Elsa’s Dual Loss in Ecuador’s COVID Crisis1
Date Posted: August 2, 2024
By María José Peláez
In the spring of 2020, as Ecuador became an epicenter of Latin America’s COVID-19 outbreak, Elsa Maldonado found herself in a situation that recalls Sophocles’ Antigone. Like the Greek character who defied the state to bury her brother, Elsa embarked on a quest to secure a proper burial for her mother, Marina. Her story reflects on the struggle for dignity in death during a time of overwhelming loss and institutional failure.
I first learned of Elsa through the Ecuadorian and international news headlines: “Some ashes and a corpse”; “Ten months with the ashes of a stranger in her garage“; “The two bereavements of Elsa Maldonado.”
When she agreed to meet me virtually – she in Guayaquil, I in Bogotá – I had imagined her as one of the ghostly figures in Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s stories, speaking with a resigned temporality and an almost dryness. Instead, I encountered a torrent of emotions and memories, a woman who defied easy categorization.
***
Standing amidst the squeezed tulle dresses hanging in her shop – yellow, green, turquoise – Elsa began her story: “First, I would like to tell you that everything you see here was inherited from my mother. Both of us lived off of this business all these years. She was a woman who pushed forward, a strong woman. My mami was not killed by COVID. The hospital killed her.”
With that “first,” I understood that Elsa was not just telling a story of loss but reclaiming a narrative that had been taken from her. She would give me both a beginning and an ending.
Before delving into the details of her mother’s hospitalization, Elsa paused. “You need to understand,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “that for months, I’ve been living with two versions of my mother’s remains. In my garage, there’s a marble urn containing ashes that I was told were hers. But then, they called me about a body in the cemetery. How could I mourn when I didn’t even know which – if either – was truly my mother?”
This uncertainty, this doubling of her loss, formed the core of Elsa’s struggle. It was an illustration of the confusion that reigned in Ecuador during the height of the pandemic, where the dead often became as lost as the living.
***
On March 25, 2020, Elsa took her mother to the hospital to get treatment for a urinary tract infection. By this time, Ecuador reported the second-largest number of deaths on the continent a number exceeded only by the much more populous Brazil. For Elsa, the “plague” or “bug” was a thing that roamed around, killing everyone she knew, fluttering, and frightening. But she was sure her “mami wasn’t infected.”
Elsa, her son Kevin, and her sister spent the entire night driving to every hospital in Guayaquil trying to get her mother admitted. They were all rejecting patients with suspected COVID-19. Elsa insisted her mother did not have “the plague.” With some embarrassment, she confessed, “I went to the private Luis Vernaza hospital in Guayaquil. I knelt to the doorman and said: ‘Here, I give you 100 dollars. Give me a bed, please.’” He refused.
When her mother was finally accepted at Los Ceibos Hospital, Elsa noticed they were understaffed. Her mother would have a bed, but no one would attend to her. Still, she kissed her mother’s forehead and promised everything would be all right, as she rushed to get a wheelchair.
“‘Mother, they’re going to take care of you, calm down, they’ll take care of you, and we’ll return home,’” she told her. “But there were so many people waiting. At that time, they gave you a bracelet, and depending on its color, you got attention. They gave my mother the yellow one. It meant ‘not urgent.'”
The hospital scene Elsa described was nightmarish. The aisles widened and shrank with every step. The rhythmic pumping of ventilators choked her. She came upon a room filled with piled bodies. “No saline, nothing,” Elsa said, just the steady pump.
“There, in the hospital, my mom got it [COVID]… there… She died in the early hours of March 26th. My mami caught it there and died there.”
Cemeteries are made of bones, but also of paper.
What followed was an ordeal of bureaucracy and uncertainty. Elsa’s son, Kevin, was given a death certificate stating that his grandmother “DIED OF PNEUMONIA” and instructions for cremation. But when he returned with an urn of ashes, Elsa knew instinctively – due to her distrust in the way the State managed the pandemic– they weren’t her mother’s. “My son came back half an hour later with a heavy marble urn without a cover. ‘They told me that this is Nana,’ he said. I took out a cover, cleaned it, and put it carefully in the garage, but with the certainty that it was not my mother’s.” Elsa didn’t cry over those ashes. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to dispose of them, knowing they belonged to someone else’s loved one.
For months, Elsa navigated a labyrinth of institutions, each passing responsibility to another. “Nobody knew anything. They all told me they were doing their part and that I needed to escalate my request,” she recalled. Institutions that had been nonexistent or subtly absent in Ecuador before the pandemic began to multiply: the headquarters of…, the board of…, the commissioner of…, the court of… In the face of the floating bodies and the state’s negligence, a suffocating bureaucracy emerged. Cemeteries are made of bones, but also of paper.
The violence of bureaucracy reached its peak when an official called, saying, “Mrs. Elsa, we are also contacting you to remind you of your payment of $1,300 for the mortuary services, otherwise you will be charged for the delay. Because you – I remember the exact words – BECAUSE YOU HAVE ALREADY BURIED YOUR DEAD.”
These words echo the theme of Gabriel Giorgi’s work on the politics of corpses. The anonymity imposed on the dead during the pandemic created what Giorgi calls “corpses without community, bodies with which the community cannot establish any bond.”2 But Elsa, like many others, resisted this anonymity, insisting on naming and honoring her mother even when faced with unidentified remains.
Elsa’s struggle reveals how language can be weaponized to dehumanize the dead and their grieving families. The shift from “body” to “corpse,” the clinical “DIED OF PNEUMONIA” on a death certificate, the bureaucratic “BECAUSE YOU HAVE ALREADY BURIED YOUR DEAD” – all serve to distance the living from the individual humanity of the deceased.
Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Elsa’s narrative is what remains unsaid. Our interactions became less about what she was communicating and more about what she was refusing to say. Her silences, her inability, and, at moments, her unwillingness, to fully articulate her loss, voice the pain inflicted by many state and institutional responses to the pandemic.
While we often say the dead don’t speak, Elsa’s experience suggests otherwise. The presence of her mother – whether in unidentified ashes or a body in an unmarked grave – becomes a way for death itself to speak. These unclosed presences challenge our understanding of grief and memory in the face of mass casualty events.
After months of fighting, Elsa finally received confirmation that her mother’s body had been identified in a cemetery and the state withdrew the 1,300 charges after her case got notoriety in the media. But even then, her distrust of the state was so profound that she asked for a video call to make sure that, this time, the person in the cemetery was indeed her mom. From the pajamas, the blanket, the raised mole on the right shoulder, and the missing bottom tooth – Elsa knew it was her, it was Marina.
“I was not afraid of her scarred skin. I wanted to see her,” Elsa said, “I would have carried her myself like Michelangelo’s Pieta if I had been allowed to. I was afraid of the lie, of the simulation in which I have been made to live all this time.”
The day Marina died, it is estimated that at least seven hundred people died in Guayaquil. For many, there were no caskets. In a country where one in three people is poor, paying hundreds of dollars for a coffin was not an option. People began to do their private rituals at home. When they could not do it anymore, bodies started appearing here and there, scattered on the pavement.
At one point, the Mayor’s Office of Guayaquil delivered some cardboard mortuary boxes to avoid exposing the bodies and what Elsa calls “the state’s ineptitude” to the international press. Elsa wanted to know what type of coffin her mother was in. “No, she is not in a coffin,” the coroner told her.
The last time I saw Elsa she was still fighting to give her mother a proper burial and a coffin. The state hadn’t picked up the marble urn with the ashes in her garage. Elsa, as she did since the first day, kept taking care of the urn–cleaning it and waiting for a family to find whoever the person in that urn was.
***
As our conversation ended, Elsa returned to work in her shop. “It’s been dry and scarce,” she said. “Without Marina, things are not the same in the shop.” At that moment, I could almost see Marina moving alongside her daughter through the shimmering, squeezed dresses. Behind every statistic is a deeply personal story of loss, love, and strength to honor those we’ve lost.
Endnotes
1 A longer version of this article was originally published in Spanish by the author at: https://issuu.com/gestiondeproyectos/docs/la_mucura_10
2 Giorgi, G. (2014) Formas Comunes: Animalidad, Cultura, Biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia.