Then, at 71, his memory started failing fast. 'He was always just that guy who wanted to help people,' said his son, Ron Burgess Jr. of Maryland. He had been the town Santa Claus for Bellville, Ohio, a former president of the “The Buckeye Santas,' and a longtime registered nurse who volunteered his skills at numerous agencies. Ron Burgess of Richland County, an hour north of Columbus, was a U.S. In McConnelsville, the county seat of Morgan County in Appalachian southeastern Ohio, almost everyone knew someone stricken by the pandemic, many of them while patients at Highland Oaks Health Center. “I just know that once it’s in that type of facility,” he said, “it has to be borderline impossible to contain.” But what they did see – warning signs all over and employees wearing protective garb, asking COVID-19 security questions and enforcing social distancing rules – left them satisfied that everything that could be done was being done. Tom Balbach never saw the inside of North River as the pandemic claimed lives there in the winter of 2020, and neither did any of the other family members. “Her final turn was fairly quick, and she was gone before anybody got to her,” Tom Balbach said.

A few days later, the nursing home told the family she had developed COVID-19. Her son Tom Balbach and his brother last saw their 89-year-old mother during a supervised visit that June, but her Alzheimer’s disease was so advanced they hadn’t had a real conversation in four years.Ībout two weeks before she died, the family visited her through a window. Mel Balbach, who spent her working life as a nursing teacher and school nurse, died the morning after Christmas 2020 at North River Health Campus in Evansville.

Article 5 trilogy