This couple loosened their stance on covid-19 and died. They wanted others to take him seriously.

© Joanna Sisk / Joanna Sisk
Leslie and Patricia McWaters, 75 and 78 respectively, both died of covid-19 on Nov. 24 at the same minute, according to their obituaries. They had been married for 47 years.

For a couple who had spent five decades next to each other, Leslie and Patricia McWaters could not have been more different.

Patricia, 78, was punctual, unadorned and precise, her family said. She must have been, as a nurse for 35 years in the operating room of a hospital in Jackson, Michigan. Retired truck driver Leslie, 75, or LD, as his friends (who were pretty much everyone he met) called him, made jokes, enjoyed cars and always loved to have fun, according to family.

But the duo were also inseparable: they raised two daughters, three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren together, co-hosting all the family reunions from Thanksgiving through Christmas to summer pool parties when. ‘they weren’t on the road in their 59 Corvettes.

They were living in tandem, and that’s how they died – both in the same hospital on Tuesday, Nov. 24 at 4:23 p.m., of complications caused by covid-19 – the latest in tragic long-standing couple stories claimed by a virus. which has killed at least 267,000 people in the United States since the start of the pandemic.

No final hug: Family said goodbye on FaceTime to two grandparents who died from coronavirus on same day

“Those of us who know them know that mom came in first and said, ‘LD, it’s time to go! “”, According to their obituary.

That’s because Patricia has always been the boss, one of their daughters, Joanna Sisk, told the Washington Post.

At pool parties, it was Patricia at the grill. From her pork cutlets with mushroom sauce to her homemade macaroni and cheese, if you asked the couple to come over to your house, she would surely bring three casserole dishes, enough to feed anyone who came along. When she was a nurse, she helped anyone who started working in the operating room, her daughter said.

“She would take you under her wing and teach you everything she knew,” Sisk said.

Her mother would like the couple’s story to be a lesson, Sisk believes. After months of feeling trapped amid Michigan’s coronavirus restrictions, the two had let their guard down: Shortly before falling ill in November, they visited a restaurant where people weren’t wearing masks and were walking around between the tables.

The McWaters, like many others, had developed an attitude of “I want to go out and live my life, and if I go covid, too bad,” Sisk said.

“But I can tell you that after being covid they were both extremely regretted because they didn’t really take their own words to heart to say it would cost them their lives,” she said.

Shortly before his death, LD told Sisk that he wished other people understood how excruciatingly painful the symptoms of the illness caused by the virus were. It was completely different from his smile the day before, when he assured his daughter that he would beat the virus.

The previous month, he was with his family, excited when his 10-year-old great-grandson Maxx repeated one of LD’s signature one-liners after his sister crushed his toe: ‘C’ is too far from your heart to kill you! ”

“My dad was beaming from ear to ear,” Sisk recalls. “It meant everything to him.