LOVINGTON, N.M. – Angie Guillen remembers the early days of COVID-19, when the new virus — called “The Coronavirus” back then — was just starting to interfere with global supply chains.
“Before all the craziness,” she said, sitting in an embroidered chair in the lobby of the New Mexico funeral home where she works as an attendant. “We went to Walmart and everything was empty. We could not find water, we could not find anything. So we came back the next day and there was nothing, the shelves were empty. Because of the virus. It is a feeling that I can’t explain.”
Then her workplace — the Kirby-Ratliff Funeral Home in Lovington, New Mexico — started to show undeniable signs of the deadly virus. Bodies began arriving. First one, then a few at a time, and then multiple arrivals not only from Lovington, but from the rest of New Mexico and Texas.
“Everybody who was dying, it was COVID. Every day, one or two, from COVID,” she said. When the overflow of bodies from the region’s larger cities — Albuquerque, El Paso, Las Cruces, Lubbock, Roswell — then began arriving at her funeral home, she knew this global pandemic would be unlike anything she had ever seen.
“I did not know what to think. There was so much death. There was no room for the bodies over there, so they were getting shipped out to us,” she said. “When they died, we had to pick them up. We would send our personal transport to pick them up.”
Guillen, who began at the funeral home eight years before COVID-19, could have never known that her role as a funeral home attendant would one day place her as a witness to the casualties of COVID-19, the modern world’s longest, most devastating pandemic. She shared thoughts on how the pandemic impacted her and her family, and their lives. She is one of dozens of New Mexicans interviewed by the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative as part of our coverage of how the state is recovering from the ongoing pandemic.
As of October 2022, Lea County, where Lovington is located, has had more than 22,500 COVID-19 cases and 406 deaths. Lovington, the county seat, has a population of 11,400.
Guillen’s job at the funeral home placed her very close to the mourners of COVID victims. Their deaths, she said, were more difficult to mourn because the disease invaded quickly, ravaging the body of their loved one and leaving family members unprepared to deal with the sudden loss.
She said COVID deaths, however lengthy the sickness might be, are still a shock to family members. The quick decline, the steady loss of breathing ability, the confinement to a bed, a respirator, then death leaves families surprised and devastated.
“It hurts to see grieving families,” she said. “When they just died of COVID, it is something you did not expect them to die of. If they died of a heart attack, or they were with hospice, the family is more prepared for their death,” she said.
Angie remembers when she first started working at the funeral home.
It was July of 2012, and she shocked her mother by accepting a job at a local funeral home.
“When I first started working here, I told my mom, and she was like: ‘Mija! Why are you going to work at a funeral home? Eres muy miedosa! (You’re such a scaredy-cat)!’” Angie recalled with a quiet laugh.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know Mom. If I don’t like it, I’ll stop working there,” she said.
It’s been 10 years since that conversation with her mother. Much has happened since then, especially since COVID-19 swept through the world nearly two and a half years ago infecting and killing millions.
Then the deaths began to happen in her family. Her nephew, in his early 40s, died of COVID.
Then, tragically for Angie, her mother, 75-year-old Selfa Moreno, tested positive for COVID. The virus was in her home, and the family prayed, preparing their mom for the battle to save her life.
“I said to her: ‘Mom, you are going to have to fight! You are going to have good days and you will have bad days. But you will have to be strong and fight through all of this!’” she recalls telling her mom. “My mom said, ‘Yes, I know and I will.”
Her mother — a faithful Catholic who would skip group rosary prayers because some group members did not wear masks — then developed a high fever, and began struggling with her breathing. She went to the hospital and was airlifted to Lubbock.
“She lasted 15 days and then she died of COVID. We were not expecting my mom to die,” said Angie quietly. “Until the last day … She died about 6 in the evening on Dec. 11.”
She believes her mom was infected by COVID when she went to the hospital for a non-COVID health matter.
At the time of her mother’s death, Angie could not visit her because she herself had contracted COVID.
Her mother’s body was flown back to the Lovington funeral home where Angie worked. Angie was still stuck in COVID isolation and couldn’t attend her mother’s funeral.
“She was buried on a Friday, and then after, I came back to work. I did not get to say goodbye,” she said.
She also missed her last opportunity to speak with her conscious mother. Before being placed on the respirator at the Lubbock hospital, Selfa called her daughter at the funeral home in Lovington.
“I was talking to a family at the funeral home, and the girl who answered didn’t tell me that it was my mom,” said Angie.
She tried calling the hospital back.
“I tried calling my mom. I never got to speak to her again. So I never got to say goodbye. She was already gone, she was just on the ventilator,” Angie said.
Selfa’s death has deeply affected the family she left behind.
“My granddaughter, she was very close to my mom,” Angie said. “Every time she comes home, she goes to the cemetery.”
“We all still take this very hard,” she said.
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Reyes Mata III is a reporter for the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative.
