Efrain Pineda of East Meadow: Dependable, good-natured nursing home staffer
Efrain Pineda, of East Meadow, died of coronavirus complications on April 2. Credit: Alexa Pineda
For decades, Efrain Pineda was a reliable and good-natured member of the housekeeping staff at Glengariff Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Glen Cove. He worked the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, cleaning rooms, bringing out trash, refilling supplies.
Some years, he worked second and third jobs too, cleaning offices, doing maintenance at the Friends Academy in Locust Valley. But after a lifetime of work, he was due to retire May 31 from the nursing home, said his eldest son, who also shares his name. The family planned a party to celebrate Pineda's retirement and his 70th birthday later this year.
He didn’t live to see it. On April 2, Pineda collapsed and died at his East Meadow home in the arms of his wife Julia and son Samuel. He’d been diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 23 at NYU Winthrop Hospital and was told to quarantine at home, where his wife was also ill with the virus. Pineda had taken time off from work for an urgent eye surgery that his diagnosis delayed, his son Efrain said, and had lost his vision the day before he died.
“All he did was work, go to church, wash the cars,” said his son, a 41-year-old pastor in Texas. “He couldn’t be still. If he was at home he had to be cleaning.”
Abandoned as a child in El Salvador, Pineda was raised by a family that informally adopted him, his son said. He didn’t reach high school, instead working from a young age before marrying his wife 43 years ago, and immigrating with their eldest son to Los Angeles in 1982.
Within two years, they moved to Long Island where their two younger children, Ruth Tercero Martinez, 32, and Samuel, 31, were born. Both still live in the family's East Meadow home. Pineda helped look after his daughter’s two children Carly, 5, and Bruno 4, putting them on and off the school bus before leaving for work, his eldest son said.
“He didn’t know how to love us with words and hugs because he didn’t get that as a child,” Efrain Pineda said of his father. “His way of loving us was to work very, very hard to give us everything we needed and wanted.”
“He was a sweet, kind, nice and peaceful man,” he said, adding that his mother, Julia, who is 71, “is very strong in her faith. She believes in God’s sovereignty and has been giving us strength.”
The elder Pineda never expressed any fear about going to work at the nursing home during the pandemic.
“He wanted to go to work,” his son said.
Pineda's co-workers were shocked to hear of his passing, said Antoyne Noel, a nurse at the Glen Cove facility where Pineda began work in the mid-1990s.
“He was very well-liked,” she said. “Whenever you needed him, he was very reliable, he always had a smile. A sweet guy.”
Pineda was cremated and the family plans on having a celebration service once his church, Genesis Assemblies of God in Westbury, can resume gatherings.
Carol Polsky writes news and features on wide-ranging topics, from superstorm Sandy, 9/11 and presidential elections to health care and the economy.
