Nobody had the heart to tell Emira Durakovic that her husband and two of her sons passed away due to COVID-19 beginning of September, but when family members told her the truth after she was discharged from the hospital, she said she already knew.

Emira Durakovic, the mother of Adis and Haris and wife of Hajrudin, who passed away due to COVID-19, was discharged from the local hospital in Bugojno on Wednesday. She was there because she contracted the coronavirus – which killed three members of her family since the beginning of the month.

The case shook the public in Bosnia and Herzegovina and remains one of the saddest stories since the virus came to the country.

The brother of her late husband told N1 that family members only told Emira that Hajrudin died while she was still in the hospital, but that they would not tell her about the death of her sons.

“It hurts,” said Kemal Durakovic, Hajrudin’s brother and uncle to Adis and Haris.

“I called her up this morning to ask her what she would like to eat (…) She said ‘I find it weird that neither you nor my children have been calling me’, so I told her ‘we agreed among us in the family that we wouldn’t burden you, and the doctor also advised us that way’,” he said.

“What to tell a mother who does not know about (the fate) of her sons? We did tell her about her husband,” he said.

When family members told Emira about Hajrudin’s death, she replied that she knew about it – even before they did.

She explained that she spoke to Hajrudin on the night of his passing and made peace with it.

The family decided to inform Emira about her sons as well but only after she returns home from the hospital.

Her other son, Dzemal, was to tell her. Again, Emira said she already knew.

“I was just getting ready to tell her. Before I had the chance, she asked me whether it’s true that the two of them didn’t make it. I asked her how she found out about it. She said ‘God told me, I had a feeling’,” Dzemal Durakovic told N1.

The family told N1 that they are thankful to the medical staff and doctors who took good care of Emira. Dzemal said that he was also in the hospital and that he had to take care of himself there mostly because he understood how overburdened the medical staff was.

“Sometimes I would turn off my I.V. myself. It’s not the fault of the doctors and nurses, there just isn't enough of them. It’s a battle,” he said.

“They fought as well as they could. They would wake up at 5 am to administer our medicine to us, and there were so many of us, and then none of them would be there after 5 pm because they simply had so much work to do,” he said.

Although Dzemal had already recovered from the disease, he still was not allowed to see the body of his dead father.

“We laid three caskets to rest without seeing the bodies,” he said.

Apart from Adis, Haris and Dzemal, Emira and Hajrudin are parents of two others – Emir, who lives in Austria and Razija, who lives in Switzerland.