After a month long battle with COVID-19, Alpine resident Micah Retz passed away on Jan. 1 at the age of 48, leaving his three children and grandchild. Retz broke his neck in 2008, leaving him a quadriplegic with limited mobility and ongoing health issues requiring 24 hour care since his accident. Retz raised his three children as a single father. Due to the pandemic and his health, recently his three children, his children Kaodi Retz, 20, Noe Lani Retz, 23, and Hashanna Retz, 25, provided 100% of his care, making their only income from In-Home Supportive Services.
His sister, Meggin Hurlburt said not only are the children dealing with the challenges of accepting and understanding the passing of their father, but also having to readjust to their new lives, find jobs, and replace the income they received as caregivers for their father.
Hurlburt said Micah has always been adventurous, a free spirit, and always loved life to the fullest. She said before his accident that he rock climbed the side of El Capitan and Yosemite, with a trail named after him and his friends in Peru, where they did ice climbing.
“He was extremely adventurous and a risk taker,” she said. “In May 2008, he went to Devil’s Punchbowl (Cedar Creek Falls) in Ramona with his three kids, all in elementary school. It was after the Cedar Fires, so he did not know that the sediment had filled in the bottom of the pool. He had jumped there before, and it had been deep enough. This time, he did not test the bottom of the pool. He jumped, dove headfirst, hit the bottom and was paralyzed. He was Life Flighted out, was in critical condition. We did not know if he would make it, but he did. He has been a quadriplegic since.”
Hurlburt said at the time he was a single father raising his kids, and even with the injury he continued to raise his children. His mother, Holly Logan, who lives in Alpine, refinanced her house and built a handicapped accessible addition to her house for him and the children, and since then had to have 24-hour caregivers.
“He did not have use of his hands,” she said. “He had some use of his arms. He could not cough, so he needed someone there to do a quad-cough, to push up his diaphragm and push anything out. He needed help with everything.”
Hurlburt said despite that, he still drove, learned to paint with East County artist Mona Mills who has done most of the murals in East County libraries. She said he was an amazing artist and musician before the accident. She said even with 24 hour caregivers, he still went out and did things that he loved.
“He was amazing,” she said. “When I asked him if he had any regrets he said, ‘I have no regrets.’ Micah said when he broke his neck, he told his brother ‘No this is my Sun Dance.’”
His brother, married to a Viejas Native American, and Hurlburt said that he participated in the Sun Dance, sweat lodge ceremonies, and many other Native American cultural traditions and ceremonies.
“He just saw his injury, instead of regretting it and being angry, he just saw it as him rising to the occasion,” she said. “He said, ‘I can still live my life and I can still do what I want. And be happy and be positive.’ Despite the fact he was in pain 24/7.”
Hurlburt said the children have done most of the caregiving as he got older, and when COVID began they did not want a bunch of people coming into the household, so they limited it to just the children. He said Kaodi and Noe would do 12 hour shifts and Hashanna would fill in when needed.
Hurlburt said the family took a drive to Michigan to see where Noe went to school, meet her friends, her boyfriend’s family, a trip they always wanted to do,” she said. “He was not vaccinated, they went out there, they contracted COVID on Dec. 1. They all got it. They came back and on Dec.9 was the first day that Micah went into the hospital. She said the hospital could not meet all of his needs, so he came home, but the day after Christmas, he went back into the hospital and they intubated him immediately, and he passed seven days later.”
Hurlburt said the children are all talented. She said Hashanna makes “amazing tie-dyes” and sells them online, Kaodi does welding and rebuilds cars, and Noe does photography and film. She said Noe is working on a documentary about the family’s travels. Noe Lani Retz has a bachelor’s degree in photography from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and now her boyfriend and her live where she was born and are trying to figure out the transition if they are going to live in her father’s house. She said before she was born her father was travelling, and for some time following The Grateful Dead, where he met her mother, and were inseparable. They traveled the Dead Tour together, went to drum circles, and conceived her older sister when Jerry Garcia passed away.
Noe said they lived off the grid in Northern California, moving back to Alpine when her sister was two. Then moved to Pine Valley until they separated, when her father and them moved back to Alpine.
She said he had his life of rock climbing, would take them with him many times. She said they traveled to Mexico, hot springs, go skydiving, rock climb, ice climb, mountain bike, and at that time she saw her dad as this crazy guy always doing this crazy stuff.
“He is like a nature guy, like Tarzan. He was basically our Superman. I was always scared,” she said. “He told me a few weeks ago that the first time he took me out to climb I was so scared that I pooped my pants.”
Noe said she remembers the day of the accident like it was yesterday. She said her cousin and her had foam board to hold onto watching people jump off. She said her brother and dad went up to jump together, but her brother was scared, so told his dad to jump first.
“My dad does this crazy flip, lands in the water and does not come up,” she said. She said her dad was crazy, and even as a child would play dead in his mother’s arms, so at first, they thought it was one of his pranks.
“My dad told me that when he jumped in, he hit his neck on the floor of the swimming hole, then instantly realized that he could not move his body and he was under water,” she said. She said with all his training, he knew he had to stay calm, and someone would get him. She said eventually, her uncle got him out of the water, they moved him far enough to breath, then used their floating boards to support him. She said fortunately, there was a doctor there to help them because it took almost two hours for Life Flight to get there.
Noe Retz said from that time, until now, the three of them have been the main ones taking care of their father, as there were so many things that even the caregivers did not know how to do for him, and all of them lived in the addition to the house that their grandmother had made.
“Those years were a little bit rough for us as a family,” she said. “The level of empathy we had as teenagers was very little, and his level of patience was wearing thin.”
She said getting caregivers to work 12 hour shifts at minimum wage, that you do not get qualified people, and there were some caregivers that would leave drugs at the house, doing drugs while working, not giving him the quality of care, he needed, so he would get infections.
Noe said on the way back from Michigan, her dad became sick, then her sister, then her, until all of them were sick with COVID. She said returning, they still had to work 12-hour shifts while they were sick to take care of their father, and her sister could not help because she was so sick from COVID.
“It was really hard,” she said. “One day he stopped taking his steroids because he thought they were causing his massive migraines and from that day he drastically declined. He was in so much pain.”
She said right before he went into the hospital the last time, she did not think that he would make it through the night. After she asked, he told her that he wanted to die at home.
“I was standing in the living room, and he told me, ‘I am so proud of you.’ When he said that I knew that it was coming to an end,” she said.
The next morning while she was sleeping, her boyfriend woke her up to let her know that her father was on his way to the emergency room.
“I went up there and held his hand, rubbed his forehead and told him how much I loved him,” she said. “I told him how much I loved him. He told me he loved me more. And the last thing I ever said to him was, ‘I will see you when you come home.’”
The last time they saw their father, he was in induced coma, intubated, and they all said their goodbyes. They held a small ceremony at the crematorium after his passing.
With all three children spending all their time in taking care of their father, Hurlburt has started a fundraiser to help them transition and recoup money they loss while taking being his only caregiver. She said this assistance will give time for the children to heal, adjust to their new life, and maintain their monthly expenses. All funds will be used to directly help the children.
For more info about the GoFundMe fundraiser, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/ quadrapalegic-passes-caregiverkids- jobless.
