COVID-19 closed Illinois schools the same week it infected a CPS speech pathologist and her parents. Six months later, she’s planning her father’s funeral.
By Friday, March 13, private schools around Chicago were starting to shut down as Illinois confirmed its 46th case of the coronavirus. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that day she had no similar plans for Chicago Public Schools, but it made no difference. Hours later, Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered schools closed by the following Tuesday.
Beth Eysenbach, a CPS speech pathologist, drove from her home on the North Side to south suburban Homewood to spend the weekend with her parents, both in their mid-70s. She wanted to help them with groceries and make sure they were prepared to weather the pandemic in the safety of the house she grew up in.
When she got there, her mother had a high fever, and her father had a cough and weakened appetite.
In the following days, their conditions worsened. Eysenbach went back and forth with medical professionals on the phone. She stopped worrying about getting her parents tested for COVID-19 and focused on getting them into the hospital.
Between caring for both parents and making phone calls, she had little time to exercise their dogs. Late one night while walking the miniature schnauzer, Pepper, and Chihuahua, Molly, she noticed that her back hurt. Soon other muscles started hurting. She realized she hadn’t just been too busy to eat; she had lost her senses of taste and smell.
“I started getting achier and achier,” she said. “Right after they went into the hospital I was like, I’m getting sick. This is the aches and pains of COVID.”
On March 19, Lightfoot announced all CPS schools would remain closed through April. The next day, both of Eysenbach’s parents were admitted to Advocate South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest.
Her mother was released March 25, but her father had to be intubated. Deemed the sickest of the three, he was the only one able to get tested, she said. By the time a contact tracer called, he was dead.
Geoffrey Eysenbach, 77, died March 30 of pneumonia and novel coronavirus, with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease also noted by the Cook County Medical Examiner. He and Virginia Eysenbach would have celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary this month.
“I know that this news is a gut punch for all of us in many different ways," the Rev. Jeremy Froyen told parishioners of Eysenbach’s church in a video announcement. "We lost a friend today, but his spirit will continue with us in our memories, in the many lives that he touched and changed during his time with us. I wish I could say that this is the only death that we’ll experience from this virus, but projections warn us that it won’t be.”
Pepper became deeply depressed, no longer sleeping, just walking around the house until he collapsed, Beth Eysenbach said.
Eysenbach tried to take care of her mother, back home but still recovering, even as her own symptoms intensified. Week one, her fever was low-grade. Week two brought worse body aches and higher fevers. Week three, the aches improved, but she still had fevers at night. As the virus ran its course, she experienced many of the same symptoms as her parents, only less severe: cough, sore throat, chills.
While they isolated, family and friends left meals on the porch, and she waved from a window.
Sick leave turned into bereavement leave, then spring break. Even as other symptoms subsided, returning to work only compounded the headache.
“We were coming back from spring break; we have all these documents that we are supposed to read and these new policies," Eysenbach said. With all of the new learning platforms to figure out, “it was enough to make your mind explode in general.”
Even now, six months later, fog sometimes clouds her head. She can’t be sure if it’s lingering effects of COVID-19 or related to the Lyme disease she was diagnosed with a few years ago. She had been in remission.
“Sometimes I feel like I am doing super well, and sometimes I feel like I am just struggling to find words, struggling to stay focused,” she said. “... I am constantly writing things down.”
She’s left sticky notes all over the place, to remember new passwords, make sure her mom can get medication online, find the life insurance policy, keep track of all the other things that need to be taken care of when somebody dies. That means spending a lot of time at her childhood home.
“It is kind of hard being here, because the house is missing someone,” Eysenbach said.
Geoffrey Eysenbach worked for many years for Ingersoll Products, where tractor parts were made. Though he loved a good martini, he helped facilitate an addiction recovery program for other colleagues, his daughter said. He was in a middle management job when the factory closed, then went back to school and became a teacher in the south suburbs.
“He really enjoyed working with kids, watching kids learn new things and being able to facilitate that,” Eysenbach said.
When she had insomnia as a child, he would take her for walks to help her fall asleep. He taught her self-hypnosis skills that she uses still.
She knew her father to be smart, artistic, a lover of music and reader of science fiction, mysteries, religion, spiritualism and poetry. She keeps finding poems and observations he wrote down in journals or on scraps of paper, prompting her to laugh or smile.
When he discovered a new interest, he’d want to learn everything about it. He dabbled in photography, woodworking, calligraphy and stained glass, which is displayed throughout the house.
Gardening was a constant, and he’d spend an entire year planning his garden, growing plants from seed in the basement so they’d be ready to put in the ground at the right time.
The family had hoped things would get better over the summer and has not yet said their final goodbyes, but is now planning his funeral.
“In all honesty, we weren’t ready to have it right when he died,” Eysenbach said. “My mom and I were both sick, both still contagious.”
Eventually, she got a COVID-19 test, after feeling recovered, to make sure she was negative. She also tested positive for antibodies. She wishes she and her mother had been able to get tests when they would likely have proven positive.
“She should be counted; I should be counted,” Eysenbach said. “I know I had it, but I’ll be counted as negative. ... That has happened with so many people probably that we are never going to know the true number."
Her father had planned to be cremated and interred at the columbarium of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in Flossmoor, where he was a member for close to 35 years and sang in the choir.
Rev. Froyen put prayer requests for the Eysenbachs in church bulletins, asking anyone who had contact with them in the weeks before they fell ill to follow public health guidance and to let both the church and their doctors know if they developed symptoms.
After Geoffrey’s death, Froyen assured parishioners that once the community was able to gather again safely, they would celebrate his life and legacy.
“Please, please, heed the advice of our public health officials," Froyen said. "By staying home and avoiding contact with others, you are helping to save lives. Together we’ll get through this crisis and we’ll be together again soon enough.”
The positivity rate is still high enough in the area that the church, which suspended worship services starting March 13, is limiting the size of gatherings. So the family is planning a small service, for which a relative who is a professional cantor is recording some of Geoffrey’s favorite hymns.
“No singing, unfortunately, which is just terrible because my father just loved music,” Eysenbach said.
As Eysenbach plans the services, she is also figuring out a new routine at school, starting a new year virtually for the first time. She works with nearly 50 students, at five different schools on the West Side, helping them with elements of speech such as vocabulary.
“Some students are doing well; others would be disappearing, like, ‘Wait, where did you go?’” she said. “Whereas if I was at school, I would have gone to get that student ... 'It’s time for speech, let’s go.’”
Like in normal times, the other day she popped into a classroom with some of her students and taught a lesson for the whole class. She just got funding for a document camera through a campaign on DonorsChoose, a site where people can help fund projects at high-needs schools.
She has an idea to collect leaves to package with white paper and crayons for an art activity that doubles as a chance to build vocabulary.
Without her colleagues, she doesn’t know how she would have made it through the spring. One walked her through what a Google classroom was. She has a friend she can call with all her questions.
“I did not get into this job to work with kid on a computer,” she said. "This is not what anybody wants to happen. The teachers don’t like this, the parents don’t like this, the kids don’t like this, the clinicians don’t like this, but in order for us to stay safe, this is what we have to do right now. I would hate for any of my colleagues to go through what I went through in March.”
A member of the Chicago Teachers Union’s executive board, she’s concerned about the district requiring employees such as clerks to work in person, despite reports of unsafe conditions. “A lot of us are very scared that this is going to be a slippery slope: ‘If this person is going in, why can’t this person?’" she said.
Between March and Sept. 9, the day after fall quarter began, at least 258 CPS and charter school employees or vendors had tested positive for COVID-19, and eight died, according to the district. CPS employs 37,775 people, which doesn’t include vendors.
Those who’ve had the virus include staff working remotely and the minority required to do work in school buildings. While CPS officials did not clarify how many cases involved employees who had been working in-person, they said 123 were “actionable,” requiring an intervention such as a “pause in operations” at a school.
It was hard at first wondering about where her parents got the virus, and whether she was the source.
“For a long time I was thinking, maybe I gave it to them," Eysenbach said. “Because I live in the city and I work with kids that are constantly sick and whose parents are front-line workers, and maybe I had it and I passed it on to them.”
The last time she left their house before discovering them sick, she thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t have given them a hug. Maybe I shouldn’t have given them a kiss goodbye.”
But it was hard to know what to do. The government had not yet advised wearing masks.
“They got it so early, not a lot of people knew what was going on,” Eysenbach said.
After experiencing so much firsthand, misinformation shared on social media has been frustrating. Half a year later, she hopes people will take the virus seriously.
“We’ve got to lower the incidence of COVID," she said. “... You do not want to go through this. It’s not like the sniffles; it’s not like the flu. You don’t know if you’re going to be the one that it hits hard.”
hleone@chicagotribune.com
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