NC hits grim milestone of 10,000 COVID deaths. Here are just a few of the many lost
Lennis Greene had to be careful what she talked about around her son Josh.
Ever since he took over the family business, Boone Lumber Co., and started making his own money, his favorite thing to do with it was spend it on others.
Once, Lennis Greene said, when Josh and a friend were visiting the house, she took the young woman aside to show her a picture in a catalog.
“Don’t say anything to Josh, but I think this necklace is gorgeous,” she told the friend. She had to be secretive, she said, because, “If Josh found out his mother liked something, it was on my table or in my garage the next day.”
Josh Ellis Greene, 48, who called his mom every morning to tell her he loved her and every night to make sure she and his dad were OK, who loved to spoil his son and was generous to strangers, died Jan. 16.
He was one of 2,286 North Carolinians whose deaths were reported by the state Department of Health and Human Services in January as being caused or hastened by COVID-19.
January was the deadliest month of the pandemic since it began last March. With that surge and large numbers of deaths reported on several days in February, North Carolina on Tuesday hit the macabre milestone of 10,000 people lost to the novel coronavirus. More than 456,000 U.S. deaths have been attributed to the virus so far.
Some of those lost in NC this year
North Carolinians who died in January included a child in Mecklenburg County — the second pediatric COVID-19 death in the state so far — as well as a centenarian who ran a restaurant supply business in downtown Asheville for more than 70 years before retiring and starting a second career in real estate.
Some had obvious underlying medical conditions. Some seemed perfectly healthy. Some fought the illness for months, others were gone in a flash.
This year so far, COVID took:
▪ John Dalton Fox, 83, of Fayetteville, who died Jan. 2. Fox was a retired colonel who spent 30 years in the service of the U.S. Air Force, 17 of them at the former Pope Air Force Base, where he retired as commander of the Airlift Center.
▪ Timothy “Lee” Howell, a North Carolina State Trooper based in Greenville and a firefighter for Sandy Bottom Volunteer Fire and Rescue. He first became ill with COVID-19 in November.
▪ Leon Dave Rocamora, 100, of Asheville, who died Jan. 10. After his dad died when Rocamora was 15, he would get off the bus after school near the family restaurant supply business in downtown to help his mother. After a stint in the Navy, he returned to Asheville to run the business with his brother for more than 70 years, before retiring to start a second career in real estate.
▪ Matthew Beaver, 40, a physical education teacher at Knox Middle School in Salisbury, who died Jan. 19, leaving a wife and two young children.
▪ Welton J. “Mickey” Jackson, 71, of Gray’s Creek in Cumberland County, who died Jan. 23. Jackson ran WJ Jackson Construction Co. of Fayetteville and was a member of Mount Pisgah Baptist Church.
▪ Edward “Big Ed” Watkins, whose namesake Raleigh restaurants served millions of country-style meals and glasses of sweet tea to customers craving those Southern comforts, died Feb. 2 at age 88. He had been injured in a car accident and contracted COVID-19 during his recovery, his wife said.
Josh Greene: ‘Such a giving man’
Josh Greene had asthma as a boy and was overweight as an adult, his mother said. But at age 48, “He had never spent a day in a hospital in his whole life, since the day I brought him home.”
After graduating from high school, Josh attended Caldwell Community College for a couple of years, but came home one day and told his mom his heart wasn’t in it.
“He said, ‘I’m wasting your money and my time,’” she said, and he left school and went to work in the lumber business he had grown up in.
Boone Lumber has two offices: the original in Boone, started by Josh’s dad, John Greene, in 1962 and now overseen by Josh’s brother, Sid; and the office in Lenoir, which Josh used to expand the business from a local operation to one of the largest dealers of specialty construction woods in the nation.
One day in late December, Lennis Greene stopped by Josh’s office in Lenoir and noticed he was congested. When he was still stuffy-headed a couple of days later, she said she told him to get to a doctor.
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” he told her.
That weekend, his friend Leigh Ann Byrd of Blowing Rock, a nurse at High Country Community Health in Boone, tested Josh for COVID-19 and it came up positive.
Josh, who worked from sunup to sundown, kept taking and delivering on orders for Douglas fir, cedar, redwood and pecky cypress, quarantining in his office. Byrd had him report his temperature and blood-oxygen level at regular intervals, and for 10 days he did fine.
On the 11th day, he woke up short of breath.
Byrd left her job, picked Josh up and took him to Caldwell Memorial Hospital in Lenoir. They waited 12 hours in the emergency room until a COVID-19 bed opened up.
Lennis Greene said over the next several days, Josh seemed to get better and then worse, finally having to go on a ventilator. After he had been in just over a week, the hospital called to say they were going to do kidney dialysis because Josh was retaining so much fluid. They called again that afternoon to say they were going to make an opening in his chest and manipulate his lung by hand to try to squeeze in some air.
“Then they called back 15 minutes later and said he was gone,” Lennis said.
Since his death, the Greenes have received more than 238 condolence cards from people who knew Josh, whether by his smiling face or his voice over the phone. Others will miss him who didn’t even know he had helped, such as the local family whose children wouldn’t have had much of a Christmas had Josh not heard of their circumstances and gone shopping for toys and clothes.
Or the kids who received any of the 20 shoe boxes Josh sent through the nonprofit Samaritan’s Purse, stuffed with items he selected personally. Or the random folks he would hear of who needed a little extra help, who would come out to find an envelope on their cars with cash inside and nothing written on the outside.
Byrd, who met Josh and his family a decade ago through First Baptist Church in Blowing Rock, said, “He was such a loving man, such a giving man. He was larger than life. Just his heart was larger than life.”
Ray Bullard: ‘Loved to watch things grow’
Like Josh Greene, Ray Bullard died without the comfort of family members nearby.
“That’s the most horrible thing about it,” said Ray’s wife, Kay, who lost her husband Jan. 13 after three and a half weeks when he was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit of Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville.
”It’s really sad not to be able to hold the hand of somebody you love when they are leaving this world.”
Kay and Ray were students at Stedman High School when they met, out of school for the summer, working to help their neighbors and make a little spending money.
“We met on a tobacco harvester,” Kay Bullard said in a phone interview. Farm neighbors shared equipment around to help each other bring in their crops. The couple dated through high school and married after Kay graduated from business college.
Ray Bullard had been born into farming, becoming the fourth generation of his family to make a living on the land and embracing it early. As a youth, he was named a Jaycees Young Farmer of the Year. He loved to fish and enjoyed cooking. He often prepared meals for the workers on his farm.
Besides the soybeans, corn, wheat, hogs and turkeys he raised, Bullard always planted a garden, mostly because he liked giving away the potatoes, beans, zucchini and other fresh vegetables..
“There was no way we could eat up three acres of a garden,” his wife said. “He just loved to watch things grow, and he enjoyed sharing it with our friends.”
The couple, married 48 years, had a son and daughter and grandchildren. Bullard was on the board of directors of the N.C. Soybean Producers Association and belonged to the Cumberland County Livestock Association. He was a longtime member of the board of directors for the Stedman Volunteer Fire Department, and most recently had served on its Firefighters Relief Fund Board.
As much as anything else, his wife said, Ray Bullard was a patriot.
A strong man and usually healthy, Bullard developed pneumonia in November, his wife said, requiring a hospital stay. He was back home recuperating when they both got sick the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It turned out to be COVID-19.
It hit Ray hard because his lungs had been compromised by the pneumonia. He went back to the hospital in December and was there for a couple of weeks. He improved enough to be sent home on a Friday, but the next day, when Kay went to wake him from a nap, he was unresponsive. An ambulance took him back to the hospital, and for the next three weeks he would have bad days followed by good days followed by bad days.
“The COVID just went right in there and destroyed his lungs. That’s the only way I know to describe it,” Kay said.
Then the good days stopped coming, and despite their efforts, doctors told Kay her husband would never be able to breathe on his own again.
They had talked about such a scenario earlier in their marriage. She knew he did not consider that a life worth living.
“I had to keep my promise I had made to him,” she said.
Hospital policy allows family members one hour with a COVID-19 patient at the end of life, Kay said, and the hour she had was not the one in which he passed. She had to hear that news from a medical worker.
To avoid holding a gathering where the virus might further spread, his family planned a private service for Ray Bullard on the place he loved best, his farm.
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 1:22 PM with the headline "NC hits grim milestone of 10,000 COVID deaths. Here are just a few of the many lost."
