When the doctors of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital turned off the fan who had kept Paul Smith alive, his condition so desperate that he moved in a minute.
His wife, Marie, had a phone near his ear, not knowing if he can only listen to his favorite song, or as she says, “the only song he knew. “
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In his soul, Marie is still an Evertonian and never liked that you would never walk due to her attachment to Liverpool, the local rivals of her team and Paul’s team have supported her total life, but since then she has acquired another meaning. “I’m getting angry now because it’s moving,” Marie admits.
Pablo died in April 2020, at the age of 52, an early victim of the COVVI-19 Pandemia that charges approximately 2,000 other people in Liverpool only. There is no day that Marie and her daughter, Megan, do not think of Paul, and in recent weeks they have felt soft.
The victory of the Premier League of Liverpool is a source of jubilation in the red part of the city, especially from the previous name of the club, received a few months after Paul’s death, the pandemic still of anger, played in a backdrop of empty stages.
Anfield will greet his heroes on Sunday for the trophy elevator after the last attack of the season opposed to the Crystal Palace. The next day, more than one million enthusiasts are expected to enter the streets for a parade.
However, for Marie, Megan and others like them, whose relatives have been denied seeing their team Crown Champions of England, this will arouse painful memories.
“I am invented, we have won the League, but I think:” Oh, he would do this now, or he would say that, and make sure he had the day of license for the parade, “says Megan. ” Its flags would have come out. A flag on the main door and a flag in the nearest lamp. Instead, we plan to put flags in your grave. “
Football was, in many ways, the Smith family’s making.
When Paul met Marie in 1993, he worked as a butler in Anfield. There, through the remarkable position of Kop, he saw him exercise his purposes as a voluntary police officer. Marie remembers going home and telling her mother, had asked for an appointment. Although Marie agreed, she did not know if she had to appear, however, her mother insisted that he leaves. “How would you like that if your own child is?” She explained.
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After their marriage 3 years later, they lost a child and Megan, born in 1998, was six weeks premature. She would expand a close bond with her father. Regarding football, she never went to a single team.
Paul, despite everything, received a task to greet visitors as an assistant at the doors of Anfield’s business fairs. He thought it was the task of the assembly and, in some cases, to know some of the maximum figures decorated to constitute their club as a privilege. Megan believes that they enjoyed him because he would talk to them like other common people on daily issues. If you discovered secrets, in fact it did not percent.
Paul moved away from the butler in 2017, at the time Megan continued the family agreement with the club by adjusting to an Ampield consultant, because he sought to be a fanatic again. Paul’s hero, Bill Shankly, however, his daughter thinks he can see what he can go under Jurgen Klopp.
Sometimes, Paul invited Carlsberg to return to Anfield and Megan with him once. She did not know then, however, the last time she saw a live place with her father. “Liverpool lost and my father was not happy,” Megan said. “I would like to pay more attention. “
Paul tended to mark Liverpool’s achievements through his wife: “He enjoyed the settlement of the Evertonians,” Marie admits, and when the club won the Champions League in 2019, the space decorated in the flags. Megan recalls that his father told him that the first championship in 30 years the following and that he corrects.
Liverpool has become a champion in June 2020, but Paul did not live to see him. Two months and two days before the confirmation of the title, on April 23, 2020, he died of COVID-19 after they fell 3 weeks before. Megan and Marie agree that they did not settle for the absence of the guy they loved. “We will never do it,” says Marie. “We just learned to live around it. “
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The events can be activated, adding the recent victory for the name of Liverpool. Megan believes that it is less difficult to avoid being caught five years ago due to the suffocating blocking restrictions in the city’s celebrations, but this time, hunting in thousands of terminals in the streets of Anfield, fireworks and fervor, too much.
Paul, she believes, has been there to see him too.
Richie Mawson, a Liverpool fan, died a week before Paul at the Aintree hospital in Liverpool, not far from the direction she welcomes with the wonderful national horsepower race.
The two men did not know others, but they had spent their adult life obsessed with the same football club, living only a few kilometers.
Geography is vital because the Anfield region of Mersyside has one of the main stages of the TouchDown Covid-19 in Great Britain, thanks to the resolution to authorize March 12 in the Liverpool Champions League, the Liverpool Champions League with Atlético de Madrid on March 12.
Madrid had already been placed in serious locking restrictions, the games in the city were organized without enthusiasts last weekend. The arrival of such a vital entry of visitors meant that districts such as Anfield and Vauxhall nearby, from there Paul, and Kirkdale, the region to which Richie was hooked on birth, has a reproductive floor for the virus.
The chronology that leads to his death suggests that they are unlikely to have poor health as a direct result of the luminaire, but as a wave of sweeping disease through the region, they were on their way.
Unlike Paul, Richie had attended the Atlético party. His son Jamie remembers having argued with his father what happens in Spain and Italy, where television photographs showed bags of stacked hospitals.
“It would be by phone to say:” Should this game go ahead? “I said:” Dad, I don’t think it’s, but you just have to follow what they think well. “
Richie, who 70s at his death, a retired exercise driver. Hearray according to Jamie, a typical Liverpudlian: “He enjoyed his family. He enjoyed a bet. He liked to faint with his friends for a pint. He also enjoyed his vacation in Spain. But his hobby the Liverpool FC. “
Richie has been following the club for 63 years, starting when the team was suffering in the Moment division. In the five years after Jamie’s birth in 1972, he had a son to take him and, together, traveled to Europe.
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Like Paul, Richie in Hillsborough in 1989, when 97 Liverpool supporters were killed in a semifinal FA due to the institutional disorder of the government that supervised the party.
Richie and Jamie, then 16 years old, were relatively at the upper point of the stretch of Lapando, but getting there was scary. Outside, Jamie had witnessed the congestion and screams of fans, begging the police to do something.
They arrived and while Richie went to the bathroom, Jamie waited near the bridge, just when a door opened and a lot of enthusiasts ran. Jamie was next to a wall and remembers that his father appeared suddenly, shouting: “Jamie, Jamie!” Richie has addressed the crowd, preventing her son from being swept in an enclosure where so many other people would lose their lives.
Jamie has never forgotten what witnessed his position above the death trap. While the men, the women and the young people raised him while they sought to escape crushing, Jamie and his father cried. “What happened will remain with me for the rest of my life. “
Despite this trauma, Richie did not lose his love for football, and in fact not for Liverpool. Above all, he enjoyed European nights in Anfield, so when the British government has given the approval of Atlético de Adjete, it will not be lost.
Liverpool lost 3-2 that night, making sure his elimination of competition, and then, Richie called Jamie from The Dark House, his favorite pub in Kirkdale.
Richie seemed involved even if he had used a mask. Approximately one hour before kicking, the World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. “I told my father that it was older to spend the house than to stay in the announcement,” Jamie said. “I said:” You’re poor . . . you’ll be fine. “
Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Work Metro for the region of the city of Liverpool, sat near Richie in the position of Sir Kenny Dalglish in Anfield. It was also in two spirits to leave, even to keep the official government advice, which meant disinfecting his hands several times when he was sitting at the back of a taxi on the ground.
Later in the pandemic, Rotheram would play a main role in the reaction of Liverpool to the epidemic, but at that time it was not a demand, still a source of frustration today because, in his words, he left regions like his “blinded eyes. “
In 2023, an investigation into the reaction of Great Britain to Covid-19 revealed that the country was wrong for a pandemic after more than a decade of cuts under successive conservative governments. In this investigation, Rotheram complained that anyone in a position of authority at the Merseyaspect or in the neighboring region of Wirral was consulted when the British government decided, in February 2020, to position the British citizens who live in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first instances of the virus were recorded, in a safe unit of the Arwe Park hospital, in the other aspect of the other aspect of the me. Liverpool. It was, according to Rotheram, a sign of things to come.
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“These vital decisions taken on behalf of us have had, in fact, terrible and disastrous consequences of families that are surely convinced that their enjoyed died of COVID-19 because they attended a football game,” Rotheram told The Athletic.
OnLético’s Day, Liverpool had six cases. On April 2, the figure was higher in 262. A month later, Liverpool had one of the highest death armchairs in the United Kingdom outside the doors of London: Paul Smith and Richie Mawson were among the other 303 people who succumbed to the virus.
For Jamie, his father’s loss continues to feel raw. Only a child and considered his father as his most productive partner. From his space to Formmy, he used to put his parents’ position in Kirkdale before going to Anfield with his father. He cannot walk around the park and paint him in the direction of the ground, before repeating the regime on the way back.
They had seasonal tickets next to others, but since 2020, Jamie has not returned to their headquarters and will not be in the stadium on Sunday for the trophy elevator.
“It’s very, very complicated to leave, either with a couple or even my daughter,” he said. “My father and I sat together, they told us, we cried, experimenting with emotion together. And then I can’t for my life right now to drag myself to the ground because I think:” Where is it? “. “
Only a few days after attending Atlético de Atlética that Paul Machin began to feel bad.
Machin, a presenter of the popular YouTube channel of Redmen TV, remembers gone to a supermarket to help prepare his cousin’s birthday and feel that something was slid, but expected that Pacetamol and Vitamins supplements were wasting it. During the party that followed, she discovered that her pregnant sister presented the same symptoms.
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Lockdown was still 4 days when, on March 19, Machin posted a video on YouTube to explain what was happening to him. Since then, her sister had been reviewed by COVID-19 and felt horrible, describing the “worst flu” with an impressive lack of breath. I had problems drinking and a vacation in the rest room have become a check because some steps were very exhausting.
Just when he started feeling a little better, the virus returned, hitting him as a “ton of bricks, is when you realize how it was, because it was completely destroyed. “
Machin says he hasn’t felt since then. It describes symptoms of cerebral fog commonly discussed through those who have suffered long covids, struggling to locate words that came here easily.
Machin has doubts that the compounding in Atlético’s adjustment made him ill. He interviewed the enthusiasts near the neighborhoods before the adjustment as a component of their Redmen television responsibilities and remembers the euphoric celebrations of the KOP that accompanied the two objectives of Liverpool, bodies that accumulate the bodies, without danger.
He 37 years in 2020 and considered one of the lucky ones. The elders, such as Paul Smith and Richie Mawson, were less fortunate, even if the two men were in intelligent conditions without underlying physical conditioning problems.
Paul’s wife, Marie, was already aware of the risks of the virus because she was a manager of the Destination Hospital and the Emergency Unit, where her husband despite everything was found. He was there when the first user was admitted with Covid-19, dressed in his facial mask and his apron. They were his paintings to supervise the cleaning of the elevator after the patient was caused in a safe room where doctors were covered with non -public protection equipment.
Marie has the letter confirming that Paul, who had taken a component task as a cashier in a supermarket in Aintree, was an idea of an essential painting. When he began to complain about fatigue, the circle of relatives idea that he was exhausted through long -room models: it was occasionally a state at four am, reaching the paintings an hour later. During those first weeks of the pandemic, he did not return to the house before 8 p. m. , when the acquisition of panic grabbed the city.
On April 1, Paul began to show cavid symptoms. After being invited to isolate himself in a separate room, he entered the hospital on April 5 after telling Marie that she simply does not breathe. Less than 24 hours later, it was placed on a fan.
When Megan entered the community where his father about to die, the nurses were begged through the nurses. On the one hand, there were improvised plaster cabins. There were curtains slightly enough to give other people united to enthusiasts a safe intimacy. “They had completely left,” he recalls. “I don’t know how the staff did. It’s like a war zone. It’s horrible. “
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The doctors had spent the last hours returning to Paul from the back to their forehead to see if they can get more oxygen in their lungs, but their condition worsened.
Marie believes she has controlled the last weeks due to video messages of mythical Liverpool players such as Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Bruce Grobbelaar and David Johnson. “Doctors and nurses are confident that he died with dignity and respect, and I will thank you,” explains Megan.
Another delights with the Mawson family, who could not enter the hospital where Richie wasted his fight for life.
Jamie searched to protect his mother from what happens. After a telephone verbal exchange with his father, he knew he had problems. Consequently, the updates went through Jamie. For approximately a week, he told him that his “comfortable” father, but Jamie knew what he meant not improving.
When Jamie reported through a doctor that there is nothing more to do to save Richie, he begged him to continue trying. “I said:” Give him some other week, “says Jamie. ” The doctor said he had been in the hospital for almost a month without responding to any treatment. He said: “I have no options, I will have to turn off the device. “
Jamie and Mary said goodbye to Richie thanks to a video call, with a nurse who holds the phone, before the device is extinct.
“I asked the nurse to endure because we were allowed to be there. She seemed swollen and swollen due to steroids. I shout, crying her eyes before this poor nurse. She said:” Don’t worry, Jamie, I will leave it, “however, we had to finish the call. They were uncontrollable. “
When Liverpool won the name of the Premier League on June 25, 2020, two months after the death of Richie Mawson, Jamie and Mary marked the opportunity to form a way to raise a glass of champagne the guy who loved.
The day before, when Liverpool returned to Anfield for an opposite adjustment to Crystal Palace for the first time since the interruption of the season, a butler jacket with Paul Smith’s call had been placed in the Kop in his honor.
The former club manager used to call his daughter his “shadow. ” Megan says that those are the little things that he lacks to the fullest about his father: ask him if she went well when he sat on the couch, crossing the main door after paintings or text messages.
“For some people, small things may seem, but for me they are huge,” he said. “If I ever felt worried or anxious, I would go to my father. If with an idea that I didn’t know what to do or if I needed advice, it would be my father. “
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Megan is mourning for his loss and diagnosed with the SSPT due to some of the things he saw in the hospital when his father died. She says she is a prey to reflections on how she contracted COVID-19. Was it for her? Although it is very unlikely, she will never know with certainty.
What she is how her father would have reacted to the last triumph of the name of Liverpool.
“It’s so unfair,” he said. “He would like Liverpool enthusiasts to celebrate it because it was a red loop. But I would also say:” Remember those who did not; Remind us when you look. “
(Main photos: Gracieuse of Smith and Mawson Families; Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb)