Teresa Sperry’s mother Nicole relives moments before her COVID death

Nicole Sperry walked into the cramped intensive care room and for a few surreal moments she felt like she had stepped into an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

“I heard someone say ‘the defibrillator’, and how much epinephrine they need to give them and ‘chest compression’,” recalls the 40-year-old teacher.

Then the medical team started to walk away and a doctor walked up to her.

“That’s when they said she was gone,” recalls Nicole.

Nicole looked down where her 10-year-old daughter Teresa lay dead five days after showing the first signs she had been infected with a virus that people are still trying to say does not affect children . Now someone has rolled a computer chair to what had become their child’s deathbed.

“Because I couldn’t stand up,” Nicole said. “So I kind of walked in and sat next to her, just in shock and crying.” I don’t even know how much time has passed.

She had left her phone in the waiting room she had been taken to after running from school where she teaches in third grade at the King’s Daughters’ Children’s Hospital in Virginia. Her husband, Jeff, called from home to say that Teresa suddenly stopped breathing and was taken to an ambulance. He stayed home to watch their three boys.

Now someone went to get her phone and she called Jeff to tell him that Teresa had been beyond rescue.

“He told the boys that, and I told him to put me on speakerphone so they could hear me too,” recalls the mother. “It broke my heart. They were all crying.

When she hung up, the nurses began to ink prints of Teresa’s hands on paper.

“I was able to help with some of them,” the mother said. “They made molds of his footprints for us. They let me braid a section of her hair and I cut it.

“And then they asked me if I wanted to help him clean it.” I couldn’t cleanse the rest of the body, but I cleaned his face. They took out all the tape and stuff and gave me the rags.

Nicole proceeded to wash the face which looked so much like hers, which had seemed unable to form a mean expression and still empathized when she saw the pain in others. She removed all traces of adhesive.

“I made sure to remove everything that was in there,” Nicole said. “I told them I wanted to do whatever I could for her.”

Nicole had been there for maybe four hours when she decided it was time for her to move away.

“Her lips started to change color,” recalls Nicole. “She started to feel cold. I didn’t want her to go out. I wanted her to be taken care of.

Nicole stood up and the longest steps she had ever taken took her away from her daughter. The mother started out in the hallway in a changed world.

“Walking down the same hallway that I walked to see her, everything looked different,” she said. “I’m sure that’s how any parent who has lost their child feels, especially when they are young. You’re just looking at things that you’ve always watched and it doesn’t seem to be what it was a few minutes ago.

Nicole called to ask a colleague to pick her up. The colleague was at the September 27 meeting of the Chesapeake School Board, which oversees the school where they both teach, and said she was happy to be leaving. Some of the people who made public comments at the meeting were anti-masks saying things like “COVID is over” and “Deaths and hospitalizations are falling like a stone” and “Car crashes are causing more deaths. and injuries in this area than that. , but we don’t make people stop driving, do we? And they were saying it within 10 miles of where Teresa was lying, no more than two hours after her death.

“When my coworker told me that, I thought to myself, ‘If what they’re saying is true, I wouldn’t be sitting next to my daughter right now,” Nicole said. “I don’t care. wearing masks. God knows they rub behind my ears and I try to wear them properly and I wear glasses. I hate that. And teaching third grade, trying to teach phonics and things like that behind a mask, having to wear a little microphone so they can hear you louder, that’s not how I want to live it. But I do it because we want to make sure people are safe. “

The friend brought home Nicole, who took to Facebook.

“We are at home. But we left a huge part of our heart at the CHKD. It hurts so much not to have him here. To see his name that I painted on his door a few years ago when we painted her room and watched her cat walk around the house knowing my diva will never come back.

Nicole had come to understand that too many people who hear that someone has died from complications from COVID immediately seek to say that the cause was not really the virus but another health problem.

“And I want to explain by complications that her heart has just given up,” she wrote. “Our daughter was in perfect health. And they would have continued to be here if people had stopped sending their sick children to school.

Nicole noted something Teresa told her father when he picked her up from school on the Thursday before she died. They were only now beginning to realize its possible meaning.

“Her teacher at Hillpoint gave her the job of ‘nurse’. She had to accompany all the sick students in her class to the nurse’s office.

The Sperry family understood from the start the importance of doing everything possible to mitigate COVID-19. Both parents were fully immunized at their first opportunity. The two older boys had been vaccinated as soon as they were eligible. And they had worn masks. Teresa had done it even while playing outside with two other little girls on the street.

“We did everything we could have done and now we have lost part of our heart,” Nicole wrote. “COVID is real and it doesn’t matter who it takes. If you are still under the illusion that you are not, you can gladly remove me from your friend and I can guarantee that you will not be missed.

The next day, September 28, Nicole saw a letter from the principal of the Suffolk School District, announcing the death of an anonymous student at Hillcrest Primary School, where Teresa had entered fifth grade. Nicole posted the letter on Facebook and wrote:

It was easy to compose because what we all have to do is incredibly simple. The obituary she wrote for Teresa was infinitely more difficult.

“Her name is Teresa Makenzie Sperry… My beautiful daughter was taken from me because people are too selfish to care about what might happen to others. I wasn’t. We weren’t. We wore our mask because there are too many in our tribe who are in danger. My daughter was not in danger. And now she’s gone. .. Want to know what you can do to honor my lovely daughter?

“Wear a fucking mask!”

“To get vaccinated!

“Social distance!

“Most importantly, stop complaining and keep your sick children at home.

“Because in the end, you can still kiss your own.

“Teresa Makenzie Sperry entered this world on February 22, 2011 and passed away on September 27, 2021 at 4:46 pm due to complications from Covid-19. During her brief 10 years on this Earth, Teresa has been a ray of light and positivity to many. She was everyone’s friend, even those who intimidated her. Teresa enjoyed the arts. She loved to draw, dance at home and sing. She was an active Girl Scout with Troop 313 in Suffolk, Virginia. She attended her meetings virtually or in person when it was safe to do so. Teresa was proud to be Husky at Hillpoint Elementary School where she had been attending since September 8, 2015 with the Early Start program. After the closures, Teresa began to learn to sew. She wanted to learn how to make clothes and her family joked that she should be her mother’s personal designer. She was a daddy’s daughter every step of the way. Teresa is survived by her father Jeff, her mother Nicole, three protective brothers: Jonathan (16), Sean (14) and Michael (9).

Niocle continued, “Covid-19 took her away from us as quickly as she started showing symptoms. And her heart which was big enough to care for everyone she met was not strong enough to stay with us.

The obituary noted that services for Teresa will be held at Altmeyer Funeral Home in Virginia Beach at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 10, followed by the burial at Holly Lawn Cemetery and the celebration of her life at adjoining Lake Meade Park. . Participants are asked to “wear a mask” and “please wear your favorite color”.

“She would say purple, because it’s mine,” Nicole said when asked about Teresa’s favorite. “When she painted her room, she chose purple. But she liked all colors.

Teresa also loved music and some of her many favorites will be played at the funeral home. She particularly liked Billie Eilish and toured the house playing the singer’s hits on an iPad, singing along as the lyrics scrolled across the screen.

And Teresa loved her kitten, Missy, who seemed to feel the same way about her.

“You almost wish you could talk to animals, could explain to them,” Nicole told The Daily Beast. “Sometimes the cat is running around the house and I think she is always waiting for Teresa to come home. We all try to go and give her all the love we can, just like Teresa did.

But Nicole knows it’s not the same.

“We’re all going to scratch her, stuff like that, but she doesn’t lay down next to us like she did Teresa.” When we call her by name, she does not come to us. When Teresa called, ‘Miss! Miss‘, the next thing you know, the cat would run down the hall to Teresa’s room and jump on her bed. They were definitely the perfect match.

Nicole says she initially expressed her fury when she started sharing Teresa’s story online and with the media. But then people started telling him that it made them change their perspective on masks and vaccines.

“If we know that she continues to change people’s minds and convince them to wear their masks, wear them correctly, get vaccinated if you can …” said Nicole. “We just want people to care about people like she cared about people. There are too many people who don’t know how to empathize with others. They say they have empathy, but they don’t.

She added, “It takes a lot more energy to be cruel and hurtful than to be compassionate towards someone.”

She also warned that Teresa had left us with her sudden and heartbreaking departure.

“COVID doesn’t care,” she said. “He takes who he wants when he wants. “