- Hi!
- Hey!
[Cross Talk]
- Do we look okay?
[Cross Talk]
- Oh is that a devil Melissa?
[Cross Talk]
- We are the Neutz family.
- We've always been known as a large family
and we're all so very close.
We're a strong family of faith.
- When we get together it's 60 or 70 people
- I guess when I think about my family, I just think
I'm one of the luckiest guys in the world, I really do.
We're all very close.
[Singing Happy Birthday]
- We went from worrying about our hands being clean
and what groceries we needed to buy to not even
like a week and a half later our mom's in the hospital.
We realized we were not gonna to be able to be with our mom
[Melancholy piano music]
- I don't see how she was able to raise eight children
with what we had and for everybody to turn out pretty good
- She was devoted to the family,
you know we had an alcoholic father,
who unfortunately died an alcoholic.
But mom was very strong
and she kept us together as a family.
[Laughter]
- What do you think Keiko?
- [Laughs] She's so cute!
[Melancholy piano music]
- When she first went into the hospital
and we knew that we weren't going to be able to visit her,
it just really gave everyone a sense of hopelessness
and helplessness that we wouldn't have anything
that we could do, even if we wanted to,
to hold her hand or to be with her.
Lacy figured out that we could get a laptop to her.
- A nurse at the hospital came and met me outside
and grabbed the laptop and within about an hour
it was up in her room set up.
- Mom I think would have loved that to be her last 24 hours,
- a party - it was like a real party
- Say Happy New Year!
- Happy New Year!
- We even sent food and one of the families got to watch
her enjoy her Japanese dinner and
you know, we even kind of thought
maybe she was gonna come around,
you know watching her there.
- On Sunday, the doctors had let us know
that she was most likely going to be passing soon.
They were going to go ahead and minister what they call
comfort drugs,
so each of the brothers and sisters had gathered up
each of their family members and then we each were able to
get on the House Party app and spend time with her
as a family unit.
- I would say mom it's Tommy, and she would go, Tommy!
I said I love you mom and she responded back, I love you
and I cannot tell you what that meant to me.
They had her on an oxygen mask, they had a mask
that just covered her face
and oxygen was blowing through that mask.
When they did pull the mask off,
the nurse was holding her hand, within less than a minute
she said she's gone.
When they went to go remove that mask,
was when the nurses gathered around her room
outside her door and the other nurses held her hand.
So it was a pretty touching moment for all of us.
- The hardest part of this for me is not
to be able to be with you all
because we're such a great support for each other.
- It feels a little surreal,
I know that she was in the hospital
and I know that she's not here,
but it also seems like kind of was it just a dream?
Like did it really happen?
Some of it just seems not real because you didn't see her
and we didn't all get together.
- The whole situation really just makes you feel
like you're being robbed,
of not being able to hug your loved ones, you know,
or be with them, or talk about,
share stories about our grandmother together.
You just never imagine in a million years that this is how
it would play out and this is how it would happen.