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The last time Elijah Ross-Rutter saw his mother, he was looking into her hospital room through a small glass window. As his mother was dying from the coronavirus, he and his five siblings said goodbye to her using a walkie-talkie. The receiver sat propped up against a pillow beside their mother.



“I told her I love her ... she shouldn’t worry about the kids,” Ross-Rutter, her fourth-oldest child, told BuzzFeed News.

Sundee Rutter, 42, a single mother of six and breast cancer survivor, died as a result of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on March 16. All six of her children as well as her sister and mother were outside her hospital room to say goodbye via a handheld radio device.

Rutter was recovering from a yearlong bout with breast cancer when she was diagnosed with COVID-19. During her cancer treatments, she was able to have her family and friends by her side, but with the coronavirus, Rutter’s family could only communicate with her from outside her hospital room.

At first, Ross-Rutter said he was allowed to see her with a face mask on, but then the hospital completely isolated her.



“Like, I’m about to lose my best friend and she can’t even hear me,” Ross-Rutter said.

Ross-Rutter said his mother first visited Providence Regional Medical Center in Washington — the hospital where the first known US COVID-19 case was treated — on March 3.

While there, he and his mother spent eight hours in a sealed room with hospital staff coming in and out wearing full protective suits.

“They don’t even want to touch my mom,” Ross-Rutter said, adding that they were later sent home.