When the call finally came Tuesday evening, it was good news: Fred Lee Stafford was still alive.
Bernice Stafford-Turner has been waiting for those calls every day as the death toll at the skilled nursing center where her brother lives continues to rise.
“It’s so good to hear,” Stafford-Turner said in a phone interview, after receiving the update on Tuesday. “I was on pins and needles.”
Her voice was strained; the last couple of weeks have weighed on her.
Her 65-year-old brother, who was permanently disabled when he was hit by a car as a child, is one of more than 80 residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Henrico County. By Thursday, 39 others had died.
“Every minute somebody could die, any minute, and you not know it,” said Stafford-Turner, an attorney known by many as “The Flower Lady” because she for decades has sold flowers outside the Tobacco Company Restaurant in Shockoe Slip and elsewhere in Richmond.
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As of Thursday, 84 residents were infected. The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week.
Stafford-Turner has been frustrated by an inability to quickly get information about her brother’s condition. She said nursing facilities need greater government oversight. She fears an influx of aging baby boomers will overwhelm an already-strained system.
“These facilities are not ready for caring for a boom in residency,” she said. “If you live long enough, someone is going to have to give you a glass of water. Either it’s going to be a family member or it’s going to be in a facility.”
She wants the federal government and a team of nurses to go into Canterbury and said she has reached out to the offices of Gov. Ralph Northam and Sen. Tim Kaine about her concerns.
“If Canterbury needs something, the public sector needs to come forward,” she said. “I want to help them to get over this. I want my brother to live. I want the patients there to live.”
Stafford-Turner said she must wait for information on her brother’s condition from a public guardianship program that is checking with Canterbury for updates. She has given them a list of questions and is awaiting answers.
What is he eating? Is he being given vitamins? His upper respiratory problems increase his risk of complications from the disease.
“Have they explained to Fred what’s going on, and what did they say to him and how did it affect him?” she asked.
Stafford-Turner said she was told late last month that her brother had a low-grade fever, and she learned last week that he had tested positive for the virus. As of Thursday, she said she was told he had no symptoms.
Her daughter, Precious Turner, said her uncle must be fed through a tube and has to be helped to get out of bed. She wonders how he was exposed to the virus.
“My uncle can’t walk,” she said. “How did he get it? Somebody brought it into the room.”
Although they are frustrated and afraid, the mother and daughter praised the workers caring for Fred Stafford and others at great risk to themselves.
“At the end of the day, I have to be grateful for everything they are doing,” Turner said. “I need them. Right now, this is not time to blame. But it didn’t start out that way.”
Fred Stafford was 3 years old when he got hit by a car, leaving him with a severe brain injury and physical disabilities, Stafford-Turner said.
She said she taught her brother how to write his name years ago. Their mother bought Stafford a priest’s collar, and he sometimes wears a cross as a necklace. He loves to sing “Amazing Grace” and has a big picture of Jesus on his wall.
Precious Turner, 39, recalled that throughout her childhood, whenever her uncle would have a birthday, he would say he was 31. “We didn’t know how old he was,” she said. “He was just 31 every year.”
“Uncle Fred has an amazing imagination,” she said. “He’s a real character.”
Whenever she would get into trouble as a child, he would start crying. “He is more like a brother than an uncle.”
“My heart aches for him more than I hurt, more than anything else,” she said. “What he must be thinking about, what is happening, tortures my spirit.”
But she also said she has seen her Uncle Fred get pneumonia twice before in years past, and he always pulled through.
“He’s very strong, and we’re trying to stay positive,” she said. “It’s really easy to go to a dark place.”
Turner, who lives with her 15-year-old son in Richmond, said her emotional state has shifted through stages of extremes as she has sought to accept and cope with the outbreak at Canterbury.
First was a deep anger as she struggled with helplessness. She couldn’t fix the situation or even keep tabs on it.
“The anger turned into intense sadness,” she said Tuesday. “It was almost as if I could feel the whole world’s sadness.”
She temporarily disabled her Facebook account. She struggled to eat, or even get out of bed.
“I just couldn’t take anymore bad news,” she said.
A friend helped, and now she is focused on staying strong and having faith.
She has returned to writing cards to send with flowers to residents of nursing facilities, which she had been doing before the coronavirus pandemic. She has plans to have about 160 cards sent along with a carnation to residents and employees at Canterbury. They should arrive by the middle of next week, she said.
The cards were written by Turner and others in the Richmond area and elsewhere in Virginia. On them are messages like “Somebody is thinking about you” and “I’m glad you’re in the world” and “Your smile is beautiful.”
“I feel like I am here to bring people joy,” she said, adding that she is concerned not just for her family, but for the overall toll that isolation is taking on families everywhere. “Nobody wants to be alone.”