A16 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.
with a hacking covid cough, would fight on, but 14 days
after Misty died, on Oct. 8, he, too, would succumb. He also
left behind a 22-year-old daughter from an earlier relation-
ship.
Sutter waited until they were settled into what would
become the children’s new home before she told them
about their mother.
Six months later, the shock still feels fresh, yet the
children, she said, have managed to make friends and find
new activities.
One of Sutter’s friends bought each of the children a
bulletin board to put up on their bedroom wall. Each is
now covered almost entirely with photos of the kids with
their parents.
Behind Sutter’s home, the family put a plaque under a
big tree: “The Kevin and Misty Tree,” it says, and there’s a
bench nearby, and a hammock to lie in. Sutter and her
husband raise foster puppies for a rescue facility, and the
Mitchem children delight in playing with them; there are
14 pups on their two-acre property now.
For Sutter, the death of her sister and brother-in-law has
meant an abrupt new chapter of life. She has a house full of
kids once again; her own two children are grown and out of
the house — one in the Army and one in college. Sutter has
had to arrange for braces for three of her sister’s children,
tutoring for one, counseling for all. There are mouths to
feed, bodies to clothe.
The day after she and the kids arrived in South Carolina,
Sutter had all four of them vaccinated. Their parents had
decided against getting the shot. Kevin, according to his
brother, had spent a lot of time on Facebook, where he
picked up notions about the vaccine being dangerous or
part of some conspiracy against former president Donald
Trump.
“We’d tell Kevin, ‘This is not a joke, it’s real,’ ” Mike
Mitchem recalled. “And he’d say, ‘The government wants to
microchip us.’ I could have wrung his neck. And then when
he was in the hospital with covid, he called our mother and
he said, ‘Mom, I love you, and I wish I would have got the
shot.’ ”
Kevin’s parents, who have lived in the same house in
Prince William County since 1983, are selling the place
now. They can’t live with their expectation that Kevin, his
dad’s right-hand man, will pull into the yard any minute,
ready to fix what needs fixing.
Misty’s family pushed for the vaccine, too. Her brother,
Bobby Newton, a police officer in Muscle Shoals, Ala., tried
to persuade Kevin and Misty to get the shot, but, he said,
“for Kevin, the politics got involved, and he wasn’t going to
do it. I keep thinking I should have pushed harder for
Misty to get it, but they’d been together for a long time,
and you know how that is.”
“Stubbornness runs in our family,” said Kathy Newton,
Misty’s mother. “Kevin kept saying it’s not necessary. When
Misty died, I was mad at Kevin a whole lot. It’s taken me a
long time to let loose of the anger.”
Both families feel the gap every day. When Washington’s
football team finally picked its new name, Mike Mitchem
reached for the phone to call his older brother to find out
what Kevin thought of “Commanders.” Mike put the
phone back down. When snow fell this winter, Mike
reflexively revved up his truck and readied to meet his
brother at one of the shopping centers they’d long plowed
together. Mike went alone.
Seven hundred miles away, in Killen, Ala., Misty’s
mother feels what’s missing every day. “I don’t know how
I’m going to get by without her,” Newton said. “I know this:
The kids aren’t supposed to die first.”
At 8 o’clock most mornings, she gets a text from Taylor,
one of Kevin and Misty’s twins. “I love you and I still miss
Mommy and Daddy,” it says.
Her grandmother replies: “It can’t be helped, but God is
watching over you all the time and He’s up there with Mom
and Dad, so they’re not alone.”The first of everything was difficult. The
one-year-anniversary of the ill-fated cruise,
which they marked by getting their vaccine
shots. The anniversary of Ming’s death, when
his family released white balloons with long
yellow strings into the sky.
“As the world keeps moving on around me, I
am still standing, still trying to figure out how I
should be,” his daughter, Anne Peterson, 41,
posted on Facebook in September 2020.
“Should I be better by now? Should I be less
sad? More happy?”
Time hasn’t helped yet. The second of every-
thing proved just as hard, compounded by
arguments with some customers over mask
mandates and supply chain issues that forced
Ming’s son, Ping, who took over the restaurant
from his father, to raise prices.
In Ming’s absence, his family learned to
believe in signs, in the pennies found on the
sidewalk and the cardinals that alighted out-
side Lu’s living room window. Maybe it was
Ming trying to communicate with them.
At Ming’s Restaurant, they’ve hung a photo
of the patriarch above the counter, next to a
bouquet of dried yellow roses.
Everyone — staff, customers — knew Ming’s
story. How he learned to cook in Taiwan’s
marines and taught math at a Taiwanese uni-
versity before moving to the United States with
Lu — a physical therapist — and 2-year-old
Ping in 1977. They settled near D.C. before
deciding to move to California. On their way
west, in Nebraska, Ping got sick with a cold.It’s been nearly two years since Ming Wang
died of the virus, and still the customers
come, filling the tables of his small Nebras-
ka restaurant.
There’s the mayor, usually the first to com-
ment on posts on the restaurant’s Facebook
page. The police chief, who likes ordering
Emperor’s Delight, and who sends patrol cars
by on nights when Ming’s widow is locking up
alone. Just as they have throughout the 33
years that Ming’s Restaurant has been open in
Papillion, right outside Omaha, they come —
judges from the nearby courthouse, and fami-
lies with children who’ve grown tall and lanky,
then brought their own children.
They come for the food — served hot and
fresh on big white plates — and to show
support for Ming’s family. He was the first
person many of them knew who died from the
coronavirus.
After contracting covid on a cruise to New
Zealand in March 2020, Ming was hospitalized
for 74 days before he died on June 8. He was 71
years old.
Afterward, his adult children draped black
mourning cloth over the restaurant’s exterior.
His wife, Lu Wang, dressed in black and pinned
a white cloth flower to her lapel. In the year
after his death, she barely left the house. She
didn’t want to go out in public, where everyone
seemed to know her husband, whom she’d met
in kindergarten in their native Taiwan. At
Target, at AutoZone, everyone stopped to give
their condolences.Kevin and Misty Mitchem’s four kids — 12-year-old
twins Taylor and Aidan; Leah, 15; and Riley, 17 —
were at their house in Stafford County, Va., one
day last September when their aunt, Janine Sutter,
drove up from South Carolina to fetch them and take them
to their new home — hers.
The kids’ mother had gone into the hospital with covid
and was quickly put on a ventilator. Now their father, who
contracted covid first but seemed to be doing fairly well
with it, was in a different hospital. Sutter, Misty’s older
sister, made a beeline for Virginia.
She packed the kids’ bags and drove four children, two
cats and a dog 450 miles southwest to her place. What she
didn’t tell them immediately was that she’d already gotten
word as she drove north: Misty, who was diabetic, had died
on Sept. 24, just four days after she entered the hospital, just
two days after she was put on a ventilator. She was 46 years
old.
Kevin, a healthy 48-year-old equipment operator, nowMissing Mommyand DaddyA restaurant in mourningCOVID FROM A
COURTESY OF THE MITCHEM FAMILY
FAMILY PHOTO