Olympia woman grieving, grateful for state’s action after parents die from COVID-19

Tracey Carlos says she knew what was coming in mid-March, as soon as her mother told her she had a fever.

Tracey lives in Olympia, but her parents, Bob and Bano Carlos, had lived in Florida for decades.

While Washingtonians were being told to stay 6 feet away from one another to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, her parents were still hosting game nights, playing Canasta and Mahjong with their friends from the retirement community where they lived.

Bano Carlos, in her 70s and plagued by many health issues, was especially at-risk for suffering severe illness if she contracted the virus that causes COVID-19 respiratory disease.

Tracey says she didn’t tell her mom about her hunch that she had contracted the virus because she knew there weren’t any treatments known to be effective.

“I was trying not to scare her,” she told The Olympian in a phone interview last week.

It was less worrisome to her that her dad, also in his 70s, had a fever. He had been a smoker for much of his life, according to his daughter, but he didn’t have any major health issues that were thought to increase risk.

But, after two fraught, short battles for life that have become commonplace during this pandemic, Tracey and her brother lost both of their parents to the disease that has claimed the lives of more than 78,000 across the U.S. and 277,000 worldwide in just a few months.

A high-speed health roller coaster

First, Bano and Bob Carlos were diagnosed with pneumonia, their daughter says.

On March 25, they went to the doctor’s office for Bob to get X-rays and both ended up in the intensive care unit, sedated and breathing with the help of ventilators. They were tested for COVID-19 and, a few days later, the results came back positive.

Tracey says she became their advocate from across the country. She talked to the doctors at least twice a day, at all hours, and gave permission for them to take various steps as their care proceeded.

Her mother’s health declined steadily, while her dad’s oscillated. At one point March 27, Tracey said her dad woke for a couple hours, but staff didn’t find her phone number — it was listed on her mom’s chart and not her dad’s — until he had declined again and was back on a ventilator.

Her mother, Bano Carlos, died first, on March 30. Her father died less than a month later, according to explicit instructions in his living will.

Bob Carlos died not knowing his wife had gone before him.

On the last day of her father’s life, Tracey says, several family members video-chatted with him while he was sedated, with the help of a nurse named Angel who was shrouded in a full Hazmat suit.

“I don’t know if he heard it,” Carlos said. “I like to think he did.”

Remembering Bano and Bob Carlos

Bano and Bob Carlos had gone to the same New York high school but didn’t meet until community college, according to their daughter.

After their wedding, they drove across the country to California for Bob’s Navy basic training and moved frequently, living in New York for more than a decade before settling in Kissimmee, near Orlando, where they both worked for Disney.

They were an interracial couple who married in 1966, a time when the union wouldn’t have been legal in some states, Tracey Carlos said. But, unless someone brought it up, they didn’t find that noteworthy.

Still, it impacted their lives — family members cut off contact, Carlos said, and it made finding housing difficult.

Tracey calls her mother “the ultimate mom,” always crafting things that made her children’s world brighter. For one Halloween party, she made gravestones for the tops of guests’ sleeping bags and assembled a “haunted room” with fake spiderwebs and bowls full of creepy textures, such as peeled-grape “eye balls,” Tracey recalls.

An artist, Bano Carlos used her own needlepoint pattern to stitch a perfect replica of a Picasso painting, which Tracey says took home the top prize at a county fair.

Bano Carlos worked at the Disney reservation center, helping people plan vacations for 22 years, Tracey says, and bringing in awards for her work.

As her daughter, Tracey says she’ll miss the proud, compassionate sounding board she called upon each week.

“Every Saturday, my mom and I had a conversation,” she told The Olympian. “That’s one of the things I’m going to miss the most.”

In contrast, her father was an intimidating figure, she said, large in stature with a booming voice grated by years of smoking. But he also was extraordinarily kind.

At times, he’d use his ability to intimidate strategically, as a hero. At least once, he stepped in when he witnessed a coworker’s boyfriend abusing her at work, Tracey says.

He was working in the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop when Disney gave him the opportunity to start talking like a pirate, and he jumped at it, “as a way to stop intimidating people,” Tracey says.

He took a list of pirate-y words and ran with it, she says, telling corny pirate jokes and signing kids’ autograph books.

“He became a pirate,” Tracey says. “He never was out of character on Disney property ... to the point where a lot of the executives recognized him as a character, unofficially.”

When a Disney employee retires, there will typically be a brief party in the employee’s area of the park, Tracey says. But for her dad, they shut down part of a restaurant in the Magic Kingdom for a whole day.

“He was an icon, in his way,” she said.

Grieving, angry, grateful

Tracey Carlos has been posting publicly on social media about her parents’ situation nearly since the fevers hit, at first hoping to lie bare the reality of what can happen if the virus’ threat isn’t taken seriously. Later, it turned into a way to keep family and friends posted on their health status.

“The whole point of me doing any of this is to make it more real for people,” she told The Olympian.

She and her brother recently returned from a trip to their parents’ home, where they settled affairs, sorted through belongings, and shipped keepsakes to Washington.

They set out their mother’s craft supplies for a “garage giveaway,” and sat at one end of their parents’ garage while people picked up supplies from the other end and shared stories.

The siblings drove together back to Washington state in their parents’ car packed full of memories. Out their car windows was a patchwork of practices and policies being employed, or not being employed, to address the pandemic.

In five days of driving through 11 states, Carlos says there was a roughly 50% chance at any given stop that people would be taking the threat seriously, wearing masks and keeping a safe distance from one another — until they reached the Pacific Northwest.

“The big message I want to send is just thank you to Washington,” Carlos said last week. “I’m so grateful I moved up here and that people are taking things seriously. ... I cannot express my gratitude towards that enough.”

There are moments now when she chokes up — when she donated the Halloween costumes her mother made for her, when she finds Christmas ornaments or photos. But she’s also angry.

Carlos is active in the local political scene, working on Democratic campaigns. She’s currently running to be a Joe Biden delegate.

She would’ve done it before, she says, but now, it’s taken on a new meaning.

“It’s my way of honoring my parents at this point,” she said. “Now, it’s about them.”

She blames President Donald Trump for her parents’ deaths, tracing their nonchalance about the risk of contracting the coronavirus to the federal level. She was telling her mom and dad how serious things were, but she says they were only hearing “in Washington.”

“They weren’t taking it seriously, because it was being treated like it was a West Coast problem,” Carlos said. “In mid-March, Florida wasn’t taking it seriously at all. To me ... that’s because the federal government wasn’t making it clear to everybody that it was not a West Coast problem, it was a national problem.”

Going forward, with no vaccine or known treatment and the state eyeing a gradual reopening, she has a request to Washingtonians: Patience.

“We just have to have patience and realize that this is not forever,” she said. “What we gain by having patience now is so much bigger. I don’t want to lose anyone else. That’s really what it comes down to. I’m being selfish — I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

This story was originally published May 10, 2020 at 5:45 AM.