlier, President Donald Trump had declared a national emergency and had been promising “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” So why, Edward wondered, weren’t his parents getting the treatment they needed?
‘Didn’t do well not together’
Mercedes Hartwig was always the caregiver in the family. If she wasn’t babysitting for friends and relatives, she was taking care of her husband, who battled diabetes and nearly died a few years ago of heart problems that required him to wear a pacemaker. Ever since, Mercedes was hyper-attuned to her husband’s health — and often argued with him over his love of canned Vienna sausages and sweets.
“They would yell at each other about him not taking care of himself. It would blow over,” said Shelley Hartwig, Richard’s daughter from his first marriage. “They were affectionate and lovey-dovey when he got up and walked into the kitchen where she was. They didn’t do well not together.”
The psychological effects of fighting in Vietnam in 1968 and ‘69 with the Screaming Eagles in the 101 Airborne Division had scarred him, ending his first marriage and frightening his children from both. He would tell them later — after he finally received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in the 1990s at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto — that he had witnessed his best friend decapitated by a helicopter blade, that when he wasn’t shooting at Viet Cong as a door gunner from a helicopter he was tasked with counting mutilated bodies. When he came home, like so many other soldiers, “nobody cared about him,” Shelley said.
He would have nightmares and wake up sweating. He became paranoid, believing people were staring at him when they went out, so he mostly stayed home. Mercedes would take the children camping, but he would never go. Once he went for the day, but couldn’t spend the night in the woods.
The couple had met when both were working at Tandy Corp. in Santa Clara in the late 1980s. He fixed the machines that made Memorex cassette tapes. Mercedes, who had recently immigrated here, worked on the assembly line. They raised their three children in apartments in Santa Clara, and at times moved in with relatives, before saving enough to buy a home in Stockton in 2000.
“They wanted for me and my brother and sister to have our very own rooms and our very own house and backyard,” Rene said. “It was the biggest backyard I had ever seen.”
But when the foreclosure crisis struck in 2008 and Richard got sick with coronary heart disease and lost his job, he also lost the family home. He had trouble finding work after that and they ultimately moved into a rental.
“It was very tragic and heartbreaking for all of us,” Rene said, “especially for my mom.”
‘Feel like I’m drowning’
On March 17, as the Bay Area’s historic stay-at-home order began, Mercedes’ fever continued to rise. Edward, now both son and caregiver, started feeling ill himself — with a headache, nausea, loss of smell and taste and “a bit of difficulty breathing.” He wasn’t sick enough to go to the hospital, he said, and had enough on his hands.
When his mother’s fever climbed to 102.5, Edward again called the doctor who this time prescribed his mother a steroid and advised him to “continue monitoring her symptoms.” Like so many who had been suffering as the pandemic began overwhelming hospitals across the country, he was told to isolate his parents and stay at home.
“It was frustrating, but I just kind of trusted the doctors,” Edward said. “What else could I do?”
With no medical training, Edward suddenly found himself sifting through leftover medical equipment still in the house from his dad’s heart problems and his grandmother’s time in hospice — heart monitors, equipment to check blood sugar, a couple of extra liter bottles of oxygen. On March 18, when his mother’s cough became “super severe” and her oxygen levels dropped below 90 percent, he hooked up the first tank.
When it ran out that night, his mother whispered, “I feel like I’m drowning.”
He tried to rush her to San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, but on the way, they were interrupted by an utterly frustrating confrontation. After rolling through a stop sign as he entered the freeway onramp, he was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol. “I’m telling her I’m in the middle of an emergency,” Edward said of the officer. “She acted like I was trying to get out of a ticket.”
On the side of the road, with “my mother panicking,” he demanded the officer call paramedics. Ticket in hand, Edward drove alone to the hospital — five minutes away — and waited for his mother to arrive.
Mercedes was admitted into the ICU that night of March 18, quarantined and finally tested for COVID-19. Not until the funeral would Edward or any of his siblings get that close to her again.
The cruelty of separation
Mercedes’ “love language” was touch.
“She was the type of person who showed her love constantly — almost to the point we couldn’t keep up with how much love she wanted,” Naomi said. “If she had it her way, all her kids would have lived in her house all together forever.”
Instead, she welcomed others into their home, from relatives and friends who needed a place to stay, to stray animals. She had nearly a thousand Facebook friends, more than her children had, and “anywhere she went, she could make a friend. A restaurant, a party, a festival,” Naomi said.
Having such a network helped lift her spirits as she suffered tremendous pain from fibromyalgia. “Everybody loved her,” Naomi said.
As her condition worsened, doctors sedated and intubated her. She had no way to speak after that, nor receive visitors.
“I’m almost certain if this was a different circumstance and we were allowed to be by her side 24/7, I really believe she would have pulled through,” Naomi said. “Same with my dad.”
With Mercedes in the hospital, Richard began a downward spiral at home. His fever had passed, but he wouldn’t eat without Edward hand-feeding him.
“I worried about his blood sugar,” said Edward, who drove his father to the VA Hospital in Palo Alto. “I was worried that one of my father’s maladies would get out of control.”
Doctors told Edward his father would likely be discharged in a day or two. But his blood oxygen levels dipped, and on April 1, nearly a week after being admitted, Edward received the stunning news: His father had died of a heart attack and pneumonia caused by COVID-19.
Unaware of it all, Mercedes was entering her second week on a ventilator, isolated in a coronavirus ward 76 miles away. Her children agonized over how to tell her about Richard, Naomi said, but she never regained consciousness. “We never got to tell her my dad died.”
By the first week of April, Mercedes’ breathing tube had been in so long — more than two weeks — that a blockage had formed. When doctors replaced the tube, her vital signs plummeted.
“We begged to see her, so she’s not alone,” Naomi said. “It’s easy to give up when you’re by yourself.”
Naomi and her brother, Edward, were allowed to get close enough to see their mother through a sliding glass door, taking turns in the hospital hallway. They used FaceTime to connect with their older brother, Rene, who was in San Jose, starting to recover from his own illness — he had been so weak he collapsed on the stairs — and his wife was just getting sick.
They pointed the camera toward the bed where their mother lay still, then moved to the nurses station to speak to her through the intercom hanging at her bedside.
“I just told her that I loved her,” Edward said, “and I didn’t want to lose her.”
Two days later, she was gone.
No staying distant in saying goodbye
On Tuesday, at the Alta Mesa Funeral Home in Palo Alto around the corner from where their father had died, the Hartwig children arrived wearing the obligatory protective masks and gloves. They had been warned not to touch, hug or kiss their parents as they lie in repose in side-by-side open caskets. New federal recommendations were supposed to keep them away from a corpse.
But during the brief, heart-wrenching service, they collapsed into the coffins.
“I don’t think they could have stopped me,” said Shelley, Richard’s daughter. “I had to say goodbye. I had to hug him and touch his face.”
Her brother, Scott, also from Richard’s first marriage, was unable to travel because of the COVID-19 pandemic and couldn’t attend.
Richard lay in a black coffin with American flag motifs around the edges and a U.S. Army insignia visible when the lid was open. Mercedes lay in a simple brown “cremation coffin,” lined with white linen.
When Rene approached them, he hesitated at first, taking a step in each direction before falling into his mother’s quilted casket. He rested his head on her chest and draped his arms over her floral blouse. His mask muffled his sobs. His glasses steamed with tears. “I’m grateful to be your son,” he whispered.
The rules of the service were clear: Only 10 mourners allowed in the chapel to accommodate social distancing. They were granted back-to-back services because two people had died.
Without a priest, the family chose not to spend time with formal eulogies. They all knew the stories already — how Mercedes loved to dance, how Richard’s jokes made him the favorite uncle. Instead, they spent every one of the 60 minutes making up for the intimacy they had lost.
At Friday’s burial at the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery, the family stood on the windy hilltop near signs warning of rattlesnakes and strained for a glimpse of their parents’ final resting place. An American flag flew at half staff above them.
But there was no bugler at the graveside, no flag on their father’s coffin.
Frustrated, they broke the rules and drove down to the burial site and got out of their cars, but were shooed away.
“I’m sorry,” Rene said. “This is not the way you wanted it, Dad.”
“Our whole family paid for his time in Vietnam with his PTSD and that’s how they treated him,” Shelley said just before she drove away. “We didn’t even see them lower the casket.”
These last two months have been frantic, desperate and infuriating. After Friday’s service, the Hartwigs were promised they could return to these remote foothills for an honor guard ceremony when the pandemic is over, but they know it won’t be the same. And even though Richard and Mercedes aren’t nestled in the same casket, their children can take solace that, at least, they will be side by side.
“I don’t think he necessarily wanted to live if she didn’t,” Shelley said. “And if she had lived and he would have died, her heart would have been broken forever. They had to be together.”
