“I can still see him there,” said Mr. Jones, the pastor. “It never goes away.”
There is a corner in Plano, Texas, which was occupied by Bob Manus, a veteran traffic cop who drove children to school for 16 years, until he fell ill in December.
In the twin cities of Minnesota, LiHong Burdick, 72, another victim of the coronavirus, is absent from the groups she loved: one to play bridge, one to mahjong and one to improve her English.
In his empty house, holiday decorations are still on the rise. Letters are lined up in the fireplace.
“You come in and you smell her,” said his son, Keith Bartram. “Seeing the chair in which she sat, the random things around the house, is definitely very surreal. I went there yesterday and I had a small breakdown. It is difficult to be there, when it looks like it should be there, but it is not. “
Spaces left empty
The virus has hit every corner of America, devastating dense cities and rural counties. So far, about one in 670 Americans have died of it.
In New York City, more than 28,000 people died of the virus – or one in 295 people. In Los Angeles County, which lost nearly 20,000 people to Covid-19, about one in 500 people died of the virus. In Lamb County, Texas, where 13,000 people live spread out over 1,000 square miles, one in 163 people died of the virus.
Across America, holes in communities, drilled by sudden death, remained.
In Anaheim, California, Monica Alvarez looks at the kitchen in the house she shared with her parents and thinks of her father, Jose Roberto Alvarez.