When retired LSU professor and nationally known folklorist Frank de Caro died last week at Ochsner Medical Center, his wife, fellow retired LSU professor Rosan Jordan, was back at Lambeth House, holed up in her apartment on the fifth floor.

They’d been married almost a half century, and for most of their 30-plus years as English professors at LSU, they shared an office, their names appearing together on the door, and in published work.

“He really was a scholar. I’m a good editor,” Jordan said.

De Caro, 76, who had Parkinson’s, was living three floors down in a room at St. Anna’s, the nursing care section of Lambeth House, when he was hospitalized March 20 with a fever and cough. Jordan, 80, said he was administered a coronavirus test while she stayed put in isolation.

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Already sequestered in different parts of Lambeth House for more than a week, they managed a FaceTime call on March 21. The doctor had called with a grim prognosis.

“I wasn’t sure they would let me in the hospital, or if they did, whether they would let me back in Lambeth House,” Jordan said of her dilemma. “I just waited.”

De Caro died the next day, a Sunday. Jordan said she was later told he’d tested positive for COVID-19.

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Death in isolation has fast become the grim calling card of the new and greedy coronavirus, a pandemic that has left 151 reported dead and 1,127 hospitalized in Louisiana, with a third of them on ventilators, according to the state's noon update Sunday. And nowhere in the state has that forced separation appeared with more deflating repetition than at Lambeth House.

De Caro is among at least 13 Lambeth House residents — 5% of the senior home’s population — now dead from the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a memo that Lambeth House CEO Scott Crabtree sent Saturday evening to residents.

All told, Crabtree wrote, 53 residents have tested positive for COVID-19 or were presumed positive, about one in five Lambeth House residents.

There have been no numbers released on the number of Lambeth House staff who have been tested for coronavirus or fallen ill.

Crabtree also wrote, as an encouraging sign, that 21 of those 53 positive residents had “successfully completed the CDC-mandated isolation protocol and are now released from isolation according to CDC’s discharge criteria.”

Rosan Jordan said she is among those now free to walk around the facility or in the parking lot, though not outside the gates of the complex.

“The halls of Lambeth House feel like they’re full of ghosts, there have been so many passing,” she said.

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The death toll at Lambeth House in recent weeks extends beyond the 13 residents reported from Louisiana’s first known coronavirus cluster. Another 10 such facilities across the state have been identified as of Sunday as coronavirus “clusters,” defined as those having more than one confirmed positive case.

The state Department of Health is now providing the names of homes where coronavirus clusters have arisen, but that information does not include the names of the dead or their numbers at each facility.

According to Lambeth House residents, at least five more of their neighbors have died, beyond those 13, since the outbreak. How many of them will ultimately be placed on the state’s rapidly growing roster of anonymous coronavirus deaths is uncertain.

A spokesman for Lambeth House did not immediately respond to a request for information Sunday.

At least four of the 13 people confirmed dead from the virus at Lambeth House, including de Caro, lived at St. Anna’s, the nursing care section on two lower floors.

Lambeth House officials had worked in the early days of the outbreak under CDC guidance to shield those especially frail residents of St. Anna's from the spread of COVID-19, but it hasn’t seemed to work. Several other residents living on those floors also have tested positive, other residents said.

De Caro entered St. Anna’s about a year ago, his wife said, after Lambeth House staff decided his Parkinson’s had finally left him in need of skilled nursing.

It had been a decline over years, though de Caro appears to be the youngest Lambeth House resident to die with COVID-19. Like many of the others, he’d retired to the Uptown complex after a successful career.

The couple met in graduate school at Indiana University, “one of the big schools in folklore studies” at the time, and wed in 1970, Jordan said.

Frank took a teaching job the following year at LSU; Rosan finished her dissertation then joined him on the staff there, she said.

Rosan said they retired from LSU in 2004 and moved into a house on Camp Street in New Orleans’ Garden District, before Hurricane Katrina struck a year later.

They began what de Caro would describe in his writing as an “odyssey of displacement” that included stops in Texas, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C.

Marcia Gaudet, president of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society — a seat de Caro once held — said he was the first chairman of the Louisiana Folklife Commission, president of the Louisiana Folklore Society and edited the publication “Louisiana Folklore Miscellany.”

“I also recall Frank's fun side, such as his wonderful laughter while Cajun Mardi Gras women dragged him on the ground during a courir de Mardi Gras one year, playfully attempting to rob him of his trousers,” Gaudet wrote in a tribute.

“Frank seemed to relish the Louisiana culture, and his articles on New Orleans Mardi Gras are invaluable.”

De Caro’s work is included in a recently released book, "Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans."

“He was just really a nice, gentle and generous kind person who treated everybody the same. He was really nice to everybody,” Jordan said. “Of course, we both taught a lot of students at LSU in our years there.”

The couple had no children. They moved into Lambeth House in 2017.

“I guess he had the idea it would be good; we should be looking around for a retirement place,” Jordan said.

About a year ago, de Caro “had a couple of falls and they decided at Lambeth House he needed to be at St. Anna’s. He was never happy about being there," she said. "He always liked to come back to the apartment, use the computer there. He could still type and do email, things like that.”

De Caro had grown up in New York City, attended college at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and received a masters degree from John Hopkins University Writing Seminars, said a friend and co-author Robin Roberts.

After Katrina, he grew fascinated with stories and urban legends that had cropped up in New Orleans after the storm. De Caro wrote of how he and other folklorists “can’t stop thinking about what the narratives may be telling us about the future — or at least our local visions of it.”

De Caro might have made some sense of the pandemic, Gaudet wrote, had he survived it.

“It adds to this great sadness that Frank will not be here to help us understand the narratives we're hearing now.”