Cindy and Mark Bezzek at their home in Sanford on December 17th.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Cindy Bezzek and her husband built their home in Sanford, North Carolina, to be an oasis, with bonsai trees, turtles and a koi pond flanked by a waterfall. The place called Rancho da Tranquilidade was Bezzek’s refuge after years of turmoil. His mantra when 2020 started: “Look for beauty”.
Then came spring, when Mark Bezzek, a doctor, started treating patients so sick that they died regardless of what he did. When Mark’s mother contracted Covid-19 and died. When a health care institution interrupted Cindy’s visits to her own mother, Louise Hope. When the 92-year-old man stopped eating and died.
When, as Cindy had long feared, her 33-year-old daughter, Marley, overdosed for the last time.
The pandemic that started 8,000 miles away in a corner of a Chinese market has invaded the defenses of Rancho da Tranquilidade. With her four-year-old husband plunged into the medical crisis and friends and family unable to visit them freely, this left Bezzek, a 62-year-old retired mother of three, suffering alone.
Photographs of Cindy Bezzek’s late mother, Louise Hope, and daughter, Marley Atamanchuk.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“I stay out a lot. It seems that you need heaven because your pain is so great. If you’re indoors, it looks like you’re going to suffocate, ”said Bezzek, who has the extended vowels of a past life in North Carolina. “My daughter is gone. My mother is gone. And I’m still here. “
Around the world, 2020 was a year of losses: education, jobs, health and lives. The United States, whose federal government has refused aggressive measures to tackle the pandemic, recorded more than 19 million cases of Covid-19 and 333,000 deaths, mainly among the elderly and people of color. Another 130,500 Americans are expected to die from other causes this year, above the historical average. At least one factor: with people without relatives and support systems, drug overdoses and mental health crises skyrocketed.
Still, for all that families like the Bezzeks endured, 2021 is set to start very much like the year before it. In April, another 209,000 in the United States could be killed by Covid-19, according to a model. While calculating the impact of lost lives, productivity and health, economists and academics predict long-term effects on the mental health of those who survived the pandemic. Families across the US are already battling this toll.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in December, Bezzek has a video tour with two of his three sisters. The oldest, Bonnie Allen, continues to cough – hacking, actually. She can’t smell or taste it, and it’s driving her crazy, she tells the sisters. The symptoms spoiled the plan to visit her granddaughter in Pittsburgh, which will host a unicorn-themed sixth birthday party.
Cindy Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“Maybe that will change,” says Bezzek to the sisters. “Maybe the vaccine is miraculous and things just open up and we can have a better life again.”
Maybe, says Allen. But she read that even after a vaccine we will still need masks and social distance.
“I’m just trying to find some hope for 2021,” says Bezzek.
“We only have three more weeks,” says Allen.
“Fortunately,” says Kari Crow, from Katy, Texas, still the baby of the family at 50.
The day after the conversation, Allen’s test result comes back: positive.
Covid-19 has been permeating the family for months. In April, the sisters came together when their mother contracted the disease.
Thinking it was the end, the assisted living unit in Pittsboro, North Carolina, allowed them to visit, says Bezzek. When Louise Hope recovered, the house stopped visiting again. Then she stopped eating. Her daughters believe that she felt abandoned and isolated. Bezzek was able to visit her on her mother’s last days, but she arrived too late on the afternoon of July 22 to be with Louise when she died.
“Covid didn’t kill her, but the broken heart did, I think,” says Allen.
A memorial stone for Cindy Bezzek’s deceased daughter, Marley, in the family’s backyard.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Louise Hope had seven children, raising them in Alabama and then in North Carolina, where she and her daughters became members of the World Church of God, which some call a sect. There, Bezzek, 18, met and married her first husband and father of three children, including Marley.
After the divorce, she left the church, remarried a developer, and helped manage a property they rented to students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That marriage collapsed in 2015, eroded by years of trying to help Marley. She met Mark Bezzek online that year, sending a message to the 62-year-old emergency doctor because she liked his smile. They married a year later and moved to Tranquility Ranch in 2018.
They lost Mark’s 82-year-old mother in June. Already suffering from Alzheimer’s, she contracted Covid-19 in a New Jersey nursing home and died a week later. Until they got the call, they didn’t even know about the diagnosis, he says.
Stoic, with white hair and a broad, rough face, Mark Bezzek has been surrounded by the disease for months, often working without sufficient protective equipment. Even with the trauma in his family, work prevented Mark from taking days off. Your hospital is serving more patients with Covid-19 than ever before, and with a limited number of nurses, each staffed bed is occupied.
“It is difficult to deal with losses at home and at work. You are surrounded by death all the time, ”he says. “One of the things I got over Cindy is that I worked with death. I’ve been surrounded by it my whole career. Eventually you become, I would not say a heart of stone, but you become a little less in love with death. “
Meanwhile, Cindy had been chased for years with the prospect of a singular death. Marley Atamanchuk became addicted to opioids in her late teens. She married, had children and became a beautician. Nothing interrupted the treatment, recovery and relapse cycle.
Cindy and Mark Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
The pandemic did not control America’s dependency crisis – instead, driving forces such as economic despair and social isolation have intensified. Overdose deaths, already on the rise, appear to be accelerating, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned. More than 81,000 of those deaths occurred in the year through May, the largest ever recorded in a 12-month period, according to the agency.
Marley was fired this year and Bezzek saw signs that she was declining. Insurance, through the Affordable Care Act, paid for a program, but Marley returned to a world without face-to-face support meetings and struggled to find the same connection through Zoom’s offerings.
Just two weeks after the death of the grandmother who gave Marley her middle name, Louise, she overdosed on heroin, dying days later.
The Hope sisters visited North Carolina again in August, while Marley was in a hospital bed. But when it came time to pick up his ashes at the funeral home, Bezzek was alone. She drove alone and fastened the urn to the passenger seat. Neither Marley nor Louise Hope had a funeral.
Ultimately, Bezzek spends his days meditating and reading books about death and the afterlife. For the rest of the year, she gives herself a free pass: eat sugar at every meal or not wash her face. But in January, she has to get up and start moving again; maybe start some volunteer work, if Covid allows it.
She did not choose a mantra for 2021. She thinks it will be about coming home to herself. Finding ways to move on.