Woman whose mom died of COVID-19 in Crestview assisted living center: ‘What good did it do to keep me out?’

By Wendy Victora

CRESTVIEW -- On a day in early March, Johnnie Kay Ealum and her mom, Patsy Poss, colored pictures together at the assisted living facility where Poss had lived since November.

Poss, who was almost 88, liked to color. She liked it when her daughter sang to her and played the piano. She couldn’t remember how to sing or even her daughter’s name, but she’d hum along and had a new name for her daughter, one she could remember.

She called her “Pretty.”

“To her, I was the probably the most beautiful thing in the world,” Ealum said.

Poss, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 15 years earlier, had been in a slow decline for years.

Pretty would be the last intelligible word Ealum heard her mom speak.

“I love you” and “We can’t give up” were her last sentences, offered during a surprisingly lucid conversation on Mother’s Day.

Both were over the phone as Ealum struggled to maintain contact with her mom after visitors were shut out of Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center in mid-March. The same thing was happening around the state and the country, as officials struggled to protect the elderly and infirm, particularly those in assisted living facilities.

But in Poss’s case, they failed, Ealum said

Not only did her mother contract the coronavirus, but also lived the last months of her life alone and confused. By the time she died Saturday, she’d lost all connection with reality, spending her days agitated and yelling gibberish.

“What good did it to to keep my mama from me?” Ealum said. “She ended up dying from somebody else giving it to her. I tested negative. I would not have given my mama COVID.

“Somehow COVID got into that facility.”

Ealum had always promised her parents that she would never put them in a facility. She did her best to keep that promise, making sure her mother was cared for 24/7 as the older woman lost the ability to follow simple commands. She poured her tea on her food, sat down where there was no chair and stayed up all night talking.

By late 2019, Ealum knew she could no longer continue to keep her mother safe at home.

Making what she says was the most difficult decision of her life, she placed Poss at the facility in Crestview. Five or six times a week, Ealum drove from DeFuniak Springs to visit.

That decision transformed Ealum from a full-time caregiver back into a daughter. Her mother seemed content. It worked as long as they could still spend time together.

But on March 12, the day after they colored together, Ealum got the call that family members were no longer allowed to visit.

“I didn’t know that was my last time to do anything with her,” Ealum said.

The next months were difficult and frustrating. Ealum tried talking to her mother on the phone, but her mother couldn’t concentrate. They tried Zoom once, but Ealum was confused by it and the nursing home staff had to prompt her responses.

In mid-May, Ealum’s sister, Joy, died unexpectedly. Ealum got the call in the middle of the night and all she wanted to do was talk to her mama. Instead, she called the nurses’s station and sobbed.

“I just babbled to the nurse, ‘I can’t talk to my mama,’” Ealum said. “She said, ‘Honey, I’m the closest thing you’ve got right now.’”

Although Poss was never told about her Joy’s death, Ealum believes she sensed it. From that point on, she spiraled rapidly into full-blown dementia.

It got so bad by the end of May that nurses dressed Ealum in full personal protection equipment and brought her in to try to calm Poss. As she sang, her mother quieted. But when Ealum stopped, and as she walked out the facility’s doors, she could hear her mother wailing again.

She wouldn’t see her again until July 15, the day after her mother’s COVID test came back positive.

By then, there was nothing anyone could do. Nothing left to protect her mother from. Ealum was allowed to visit her mom, as long as she was covered from head to toe in protective clothing.

She held her mother’s hand wearing plastic gloves.

“She opened her eyes to me and she moved her hand and she squeezed my hand,” Ealum said. “I sang to her. I believe she knew I was there.”

Two days later, Ealum went back.

“I told her goodbye. I started down the hallway. I turned around and went back in. she opened her eyes. I told her I loved her and that she was going to be OK, and I was too,” she said. “That it was her time.”

Twenty-four hours later, Poss was gone.

As of Monday, the facility where her mother died had 53 active cases of the virus among patients and another 15 among staff, according to the state’s COVID report.

In the days since her mother’s death, Ealum is grieving the loss of the woman who’d loved to laugh, who’d stayed home to raise five children, who could cook anything and who tried to take care of her husband even after she was no longer able to care for herself.

And she’s angry.

Ealum believes her mother died of a broken heart every bit as much as she died of COVID. She died wondering why she had been forgotten and abandoned. She died without the comfort of human touch and the power of feeling loved.

Poss had long ago signed documents giving Ealum the power of attorney over her affairs, including her medical care.

In those last months, Poss had no voice. She literally couldn’t understand words or speak them. She needed Ealum more than ever, both as her daughter and as her medical advocate.

“I understand the need to protect the elderly. I understand what COVID is. I understand they’re a vulnerable population. There has to be some kind of measure that we take to protect them,” she said.

But that measure should include access to loved ones.

“If they can screen workers and vendors that come and go every day, family members can do the same thing. If our parents are possibly going to get sick and, God forbid, die then what good has it done to protect them behind closed doors?”

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Woman whose mom died of COVID-19 in Crestview assisted living center: ‘What good did it do to keep me out?’