A year and a half into the pandemic, millions of Texans have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 54,000 have died. Vaccines brought family reunions and the hopeful, albeit short-lived, promise of a semi-normal summer. But with less than half of Texas’ population still unvaccinated, the more contagious Delta variant of the virus took hold and confirmed cases and hospitalizations surged in July and August. When this pandemic ends, it will leave behind scars far beyond what is captured in those numbers: jobs lost; homes lost; relationships, people, places, ways of life lost.
For more than a year, we’ve been following a group of Texans from across the state, chronicling the ways the pandemic has altered their lives in overlapping yet infinitely different ways. The first part of this series was published last September and the second, this March. In this third installment, we hear from these folks as they cautiously navigate their way into this next uncertain chapter. These are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. We’re grateful to them for sharing their stories.
JAMES T. CAMPBELL
AGE: 65
PROFESSION: INSURANCE EXECUTIVE
LOCATION: HOUSTON, HARRIS COUNTY
Almost a year and a half after James T. Campbell lost his dad, James Cleophas Campbell, to COVID-19 in March 2020, he still avoids his father’s bedroom. His mother, Rosa Campbell, still sleeps in the guest room, leaving their bedroom just as it was when an ambulance took her husband away in the early days of the pandemic. “I haven’t even gone in the room,” James T. says. “She asked me if I want my dad’s boots or his jewelry or anything like that, and I’m not yet prepared to do that.”
James T. thinks about his father nearly every day. His phone screensaver displays a photo of the pair at a Houston Texans game, “so every time I open up my phone, I see him.” He senses their close connection most strongly at night. Like his father, James T. suffers from insomnia, often obsessing over family problems. Lately, he’s spent many nights awake worrying about his 86-year-old mother, who refuses to get a COVID-19 vaccine. James T. and his sisters have spent months trying to change her mind but have begun to think that she may never do so.
A retired nurse, Rosa has continued to isolate instead of getting the shot, in part because she once suffered a severe reaction to the flu vaccine. She spends most of her time at the family’s three-bedroom house in the Houston neighborhood of Pleasantville. Others run her errands, everyone dons masks around her, and she attends church and funerals via Zoom.
In recent months, Campbell family gatherings have resumed without the patriarch and with many precautions. Mother’s and Father’s Days used to see the homestead jampacked with relatives. This year, a small family circle gathered for Mother’s Day, and
