Essential Memory: Carmela Cruz

San Francisco CA

12 May, 2021

3:54 PM

Description

By Clara-Sophia Daly, Mission Local May 12, 2021 Carmela Cruz behind the check-out line at Grocery Outlet in the Mission where she is the store manager. Photo by Clara-Sophia Daly.Carmela Cruz, 42, has been the manager at Grocery Outlet on South Van Ness near 24th Street for four years. Before that, she worked for three years at the Grocery Outlet near her house in Visitacion Valley. Professionally the pandemic has been hard, but as we talk, it becomes clear that the personal has been devastating. Her eldest son, 20-year-old Alejandro Fuentes, died in his sleep suddenly on January 7. He would have been 21 on January 29th. He had complained of feeling tired, fell asleep on the couch of a friend's house and did not wake up. Cruz says the doctors confirmed he tested positive for Covid, but she is waiting a a final autopsy report from the Medical Examiner, a process that will take 4 or 5 months, she was told. Her son had been working security at California Pacific Medical Center Hospital on Castro Street, checking people's temperature as they came to the location for medical care. Cruz took about a month off work to stay home after his death, and then went back to work at Grocery Outlet. "I didn't want to go into his room when I was home, and all I could do at home was think." "People told me I had to go on for my other two children," so Cruz pushed forward and went back to work at Grocery Outlet. At work, when memories of her son come up, she steps into the office to cry. Cruz with her late son Alex Fuentes. At his ceremony in the cemetery, Cruz says it was full of people, many of whom she had never meet. "They kept coming up to me and telling me how incredible my son was, how he was so kind to the elderly women at the places he worked, and how he was a great person." Photo courtesy of Carmela Cruz. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.