Mom who persevered through adversity felled by virus

Angeline Pindel, 95, who died Thanksgiving Day from the coronavirus, kept her strong faith, sweet ways and kind heart through the loss of three of her six children in horrific ways.

"She was a great wife, mother, daughter, sister," said Angela Pindel, one of her daughters.

Pindel, who had lived in Marengo, Lake in the Hills and Crystal Lake in recent years after raising her family in Chicago, met her husband, Joseph, at a dance hall on the Northwest Side. He had immigrated from Poland after World War II.

"He asked to take her home, and she thought he had a car and he didn't even have a car," Angela Pindel recalled of her father, who died in July 2009. "He used all his money to take her home on the bus. And then he had to walk home from her house, because he had no money left."

They married in 1950, but life wasn't easy. "My youngest brother, her first child that she lost, was her sixth child," Angela Pindel said. "He was Joey, and he was 18 months old. He choked to death on a hot dog. Then my sister was her second born. She died in a car accident. And then my brother in the city, he was in a bar and it ended up there was a brawl and he got stabbed to death."

Angeline Pindel, whose father was a real estate lawyer in Chicago, sold Stanley home products and worked as a secretary, an experience that helped her master modern technology.

"At 95, everybody was amazed because my mom texted like crazy," Angela Pindel said. "Nobody could believe it. She was so sharp. But that's because of her background of being a secretary. ... And that was our main form of communication with her, because she had bad hearing."

Because Angeline Pindel was in a nursing home, there wasn't any physical contact with family from last spring until after she fell ill three weeks ago.

"I know my family was extremely happy to be able to see my mom in person and hold her hand before she passed," Angela Pindel said. "This time is so difficult for so many people, and the isolation is so hard on the elderly."

Survivors include two other daughters, Jo-Ann Barker (Jay) and Helen Bjorklund (Kent). Services will be held at Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Crystal Lake when the family can gather more safely.

"She had all the patience in the world," Angela Pindel said. "Never said anything bad about anybody."