NC man and his mom die of COVID 8 days apart, leaving a shell-shocked family behind
Kenda Rogers stares blankly at haphazard piles of credit cards, bills and financial statements as she stands over the dining-room table in the east Charlotte raised ranch that her mother and her younger brother lived in together prior to their sudden deaths last month.
“I’m still in shock,” she says, shaking her head. “But we’re so busy right now, getting this done, this done, this done.”
“And trying to raise funds,” adds her older sister, Amy Rogers-Hayes, whose working-class family has suddenly found itself scrambling to pay for not one funeral, but two.
Both ceremonies will be held during a joint service at J.B. Tallent Funeral Service & Crematory on North Sharon Amity Road on Saturday, when Kenda and Amy will join relatives and friends as the family gathers to say their final goodbyes to its matriarch, Beverly Long-Rogers, and her only son, Travis Rogers.
He died of double pneumonia brought on by the coronavirus on Oct. 19, at the age of 42. She died eight days later, on Oct. 27, of the same affliction. She was 67.
Relatively speaking, the sisters are at peace with how the end came for their mother: They and their uncle — Phil Long of Michigan City, Ind., Beverly’s older brother — were at her side comforting her at Novant Health Mint Hill Medical Center over the course of the last 26 hours of her life.
On the other hand, they are haunted by their brother’s passing.
Kenda in particular is tormented by the notion, however misguided, that she alone could have done more to try to save her brother, who died alone on the bottom floor of this house shortly after trying to summon an ambulance by calling 911.
‘He always came back home’ to help
Though the past month has been cruel to them, it’s not the first time the family has had to cope with a string of tragedies.
In 2010, Beverly Long-Rogers lost her father, Gene Long. Then her husband Kenny Wayne Rogers died of lung cancer in 2011, followed by the death of her mother, Zona Phillips-Long, in 2012.
Beverly and her son Travis wound up coping in different ways.
Travis Rogers had spent his entire life teamed up with his dad in a father-son, two-man-only small construction business that repaired and remodeled residential homes. Then, in the wake of his dad’s death, Travis “went a little wild,” his sisters say, snickering as they reveal that he took a job as a DJ at the Crazy Horse Showclub, a strip club on Independence Boulevard.
After he got that out of his system, they say, he launched a handyman business and became a father figure to a girlfriend’s two young children, remaining so even after the relationship ended. He also bought a 2013 Harley-Davidson Softail Slim about three years ago and got involved with group rides led by a local HOG (Harley Owners Group) chapter.
Travis was briefly married and bounced around different living situations, but “he always came back home,” Amy says. And in the years after his father died, he felt more obligated than ever to be there, to take care of his mom.
In large part, that’s because Beverly became severely depressed, her daughters say, after losing her parents and her husband, and retiring from her job as a licensed practical nurse. “She would try to act like she was not,” Kenda says, “and then it would be, ‘I just can’t talk to nobody. I’m in the trenches, and it’s bad.’ ”
“That’s what she’d call it when she got really depressed and didn’t want to see anybody,” says Beverly’s brother, Phil. “She would go to her ‘trenches.’ (Meaning) basically, go to bed.”
In the past couple of years, she also found herself living with physical pain — in her back and her legs — that made it difficult for her to do three of the things she loved the most: working in her garden, tending to her parakeets that inhabit the refrigerator-sized birdcage in the center of her house and playing with her two young grandchildren.
So finally, in July, she decided to schedule a spinal fusion to correct her lumbar spinal stenosis. The surgery was Sept. 29.
And right around that time, COVID-19 was starting to work its way through her extended family.
Virus meant ‘I can’t take care of her’
They think the virus may have come home from school with one of the three daughters of the live-in girlfriend of Kyle Hayes, who is Amy’s 27-year-old son. All three girls, plus their mother, tested positive in late September.
Because Kyle’s 3-year-old daughter Luna also lives in the home with those girls — and because Amy regularly takes care of Luna — Amy, her husband Mike, and Luna went to get tested, on Sept. 29, the same day as Beverly’s surgery. They each got negative results.
Nine days later, on Oct. 8, Amy stopped by her mom and brother’s shared home, and at the end of her visit, her brother sent her on her way with a pizza he’d made for her and a cupcake from a box he had gotten from a handyman services customer. Amy says at that time, she, her mother and her brother had no symptoms.
But it was the last time she would ever see Travis.
That same day, Amy’s husband Mike started feeling sick. The next day, Amy wasn’t feeling well herself. The day after that, both of their conditions had worsened, so they each went for a COVID-19 test. Their results came back positive.
In the meantime, Travis had developed symptoms, too. Within a couple of days, he’d gotten pretty sick, and Beverly started having bouts of nausea and vomiting.
So Travis and his mother hunkered down in their house, just the two of them, to try to ride out their illnesses. At one point, Kenda says, Travis fashioned a bell for her to ring that would trigger the doorbell, and he’d climb up the stairs to tend to what she needed. But by the end of the week, Travis was so fatigued that he was struggling to make it up to the second level anymore.
Finally, on Oct. 18, he called 911 to get an ambulance for his ailing mom.
Phil, his uncle, says Travis texted him that day to say: “I had to put Mom in the hospital. This (expletive) is getting worse and I can’t take care of her.”
On the 19th, Kenda decided to stop by the house and check on him.
“When I came over that day, he was just downstairs, you know, sitting in his chair,” Kenda says. “Said he was having trouble breathing... But he didn’t want me to call 911.”
Stubbornness runs in the family, Kenda and Amy say, and he simply refused to go to the hospital.
Kenda finally gave up, and told her brother she’d see him the next day. “Within less than an hour after I got home, the police called and they said they had a 911 call here from my brother, but that when they got here it was too late, and that they tried to resuscitate him, but they were not able to.”
Though her family has absolved her of it, Kenda says the guilt has been difficult to bear — “and I don’t know if I’ll get over it, of leaving him.”
On the advice of her doctors, they say, the family held off on telling Beverly about her son’s death, for fear of aggravating her anxiety. They wound up waiting for two days, till her brother Phil arrived from Indiana.
“She was hard to talk to on the phone, ’cause they had her medicated,” Phil says. “And when she saw me and recognized me coming in, she goes, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ I says, ‘I got tired of not understanding you on the phone, so I come down to talk to you in person.’ ”
He laughs softly at that memory before moving on to share a devastating one: “So we talked a little bit, and I kissed her on the head and hugged her a little bit, and about couple-three minutes later, I just leaned down side of her face and told her her son had passed away.”
Beverly died one week after that.
‘This is gonna be a wild (funeral) service’
The family was initially reluctant to share the vaccination status of their lost loved ones.
But after a brief discussion about the issue at the dining-room table, Phil says to a reporter, matter-of-factly, that “it would be great if you just said, ‘No, they weren’t vaccinated, and it was personal choice.’ ”
They don’t need people to pass judgment right now. They just need a little bit of help, they say, to come up with the money needed to pay for the funeral costs, which are due before the ceremony starts.
And they’re anticipating quite a crowd on Saturday.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you guys,” Amy says to her sister and uncle. “The (Harley Owners Group) chapter director wants to have a chapter ride on the motorcycles there for the service.”
“They’re gonna ride their bikes to the service?” Kenda asks.
Amy and her husband Mike both reply affirmatively.
“This is gonna be a wild service,” Kenda says, shaking her head.
“Right, ’cause we’re also gonna have (people from) the club that he DJ’d at,” Amy says.
“All them girls are coming,” Kenda adds.
“Who’s bringing the kegs of beers?” Uncle Phil says, chiming in.
They’re laughing now, which is something this family hasn’t had much opportunity to do over the past couple of weeks. As the laughter tapers off, Mike summarizes:
“Travis was very, very popular,” he says, smiling.
“If half the people show up that say they’re going to, it’s gonna be a pretty good funeral.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to help cover funeral expenses for Beverly Long-Rogers and Travis Rogers. Details are here.
This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
