SANTA NELLA — The Hartwig children grieved in disbelief at a veterans cemetery Friday, on a windswept hilltop so far from the grave site they couldn’t even see their parents being lowered into the ground.

“See that little blip? That’s the casket,” said Edward Hartwig, 29, the youngest of Richard and Mercedes Hartwig’s children, as a cart carrying a flagless coffin disappeared behind a row of trees.

His father had always wanted a proper military burial since returning from fighting in Vietnam, a sign of the respect and gratitude he never received when he came home. But there was no honor guard at his grave. No playing of taps.

Coronavirus had not only taken his life but that final dignity.

It took his wife, Mercedes Hartwig, too. Her ashes were supposed to be tucked into the coffin next to his body. But under strict, new pandemic rules that even caught their funeral director by surprise, the casket couldn’t be opened at the cemetery so the urn was buried next to it. Their family couldn’t watch the burial at the grave site. And coronavirus travel restrictions kept the family priest stuck in Rome, leaving the couple without a Catholic blessing for their final passage.More than 1,500 Californians have died since the coronavirus pandemic swept through the state early this year, but few families have suffered and lost as much in these last two months as the Hartwigs.

While public health departments are backtracking and struggling to pinpoint even the first victims to die, Richard and Mercedes Hartwig appear to be one of the first married couples in Northern California to perish from the COVID-19 virus.

Since they died in different hospitals, in different counties, health officials didn’t even realize their connection: Married for 33 years, the 72-year-old Dutch immigrant with a droll sense of humor and the 61-year-old Salvadoran spitfire met on a Santa Clara assembly line making Memorex tapes. They had endured overwhelming emotional and financial burdens during their lifetimes, suffering through the lingering traumas of war, losing a home to the foreclosure crisis.

“They were both definitely survivors,” their 32-year-old daughter, Naomi Hartwig, said. “So it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around that this is what ended their life — some random illness that no one knew anything about.”

And their deaths are only part of the story of how a little-understood infectious disease ravaged an American family.

Within the Hartwig family alone, the virus appears to have sickened at least five other members, including all three of the couple’s children, a daughter-in-law and Mercedes’ beloved 51-year-old sister who remains intubated in a San Jose hospital.

“I feel like we’ve been cheated. I feel like I was robbed by all of this,” their eldest child, Rene, said. “Not just me, but a lot of people who lost their families because of this virus. We were robbed.”