A Battle-Tested Family

Kaizer’s maternal grandparents, Joseph and Martha Doryen, had five sons and five daughters. All survived Liberia’s civil war from 1989 to 2003, a brutal one even by the standards of African wars of that era.

Before the fighting started, when rebels tried to oust the military dictatorship, Joseph Doryen worked as a driver at the agriculture ministry and then for a rich Ghanaian businessman. After the businessman fled the war, Joseph Doryen began growing potato greens in his Monrovia neighborhood, Capitol Hill. The children helped, and his wife sold the crop at a local market.

Until Joseph Doryen died three years ago, the old couple could often be seen strolling or sitting together under the mango tree behind their home. Their 10 children were all “same father, same mother,” a rarity in a large family of that generation.

They were also comparatively fortunate, escaping the rockets that frequently rained on Capitol Hill, destroying houses and killing residents.

Like its American model in Washington, the neighborhood derives its name from the nearby Capitol Building — one of the many ties between the United States and Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves in 1822. But being next to Liberia’s seat of government made the neighborhood a frequent target.

Not even the war, however, was as bad as Ebola, the family said.

“Even when we were fighting war at that time, you know the safe place to go,” said Anthony Doryen, 39, the second-oldest son. “This one, you can’t even know where to go.”

“Ebola is a disease that eliminates families,” he added. “It makes you afraid because when you get around your family, apparently you get in contact with it. It makes you go far away from your family.”

Today, Capitol Hill’s dirt paths snake around houses with corrugated roofs held down by heavy rocks. To the east, the Temple of Justice peeks above the palm trees. The president’s Executive Mansion is a quick walk to the south. The Liberian flag outside government buildings — red and white stripes, with a white star in a blue box — can easily be mistaken for the American flag.

For the Doryens, postwar Liberia led to better lives. Like most residents, they still got their water from aging, unsanitary wells. But because they had property in Capitol Hill, they were better off than most, with steady jobs as gas station attendants, government cafeteria workers, cellphone-card salesmen and market traders.

Just as they had during wartime, the Doryens pulled together during peacetime. The children built separate houses near their parents and tore down the flimsy old family home, pooling their savings to build an eight-room concrete dwelling. It offered stability, cohesion — and a refuge for an ailing Kaizer.

A Father on Ebola’s Front Line

For most West Africans infected during the outbreak, the virus was transmitted quietly, through tender acts of love and kindness, at home where the sick were taken care of, or at a funeral where the dead were tended to.

Image Kaizer Dour, 22, in his Facebook profile photo.

But for Kaizer’s father, Edwin Dour, Ebola came violently on the night of June 25 after a gravely ill man — Patient Zero to the Doryen family — was brought to the beleaguered government-run clinic where Kaizer’s father was the chief administrator.

Six of 29 employees at the clinic died within a month of Ebola’s arrival. Kaizer’s father, known for never turning away patients, became infected, too, passing the virus to his son in a pattern seen across the city. The sick brought Ebola to defenseless health centers that in turn often helped spread the virus.

Despite the money that the United States and other governments had funneled into Liberia’s health care system in recent years, health centers quickly crumpled. The 16-year-old girl who had brought the disease from Sierra Leone to Monrovia died in the state-run Redemption Hospital on May 25. A doctor and five nurses there, working without gloves or the basics of infection control, died in rapid succession.

Though Redemption often did not have running water, it was one of the biggest medical centers in Liberia. So after it was closed in a panic in June, the sick scattered to nearby clinics, including the one managed by Kaizer’s father. They were even less prepared to deal with Ebola’s onslaught.

On June 25, a yellow taxi dropped off a young man in front of the clinic’s gate. The patient, a church caretaker, had apparently become infected when an old woman with Ebola was brought in for prayers. By the time the caretaker showed up at Kaizer’s father’s clinic, he was exhibiting the full-blown symptoms of late-stage Ebola: vomiting, diarrhea and — a peculiar sign of Ebola — uncontrollable hiccups.

Around 10 p.m., the sick man became violent and confused. “He was fighting — unstable — he was just going up and down, coming down on the bed, turning this way, that way,” said the physician assistant on duty, Moses Safa.

The guard held the man down. “Then he gave up the ghost,” Mr. Safa said.

The guard himself would soon die of Ebola, though not before transmitting it to Kaizer’s father. The clinic’s medical staff, terrified by the deaths at the state hospital, offered the ailing guard minimal care. Kaizer’s father was not authorized to provide care, but he volunteered to put the guard on an intravenous drip — and was infected in the process.

Kaizer’s father tested positive for Ebola, but the government did not tell his family. In theory, workers are supposed to inform families of test results; in practice, few tests have been carried out and the results rarely provided — another systematic failure that has contributed to Ebola’s spread.

Kaizer’s father, who was in his mid-40s, died July 23. Because his parents had separated years before, Kaizer helped tend to his dying father. But as has been the case for thousands who have died during this epidemic, the natural inclination to care for a loved one would prove his undoing.

On Aug. 9, Kaizer’s father was laid to rest at Good Shepherd Funeral Home in a closed coffin. Though the funeral hall could hold 100 people, only about 20 came, mostly workers from the clinic and friends from the father’s days as a soldier in the Liberian Army.

No family member came.

Shared Denial and Death

Overwhelmed by Kaizer’s illness, Mamie Doryen had brought him by taxi to her family in Capitol Hill. As day broke, the neighbors learned that an ailing Kaizer had been carried in overnight.