Greg Mayon

COVID-19 took my husband of 27 years in the first wave, July 7, 2020 at 3:16 am. He died in my arms. We were alone. That is the only good thing I can say about the most painful night of my life. He should have died comfortably, peacefully at home in his own bed, surrounded by our things, our memories.

Instead on March 18, 2020, the governor of California closed down the state, including campgrounds, and he had no concern for the thousands like us who live in RVs. Same day , Sacramento county had closed the campground on Sherman Island where we were living in our RV-home comfortable and perfectly adequate. We had just paid $115 for a week of camp fees. Never refunded.

When the park rangers showed up to move everyone out, our RV suffered a fuel pump failure. We were forced to leave it in the campground and drive out in our SUV to a motel where the county social worker (through a non-profit called Sacramento Self Help Housing) informed me that we could be separated (due to my 68-year-old husband having liver cancer, being a patient on UCSF’s Liver Transplant Clinic. They wanted to put him in Hospice. Temporarily we were put in a motel at county expense while I filed paper April 1, 2020 pleading for my husband not to be removed from me and for help repairing the RV. It was not pursued because Sacramento county paid for the motel room, all the while pressuring us to move into a “group home” with three other couples and a house mother. I constantly asked for the repairs on the RV. Every 21 days we were made to vacate the motel for 1 night and go to a different motel, to avoid tenancy rights. The motel owner was kind enough to allow the room to be untouched and our things still in there, so as to come back to a quarantined space. From March 18 til June 14, 2020 this went on. Then we were told we could choose between a FEMA trailer or returning to our broke down RV still sitting in the campground on Sherman Island at that time. We chose the FEMA trailer. The photos I took and how it was to be behind chain link fence I documented at: https://www.project-room-key-home-key-no-key.com/

He died three weeks after we entered the compound. I can barely stand to think about it. I left immediately and went to stay at an estranged relative’s in the mountain. I was there 84 days before I left to live in my SUV and a tent, which was my housing from late September to December 23, 2020, when I had AAA tow my broken home to me on the Great Highway in San Francisco (where we had lived 1997 – 2013). I already knew I had breast cancer but it wasn’t diagnosed until April, 2021.