LORAIN COUNTY, Ohio — For families who’ve lost a loved one, the COVID-19 pandemic is especially tough.
“It’s hard to lose your dad and your best friend all in the same day,” says Mark Ballard whose father Clarence Ballard died from complications of COVID-19 on Sunday.
Clarence was well-known in Lorain County as well as gospel communities in Northeast Ohio and beyond. He was a gospel singer, radio broadcaster, entrepreneur, volunteer, church elder and deacon.
“He was like an ambassador for Lorain and the family and God and everybody here in this community,” explains Ballard.
“He’s always been smooth, always so sharply dressed, gliding around, blinking his eyes and just frisky and flirtatious, if he just met you or if he’s known you seventy years, you were part of his family.”
In April, Clarence had to be hospitalized and was diagnosed with COVID-19.
He was released and went home. In a video call with family, he told them how much he loved them. “I don’t know where it came from, so many people, you be around but they don’t have a halo over their head saying I got it, you don’t know who has it,” he told them. “I don’t want my day to come when only ten people can come, no I want love.”
Soon after, he went back to the hospital and was eventually moved to the ICU and had to be put on a ventilator. Ballard says even with treatments, his father’s organs shutdown.
“And his heart just failed on him and he never had heart problems, but that’s kind of the walkthrough of the mean spirit of his whole COVID virus,” he says. “My dad was 80 but he was an 80 year old that could outrun me.”
Ballard hopes the community will take this virus seriously.
“This thing is killing people that we know and love and I don’t want anyone else to have to live through what we’ve had to live through by seeing such a mean vicious virus take someone that you love so much,” he says.
Ballard was a father of three, grandfather, husband and beloved community member.
