GLEN OAKS, QUEENS — The day that Olan Montgomery was hospitalized with a fever and breathing problems, cases of the new coronavirus in New York City were in the single digits.

Two visits to a doctor had yielded little more than a directive to rest and drink fluids, but Montgomery suspected something more than a cold or the flu was to blame for his malaise. He could feel it in his lungs. So, the evening of March 6, he went to the emergency room. By the next morning, he was on a ventilator in intensive care.

In the final month of his life, the 56-year old would veer in and out of critical condition. He would open his eyes. He would make it off the ventilator. It is a story that has grown all too familiar as the pandemic has suffocated New York City — a person's sudden plunge into critical condition, the slow climb to stable, only to lurch down again. This is the roller coaster that plays out in the ICU. The doctors and nurses do their best to keep that person safe during the ride, but his loved ones can't sit next to him and squeeze his hand if everything turns upside down. They can only watch. They can pray. They wait.



On April 4, the day Montgomery died, he was one of nine coronavirus deaths at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Over the next week, the hospital would see another 61 deaths wrought by the virus. It was New York's deadliest week since the outbreak began. The statistics tell stories, but they don't capture the life that came beforehand.

Montgomery was an actor, a photographer, a painter and a make-up artist. His name may not ring a bell, but his face was a familiar one: as a newsman in the TV show "Stranger Things," as an Irish bartender in the show "Boardwalk Empire," as a security guard in the movie "The Roads Not Taken," among other supporting roles.

He created mixed-media portraits of famous figures like Rufus Wainwright and Courtney Love. He painted the women who worked in his local Chase branch in Greenwich Village, remarking to a New York Times reporter in 2003, "They're just wonderful people. But people forget, because they go to the bank and they just do their thing, and sometimes they have to wait in line, and they talk down to them. Or they talk a certain way where they don't see the person as an individual."

Montgomery was a loving person who saw beauty in everything, family members say. During a show of his work in 2011, his mother recalled, a homeless man walked into the gallery and was asked to leave. Montgomery intervened and said the man was welcome. As his identical twin, Tom, an army veteran who lives in Georgia, put it, "I did Iraq, did all these things for the country, but I think he did more. He just cared for his fellow man."