He knew the lyrics to entire Broadway musicals and shared them with his granddaughters Zoe and Madeline during their annual summer visits from Brooklyn, New York, to Kansas City, where he was a renowned architect.
Even after Alzheimer's Disease stole most of his memory, Mel sang to his newborn grandson Joshua, who was born in 2019, his daughter Laura Solomon recalled. "My father couldn't really articulate himself well any more, but the music never disappeared," she said.
Mel, age 83, died of complications from COVID-19 in Roseland, New Jersey on April 22, where he had lived in an assisted living community near his children for the past year. No one in the family got to say goodbye.
"He just vanished," Laura said.
The global death toll from COVID-19 is approaching 1 million people, and in the last week the number of dead in the United States alone passed 200,000. Out of every 100 people who have been killed by the disease in the United States, around 70 are aged 65 or over.
These staggering statistics mean that families are now missing tens of thousands of grandparents who were alive six months ago. More than 80% of Americans 65 and older have one or more grandchild, Pew Research shows and two-thirds of those have more than four.
