COVID kept a Tacoma man away from the woman he loved. Now she mourns his sudden death
“Everybody loves Grady.”
According to Ingrid Coleman, Grady Maxwell Sr.’s longtime partner, that’s how I should start this column.
It’s the only way, she insists.
“Everywhere he goes, he is always loved by everyone,” Coleman, 63, said Thursday, sitting on a couch in a home with a view of the Tacoma Dome.
“He always said so.”
Though Coleman met the man she would spend nearly two decades with in Tacoma — at the Caballeros Club on Hilltop, to be exact — this was her first time returning to the City of Destiny in more than a year. She’d spent the previous 16 months in Trinidad, where she’s originally from, and where she and Maxwell started living for half of the year in 2017.
Since last March, at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the couple had been separated by distance and circumstance. Maxwell was forced to leave Trinidad and return to Tacoma, where he was born, to ensure he’d have access to the medical care he needed to treat a heart condition. Coleman, meanwhile, had to stay behind, in part to care for her elderly mother. Shortly after Maxwell took off on one of the last planes to leave the Caribbean nation, COVID-19 travel restrictions came crashing down, essentially trapping both in place, thousands of miles between them.
In the months that followed, the connection they shared and maintained transpired largely by FaceTime.
Now, those images of Maxwell — grainy through her cell phone — are the last Coleman will have of the man she planned to spend the rest of her life with.
On Thursday, June 3, Maxwell died suddenly in the parking lot of Marlene’s Market & Deli on South 38th Street. He was 66.
For a local family, it was a devastating, disorienting loss, the kind that sucks the air out of your chest and wont give it back. The fact that the coronavirus separated Maxwell from the woman he loved for what would be the final year of his life just makes it worse.
In the midst of their tremendous grief, Maxwell’s son, Grady Jr., invited me into his home last week for one reason:
Like Coleman and the extended family that joined us, they don’t want his death to go unnoticed.
After an afternoon spent listening to their stories and memories, I have a feeling it won’t.
Everybody loves Grady, they said many times over, and it didn’t take long to understand why.
“He was Tacoma,” Grady Jr. said, simply.
Maxwell’s death is not the kind you often see noted in the local newspaper, but perhaps it should be. While he wasn’t famous — or infamous — he was part of the fabric that binds a community together. He was a dedicated father, who — like his mother before him — largely raised his son on his own. He was a loving, protective brother, and a friend to many more, two of his nine siblings, Broderick and Joseph, told me. For much of his life he wrote stories and screenplays, harnessing the creativity and empathy that made him special, his family fondly recalled. Recently, they’ve been discovering many of the handwritten pages that went unread, cherishing the last glimpse they provide of a man whose compassion was his defining character.
Through tears and laughter, Grady Jr. spoke about the father who shaped him. Standing at six-foot-two, the younger Maxwell — who graduated from Curtis High School in 2006 and earned a football scholarship to Washington State University — remembered sharing one-room apartments with his father growing up. His dad — who was also Marcus Trufant’s uncle — instilled his work ethic and love of the game. But it was the smaller things — like the Father’s Day dinners they would share, just the two of them — that left an even bigger impression.
“He would always dress me up. We would put a tie on, and dress shirts … and he would take me out to a nice restaurant. For a 10-year-old-boy going to a restaurant in Seattle, it was just the coolest thing ,” Grady Jr. said.
“It was just me and him for a long time,” Grady Jr. continued. “He did a damn good job raising me, and was just there, every step of the way.”
Looking out of his kitchen window, Grady Jr. noted that the house where his father lived as a child once stood where the Tacoma Dome now does. He has the home’s old address on East D Street — 2810 — tattooed inside his bicep.
In many ways, the trajectory of his father’s life mirrored the city he grew up in, Grady Jr. said. In addition to the Dome, his father watched Interstate 5 be built, and — after a standout football career of his own at Lincoln High School and a decade spent as a bus driver in Los Angeles — returned to Tacoma, where he spent much of his life as a champion for those who needed one most. For years he was employed as a counselor at alternative high schools. Later in life, he became a social worker. The list goes on.
Through it all, Maxwell provided for his son as best he could, with one thing propelling him, Grady Jr. said.
“He was always trying to serve people, always trying to help people, always doing things for people, his whole life,” the 33-year-old account manager for a local insurance brokerage firm said. “That’s just him. That’s just embedded in his heart.”
At the time of his death, Maxwell had been staying with his son. The day he died started like any other, with his father heading out to the gym, his son said. It was part of the regime he’d embraced since first suffering a heart attack several years ago.
Hours later, after his father was found slumped over in the front seat of his car, the Tacoma Fire Department delivered the shattering news. Grady Jr. recalled driving to the scene in disbelief, he said, and holding his father’s hand on the pavement until it was time to go.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. I’ll definitely never be the same,” Grady Jr. said. “But I just know that he would want me to continue living my life, and I know that I really made him proud.”
Shortly after word of Maxwell’s death made its way to Trinidad, Coleman boarded a plane headed for Sea-Tac Airport.
On Thursday, she said she wasn’t sure when she would be able to return to the island home that was supposed to provide for her and Maxwell’s retirement.
All she knew is that she desperately wanted to feel close to Maxwell and be surrounded by those who cared about him as much as she did, in the city he loved.
“Everybody loves Grady,” Coleman said, her voice cracking ever so slightly.
This story was originally published June 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
