’My favorite person in the world’: Inside life, death of Charlotte man who had COVID-19
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Remembering those lost to COVID-19
The story of a life can’t be told with numbers. As more people die from complications of COVID-19, The News & Observer wants to tell their stories. Those lost were friends and neighbors, grandmothers and uncles, people now missing from communities and families. If you’ve lost a loved one or friend in North Carolina to the coronavirus, please tell us more about them. Email jdjackson@newsobserver.com or call 919-829-4707 and leave a message. Here are their stories.
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Mary Catherine Hinds sat at a picnic table outside a Charlotte hospital Thursday morning, watching her father slowly pass away on a laptop screen.
Bill Bauer — rock of the family, 35-year employee at the old First Union bank, volunteer extraordinaire and the kind of guy who would dance in the middle of a neighborhood street to make his grandchildren laugh — was inside that hospital, in a room fighting COVID-19.
Mimi Bauer, Bill’s wife of 55 years, was inside that Atrium Health Pineville hospital room, too.
Her 78-year-old husband had been on a ventilator for more than two weeks. He had been unconscious for almost his entire hospital stay since she drove him to the hospital’s front door on March 28th.
Mimi Bauer had wanted to go inside with Bill then, to camp out at his bedside. But visitation restrictions related to the coronavirus prevented her from doing so. This visit, allowed under the end-of-life exception, was the first time she had seen her husband in person in 19 days.
Last Thursday, April 16th, was the day the Bauer family had decided to take Bill off the ventilator. They were acting partly on doctors’ recommendations and mostly on Bill Bauer’s previously described wishes to avoid prolonging the end of life with procedures like a tracheostomy.
In preparation to enter her husband’s room, Mimi suited up in the same sort of personal protective equipment that the medical staff wore.
Underneath her PPE, though, Mimi Bauer had on a turquoise sweater. She wore it for Bill. He always thought she looked pretty in turquoise.
***
Hinds watched alone from the picnic table as her mother and a hospital chaplain entered her father’s room just before 11 a.m. The ventilator had already been removed.
Her mother patted her father’s head and chest and began talking to him, hoping that her words were getting through. When she paused, Hinds would speak up from the laptop.
“I’m right here, Mom,” she kept saying. “I’m right here.”
Mimi Bauer recited to her husband the names of all three of their children and all six of their grandchildren, and how much they all adored him.
“I heard her telling him she loved him — that we all loved him,” Hinds said. “That she would be strong for him. That she knew he would be looking after us from heaven.”
It didn’t take long after that. Bill Bauer took his last breath at 11:24 a.m. on April 16, his wife by his side. Mimi Bauer looked at the laptop screen inside the hospital room and addressed her daughter.
“Mary Catherine,” she said gently, “he’s gone.”
One of 171,000 COVID-19 deaths, and counting
As of Monday night, Bill Bauer was one of 210 people in North Carolina who have died due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. He was one of 31 people who have died of the virus in Mecklenburg County; one of more than 42,000 coronavirus deaths in America; one of more than 171,000 in the world.
But to think of Bauer as a statistic is wrong. Like every COVID-19 victim, he had his own story, and his was mostly a happy one.
“He was my favorite person in the world,” Hinds, his daughter, said of her father. “Kind. Compassionate. He loved camping, the Tar Heels, the Panthers and driving a truck. But he would also jump right in there as a guest for my daughter’s tea party.”
Bauer grew up in New Jersey but was deeply rooted in North Carolina. He came south for college at the University of North Carolina in the early 1960s, met Mimi at a party at Chapel Hill (she was someone else’s blind date) and stayed here ever since. He worked for First Union for 35 years, climbing the ladder to become a high-level executive, and lived the final 33 years of his life in Charlotte.
‘He was so active,” Bill’s son Greg Bauer said. “Go-go-go all the time, even into his late 70s. We have no idea how he caught the virus. It could have been so many places in Charlotte, because he went everywhere.”
***
Bill Bauer spent much of retirement attending his grandkids’ sports events or dance recitals or volunteering for church-related ministries. He had season tickets to UNC football games for years. He was a charter permanent-seat license holder with the Carolina Panthers since their inception in 1995, buying the same two seats in Section 204, Row 11, every year. He thought Luke Kuechly was amazing. But his grandchildren — who all called him “Pop” — trumped Kuechly in his heart.
“They asked my Mom about a week ago what made Dad happiest,” Greg Bauer said. “And she said three words: ‘Grandkids, grandkids, grandkids.’”
Before COVID-19 struck, Bill Bauer was relatively healthy. He had had surgery for melanoma around Christmastime and was undergoing immunotherapy but he lived at home with his wife.
Bauer volunteered regularly for two continuing ministries that served Charlotte’s homeless population. He was a devout Catholic who attended Charlotte’s St. Gabriel Catholic Church. He and his wife enjoyed going to local estate sales, buying well-made pieces of furniture and then immediately donating it to a program that furnished apartments for struggling families.
‘I love you, Dad’
On March 18th, Bauer told his wife he wasn’t feeling well. The next day he went to an urgent-care facility, where he wasn’t immediately tested for the coronavirus but was prescribed an antibiotic. By March 20, doctors had ordered a COVID-19 test as Bauer kept running a fever. It came back positive.
With no respiratory problems, he and his wife were quarantined at their south Charlotte home. Some days he seemed OK. Greg Bauer, who lives nearby, stopped in March 25 and — though he didn’t walk inside the house — could see his father resting in the chair.
“I love you, Dad,” Bauer said, peeking in toward his father.
“I love you, too, bud,” Bill Bauer said.
That would be the last time the two spoke face-to-face.
On March 28th, Bill Bauer said he felt a little wheezy and had developed a cough. That led to Bauer’s trip to the hospital.
As his breathing grew more labored in the hospital, he was put on a ventilator.
“And from there, it was a nightmarish roller-coaster,” said Hinds, who lives with her family in Raleigh but has been in Charlotte for several weeks taking care of her mother. “Everyone at the hospital was great. But he just couldn’t ever wake up.”
Mimi Bauer took care of her husband for 10 straight days at home in March but hasn’t developed COVID-19. No one else in the family is sick, either.
Bill Bauer’s body was cremated. They are waiting until it’s safe again for people to be able gather at what will be a packed memorial service.
And that turquoise sweater Mimi wore to the hospital? She threw it away when she came home. It was too hard to have around anymore.
The Bauer family believes the way Bill Bauer died was important . They have shared their story in part to remind everyone how serious the COVID-19 pandemic is, and how important social distancing continues to be.
But what they really want to remember is how “Pop” lived.
For his family. For his church.
And for tea parties.
This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 1:09 PM with the headline "’My favorite person in the world’: Inside life, death of Charlotte man who had COVID-19."
