Cindy and Mark Bezzek at their home in Sanford on December 17th.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Cindy Bezzek and her husband built their home in Sanford, North Carolina, to be an oasis, with bonsai, turtles and a waterfall-flanked koi pond. The place called Tranquility Ranch was the refuge of Bezzek after years of tumult. Her mantra when she started in 2020: “Look for beauty.”
Then came spring, when Mark Bezzek, a doctor, began treating patients so ill that they died no matter what he did. When Mark’s mother contracted Covid-19 and died. When an assisted living center cut off Cindy’s visits with her own mother, Louise Hope. When the 92-year-old stopped eating and wasted himself.
When, as Cindy had long feared, her 33-year-old daughter, Marley, overdosed for the last time.
The pandemic that began 8,000 miles away in a corner of the Chinese market overwhelmed Tranquility Ranch’s defenses. With her four-year-old husband plunged into medical crisis and friends and family unable to visit her freely, she left Bezzek, a 62-year-old retired mother, 62, to grieve alone.
Photographs of Cindy Bezzek’s late mother, Louise Hope, and her daughter, Marley Atamanchuk.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“It simply came to our notice then. Looks like you need heaven because your pain is so great. If you’re inside, you seem to be drowning, “said Bezzek, who has lifelong vocals taken out of North Carolina.” My daughter is gone. My mother is gone. And I’m still here. ”.
Worldwide, 2020 has been a year of losses: education, jobs, health and lives. The United States, whose federal government rejected aggressive measures to deal with the pandemic, has reported more than 19 million cases of Covid-19 and 333,000 deaths, mostly among the elderly and people of color. As many as 130,500 more Americans are expected to die this year from other causes, above historical averages. At least one factor: with people separated from family members and support systems, drug overdoses and mental health crises have increased.
However, for all that families like the Bezzeks have endured, 2021 will begin in a similar way to the year before it. In April, 209,000 more in the United States could die from Covid-19, according to one model. While calculating the impact of lost lives, productivity and health, economists and academics predict long-term effects on the mental health of those who have experienced the pandemic. Families in the United States are already facing this toll.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in December, Bezzek makes a video tour with two of his three sisters. The oldest, Bonnie Allen, is still coughing, hacking, really. She can’t smell or taste it, and it drives her crazy, she tells her sisters. Symptoms have ruined the plan to visit her granddaughter in Pittsburgh, which has a sixth unicorn-themed birthday party.
Cindy Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
“Maybe it will change,” Bezzek tells his sisters. “Maybe the vaccine will be miraculous and things will just open up and we can get back to a better life.”
Maybe, says Allen. But he read that even after a vaccine, we will still need masks and social distancing.
“I’m trying to find some hope for 2021,” Bezzek says.
“We only have three more weeks,” Allen says.
“Fortunately,” to Kari Crow of Katy, Texas, she’s still the family’s baby at 50.
The day after speaking, the result of Allen’s test is again positive.
Covid-19 has been permeating the family for months. In April, the sisters had reunited when their mother contracted the disease.
Thinking it was the end, the assisted living facility in Pittsboro, North Carolina, let them visit, Bezzek says. When Louise Hope concentrated, the house stopped visits once again. Then he stopped eating. Her daughters believe she felt abandoned and isolated. Bezzek was able to visit her in her mother’s last days, but she arrived too late on the afternoon of July 22 to be with Louise when she died.
“Covid didn’t kill her, but the broken heart did, I think,” Allen says.
A memorial stone for Cindy Bezzek’s late daughter, Marley, in the family garden.
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
Louise Hope had seven children, who raised them in Alabama and then in North Carolina, where she and her daughters became members of the insular World Church of God, which some have called a cult. There, an 18-year-old girl, Bezzek, met and married her first husband and the father of her three children, including Marley.
After the divorce, she left the church, remarried to a promoter, and helped manage the property she rented to students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This marriage collapsed in 2015, eroded by years of trying to help Marley. He met Mark Bezzek online that year, sending a message to the 62-year-old emergency medicine doctor because he liked his smile. They married a year later and moved to Tranquility Ranch in 2018.
They lost Mark’s mother, 82, in June. Already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he contracted Covid-19 in a New Jersey nursing home and died a week later. Until they received the call, they hadn’t even heard of the diagnosis, he says.
Stoic, white-haired, with a broad, resilient face, Mark Bezzek has been surrounded by illness for months, often working without sufficient protective equipment. Even with the trauma of his family, work has prevented Mark from taking days off. There are more Covid-19 patients in their hospital than ever before, and with a limited number of nurses, every bed with staff is full.
“It is difficult to cope with losses at home and at work. You’re just surrounded by death all the time, ”he says. “One of the things I have about Cindy is that I worked with death. I’ve been surrounded by it all my career. In time you will become, I would not say the heart of stone, but you become a little less passionate about death.
Meanwhile, Cindy had been haunted for years by the prospect of a singular death. Marley Atamanchuk had been addicted to opioids in her teens. He married, had children and became a beautician. Nothing stopped the cycle of treatment, recovery and relapse.
Cindy and Mark Bezzek
Photographer: Rachel Jessen / Bloomberg
The pandemic has not reduced the addiction crisis in the United States, but has intensified driving forces such as economic despair and social isolation. Overdose deaths, which are already on the rise, appear to be accelerating, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned. More than 81,000 such deaths occurred during the year to May, the most recorded in a twelve-month period, according to the agency.
Marley was fired this year and Bezzek saw signs of declining. Insurance through the Affordable Care Act paid for a program, but Marley returned to a world without in-person support meetings and struggled to find the same connection through Zoom’s offerings.
Just two weeks after the death of the grandmother who gave Marley her middle name, Louise, she overdosed on heroin, dying days later.
The Hope sisters revisited North Carolina in August while Marley lay in a hospital bed. But when it came time to collect her ashes from the funeral home, Bezzek was alone. He drove and tied the urn to the passenger seat. Neither Marley nor Louise Hope have had any funerals.
Lately, Bezzek spends his days meditating and reading books about death and the afterlife. For the rest of the year, a free pass has been given: eat sugar at every meal or not wash your face. But in January, he has to get up again and start moving again; maybe start some volunteer work, if Covid allows it.
She has not chosen any mantra during 2021. She thinks it will be about coming home by herself. Look for ways to keep moving forward.