Carolina Tovar and Letty Ramirez, Rowland Heights, California mother and daughter known to be inseparable from each other, die hours apart from COVID-19.
A California mother and daughter known to be inseparable have died from the coronavirus just hours apart.
Letty Ramirez, 54, and her mom Carolina Tovar, 86, of Rowland Heights succumbed to COVID-19 on April 3rd at separate hospitals in southern California, the Los Angeles Times reports.
‘How ironic that you could not separate these two women in life and that fate had made it so that they wouldn’t have to be separated after death,’ Art Aguilar, who was Tovar’s grandson and Ramirez’s nephew, told the media outlet.
According to the times, both mother and daughter were often standing side by side in the kitchen, sharing traditional recipes that they would serve their children. In the evenings, they watched classic Mexican films. They got their nails done together and talked about everything.
But then came the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the United States much like the rest of the world.
‘We were all still talking to her, telling her we loved her’
Both women began having breathing trouble in mid-March, before being brought separately to the emergency room at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton.
Ramirez was admitted first to the hospital, where she was placed on a ventilator and transferred to Providence St. John’s Health Center.
The 54 year old struggled to battle the illness as she received new diagnoses of diabetes and kidney failure.
‘I just told her, ‘Mom, please keep fighting. We still need you here. We want you to come home,” her own daughter, Alexis, told the latimes.
Meanwhile, Tovar’s family was forced to decide whether to put her on a ventilator — which was against the matriarch’s wishes.
Family members made the decision to respect Tovar’s request and gathered together on Facetime as she took her last breath.
‘She was ready, and we prepared ourselves too,’ Alexis said. ‘We were all still talking to her, telling her we loved her, that we’re going to be OK and she doesn’t have to fight anymore.’
Within hours, Alexis received word that Ramirez’s health was not improving and made the decision to remove her from the machines. She died within nine minutes of being taken off the ventilator.
The family again gathered on Facetime to grieve both losses.
‘It was just hard that we couldn’t be together to console one another,’ Alexis said.
