PEABODY — Anthony Petricca had the ability to send the rest of his family into fits of laughter, his niece, Peabody resident Carol McMahon, recalled.
The Korean War veteran and beloved brother and uncle was 92 when he died of COVID-19 after contracting the virus at a North Shore care facility on April 26, 2020, leaving his tight-knit family devastated beyond words.
“It unfolded so fast. You just don’t have time to absorb what’s going on,” McMahon said. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”
What made the loss all the more difficult was the fact that Petricca wasn’t meant to be at the facility at all.
His time at the nursing home only happened by chance — the lingering result of a fall he’d taken months earlier.
In fact, his niece said Petricca was scheduled to receive approval to be discharged from his assisted living facility the very same week the pandemic swept the North Shore.
“The nurse couldn’t make it that day, so we were like, ‘no problem.’ In the meantime, the virus really started to take over and they wouldn’t allow us to go there anymore. He was good enough, in my opinion, and I’m sure in the nurse’s as well, to go back to his apartment,” said McMahon, 62. “He never made it.”
Because Petricca never married and had no children of his own, he remained remarkably close to his large extended family and was a lively guest at gatherings. McMahon fondly recalled one instance in which the family shared a good laugh after learning her uncle had purchased a coat for himself from the clothing line of rapper Jay-Z.
“He was also great at trivia. He knew every movie star, every year. He was a real movie buff,” McMahon said. “At the dinner table, we’d all be playing trivia and he’d fall asleep. He didn’t care about history, geography, but when it came to movies, all of a sudden he would just wake up and give us the right answer.”
She laughed.
“He was never sleeping. He was just waiting for the right time.”
During a second interview with The Item nearly a year later, however, McMahon still struggled to recount the trauma her family experienced in the early weeks of the pandemic.
“Heartbreaking” was a word she used frequently as she described how helpless she and her mother felt watching her uncle’s rapid decline from afar.
“He was there for two months and we weren’t able to see him. He doesn’t have a cellphone so we couldn’t do any FaceTiming. He wouldn’t even know what that was,” she said. “It was very hard not being able to talk to him, look at him, and comfort him, not to be able to say, ‘look, it’s going to be OK.’”
One week after her uncle’s death, McMahon and her mother visited the site where Petricca is now buried.
“We brought four flowers, all different colors. It was a new grave, the stone wasn’t up yet, the sun wasn’t out, but he’s facing south. It’s a good spot,” she said. “We apologized to him because we were sorry for how it all unfolded. I stayed for a couple of hours. It sounds crazy, but I felt a lot better when I left.”
Even still, nothing can fill the void left behind by her uncle’s death.
“The words are hard to come by,” McMahon said. “He was just gone. We never had a chance to say goodbye.”
Elyse Carmosino can be reached at [email protected].
