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Isabelle Odette Hilton Papadimitriou, 64, Dallas, USA
The eleven months in which her granddaughter Lua accompanied her life were probably not always an easy life in the most beautiful time of Isabelle Papadimitrious. She was married three times and had two children. Often, as her daughter recalls, she longed for distant places. She was born in Texas, lived in Hawaii and Mexico for a few years. Dreamed of Greece, of Paris.
Papadimitriou worked as a respiratory therapist, putting patients on ventilators and helping convalescents to strengthen their lungs again. Most recently, she worked in a hospital rehab center in Dallas and felt the effects of the pandemic directly: there was not enough protective equipment. But wanting to support her daughter and her husband in New York, who had become unemployed, she took additional shifts. At the end of June she felt ill. One test was positive.
He wrote to his daughter in New York: “I will fight this. I can do it for Princess Lua.” Her daughter sent her dozens of photographs of her granddaughter. But her strength was not enough. Isabelle Papadimitriou died on July 4 at a Dallas hospital.
Shortly after Papadimitriou’s funeral, one last package arrived at his daughter’s house in New York. Inside were little pink shoes for Lua.
Ursula Schank, 79, Potsdam, Germany
When Torsten, the son, left the Potsdam apartment after his death, he found numerous shoe boxes under the bed in his mother’s bedroom. He opened it and found at least a thousand pages of paper, handwritten in very pronounced handwriting. Torsten Schank started reading, cried a lot, and has wondered ever since how well he really knew his mother.
Of course, I knew that she was born on October 14, 1940 in Pomerania, in Eichenberge, which has been called Dąbie since the end of the war and is in Poland. Ursula Schank was eight years old when the family was evicted. Her father stayed in the war, so Ursula and her mother, her one-and-a-half-year-old younger sister, grandmother and aunt left the farm in a horse-drawn cart, the village of 200 souls, their home . The walk drove more than 400 kilometers west to Kanin in Brandenburg, where he stopped in front of a restaurant. In the shoe boxes under the bed she found her mother’s life story: individual notes, long memories, thoughts. “I had no idea,” says Torsten Schank. She thanks her mother for the manuscripts.
Part of the notes is titled “My first life” and a chapter is called “Born.” Ursula Schank writes that they heated the oven with birch wood at home, because then the crust of the sourdough bread tasted a little sweet. She writes how she fell to her knees in the brick hallway, screamed loud and cried and waited for the comfort of her father, who just looked over her shoulder and asked: Did you find anything? Write how he jumped up and was embarrassed.
Ursula Schank’s second life began in Brandenburg. He moved to Werder, then across the Havel to Potsdam. She worked as a kindergarten teacher, got married, took a stroll in the Sanssouci park, got divorced and raised her son alone. It made it possible for him to take piano and judo lessons, and when Torsten brought a puppy home without asking in winter when he was ten, she didn’t scold him. They named the mongrel “Bummi” after the yellow bear from the GDR children’s magazine. Torsten Schank says: “As good as it was in the East, I had it just as good.”
After the fall of the Wall, Ursula Schank soon retired early. After being hit by a car on her bicycle, she had to use a walker. She would knit, she would go to church, she would meet up with old colleagues for a coffee with milk or a Prosecco at the “Extrablatt”. She never wanted a television. When Torsten bought him one anyway, he put it away that night. She preferred to listen to the radio, Deutschlandfunk.
In March, Ursula Schank fell with the walker, probably a wheel got stuck in the tram tracks. He had to go to the hospital and the doctors diagnosed him with a bruise on his shoulder. Two days later he went to a rehabilitation center to improve his mobility. She was released on April 1, a crown test was not performed. Three days later, a geriatric nurse rang the bell, but she did not answer. The nurse saw Ursula Schank lying on the floor through a window and opened the apartment door. She came to the intensive care unit with a fever and shortness of breath; the corona test was positive.
Ursula Schank died on April 9. For her 80th birthday, her son wanted to fly with her to the sun, to Greece. Ursula Schank had replied that the Polish Baltic Sea was also beautiful. Torsten Schank wants to type and save his mother’s notes.
Nelson Meurer, 77, Francisco Beltrão, Brazil
When Nelson Meurer moved into his cell at Francisco Beltrao State Prison in October of last year, he was one of the institution’s most famous residents. Meurer, a distinguished 77-year-old man with thick, snow-white hair, was the mayor of a small town in southwestern Brazil. He represented them as a deputy in Brasilia for more than two decades, until the Supreme Court sentenced him to a long prison term for corruption and money laundering.
The judges had told him 13 years, nine months and 10 daysand whoever searches the trial files one more time will see a detective novel set in the back room of the Brazilian capital. The protagonists: older politicians decapitating expensive wines in luxurious hotel suites, while messengers disappear into the bathroom and remove thick wads of money from their underwear. Meurer was also one of these men. Over the years, he has pocketed 79 monthly payments of nearly 50,000 euros, several key witnesses told investigators.
Meurer’s trial was part of an epic corruption scandal that plunged Brazil into a deep crisis that continues to this day. Without this investigation, which uncovered how hundreds of parliamentarians, senators and former ministers looted the coffers of state corporations, a man like current President Jair Bolsonaro could hardly have recommended himself to a disgruntled people as a clean alternative.
“From the beginning my father feared that he would not survive imprisonment”says attorney Nelson Meurer Junior. Meurer was diabetic and suffered from heart problems, high blood pressure and chronic kidney failure. Your son says he took 22 tablets every day. To do this, insulin was injected. Because the nursing home’s infirmary was not always manned, he requested to be placed under house arrest on humanitarian grounds, but the judge in charge refused. That was before the pandemic. As the crown’s numbers increased, the attorneys tried again, several times, but each time the request was rejected.
Despite appearing depressed, he continued to stand in the kitchen every day working to reduce the length of his sentence.
“It can’t be that they let me die here,” Meurer said when his son last visited him in March. He died on July 12 directly from Covid-19. In the days and weeks before, his son calls “the chronicle of a death that has been announced.”
Kim Young-sook, 79, Daegu, South Korea
When saying goodbye, the grandmother always hugged her grandchildren very tightly. “Please come back soon,” he said. She sang with them and laughed a lot. Her nine grandchildren were supposed to eat well when they came to visit her. Those who stayed longer with her, the “Halmeoni” (grandmother) and the “Halabeoji” (grandfather) sometimes came back a little more rounded.
Kim Young-sook and her husband Lee Sang-man began life as a married couple in the south of the country in the city of Daegu in the 1960s. Lee was a craftsman and construction worker. His wife sewed her clothes herself, she was extremely talented, her second eldest daughter Jung-mi remembers the pretty pink lunch bag she sewed. Many of her friends were jealous.
That she is no longer alive, Jung-mi says, feels unreal. Kim had severe stomach problems in late February. When one of her daughters brought her soup, she collapsed. She died in the ambulance on March 2.
The children were told that Kim had died from Covid-19. She had posthumously tested positive. All five children struggled to see her again. Her mother was lying behind glass. She looked calm and still wore the striped blouse that she always wore.
Conny Nxumalo, 53, Pretoria, South Africa
For some, she was simply Sesi Conny, Sister Conny, while she was considered the best social worker in South Africa: Conny Nxumalo had dedicated her life to those who had little and needed protection. Even during the apartheid regime in the early 1990s, she spent a lot of time in black towns, especially with children.
When Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, Nxumalo assumed a key role in the country’s social policy. He fought for laws that protect everyone; especially children, the elderly and women who suffered violence. Commenting on the deep divisions that persist in South African society, Nxumalo once said: “You can see these social ills corrode our communities.”
Then in March of this year, when South Africa closed its borders and the government urged social distancing, it was up to Nxumalo to handle this crisis. Organized roundtrip flights for compatriots. She was part of the Corona crisis team. At one of the meetings, Nxumalo believed that he later contracted the corona virus. Conny Nxumalo died on August 22 at a Pretoria hospital.
