Editor's Note: (In a series of essays called The Distance, Thomas Lake is telling the stories of Americans living through the pandemic. This essay is based on extensive phone interviews with Maria Andrade.
Email thomas.lake@cnn.com if you have a story idea. )
(CNN) We live in a time of ruined plans, a year of final reckoning. It has forced millions of us to look back and ask ourselves what we did right or wrong, what we left unsaid or undone, in the fleeting moments with someone we loved and lost. When Maria Andrade thinks of her father, she keeps coming back to the same two regrets.
"Hey, daughter," he would say on the phone, any old weekday after work, probably on the couch with a cold beer. And he would ask her to come over, just because.
Sometimes she came over. But sometimes she said, "No, I'm kind of busy," and now she wishes she had always said yes.
So that's one regret. We will get to the second. On April 22, Jose Andrade-Garcia turned 62. There should have been ice cream cake, and a big party with the grandchildren at the house in Marshalltown, but the patriarch was in Iowa City, about 100 miles away, and a Zoom call was the best anyone could do.
Through the rectangular frame of her cellphone, Maria saw her father. He wore a white gown. His eyes were closed; his eyelids swollen. His dark hair was turning white. His face was unshaven. He had a feeding tube in his nose and a breathing tube in his mouth. Was this the same man she'd known all her life? Just three weeks earlier, he was strong and healthy and going to work.
At the JBS pork processing plant in Marshalltown, Jose spent more than 20 years cutting the meat from the bones. Some days he couldn't wash the smell away. But he kept working to support his children and give them a chance to find something better.
"Look at me," Maria remembers him telling his children. "It's hard. I come home and my knees hurt and my wrists hurt, and I don't want that for you guys."
A nurse held an iPad so his family could see him, although he could not see them. Could he hear them? The doctors hoped so. His sons and daughters took turns wishing him a happy birthday, promising a real party when he got home. Maria muted her line to make sure he couldn't hear her crying.
Jose Andrade-Garcia never learned to read. He'd grown up in rural Mexico, surrounded by adobe houses and strawberry fields, and come to the US for better opportunities. Maria took the chance her father gave her, stayed in school, applied herself, and now she worked as an accounting assistant at a credit union. She helped her father manage his bills, renew his passport, file his paperwork. There was something else she tried to do for him, too.
It's not clear when the first worker at the Marshalltown plant tested positive for Covid-19. I asked JBS spokesperson Cameron Bruett, and I didn't get an answer. Responding to the pandemic, the company instituted new safety measures: physical distancing, enhanced disinfection, mandatory use of masks, requiring sick workers to stay home, and many others. The virus tore through American meatpacking plants in April and May. At a JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, six workers died.
No one can know where or how Jose contracted the virus. According to Maria, her father said coworkers appeared to be sick in early April. A few days later, he told her he was feeling shortness of breath. He kept working until April 13. He took a coronavirus test on April 16. On April 17, when he could barely draw enough breath to speak a full sentence, Maria called for an ambulance.
She watched him on the birthday Zoom call, in a coma from which he would never emerge, and after his death she wondered what else she could have done.
"Dad, you should stay home," she told him in early April, when she heard the news of other meatpacking workers getting sick.
"Yeah, I should stay home," he said. But he kept going to work.
This was her second regret: She couldn't persuade her father to stay home when staying home might have saved his life. He had a goal in mind, and he would not be deterred. Maria had recently helped him file his retirement paperwork. After 20 years of doing a job he hated for the sake of those he loved, Jose could see the finish line. His last day would have been April 22, his 62nd birthday.
Maria looked at her phone, wishing she could hold his hand. It was easy to picture another version of this day. He would be on the couch, surrounded by children and grandchildren, with a cold beer in his hand and a smile on his face.
"I did it," she imagined him saying. "I'm all done. Thank God I'll never go back to JBS."
An earlier version incorrectly described the number of JBS Greeley plant workers who died.