In April 2020, when Sara Rochon lost her oldest brother to Covid, her grief felt all-consuming.
From her home in Florida, Ms. Rochon was pained by thoughts of her brother’s last days, alone without his wife, children and siblings in his hospital room in Ohio. In those early, paralyzing weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Rochon could not attend his funeral, a gathering limited to only a handful of immediate family members who lived nearby.
“It was unbearable,” she said.
Five years later, Ms. Rochon still thinks of her brother, Joseph Hanna, nearly every day.
But her grief has changed shape. Now when Mr. Hanna pops into her head, she remembers his face cracking a grin, his shock of thick white hair, his six-foot-one figure striding into a room.
This grief led to changes in her own life. Ms. Rochon, a retired teacher, decided to move back to Ohio, to be closer to her family.
“I can think of him with a smile and not a tear,” she said. “My grief hasn’t gone away. It’s just different.”
More than 1.2 million Americans died in the coronavirus pandemic. For their grieving families, the fifth anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning is an aching reminder of what they have lost.
Rituals were upended. Families were robbed of the ability to care for their loved ones, which, under normal circumstances, can help ease their emotional pain. The deaths themselves were often endured from a distance, with nurses holding up iPads to allow the sick to say goodbye to their relatives and spouses. And afterward, families were left to congregate and remember their loved ones by Zoom.
“It was a perfect storm of all the bad things,” said Holly Prigerson, chair of diagnostics in radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a longtime researcher on grief.
Just as Covid continues to affect people who are older or have underlying health conditions, it also still has a hold on bereaved families, five years on.
In interviews, many people say they are still mired in anger and crushing grief, unable to forget the particular cruelty of the pandemic: that their spouses, relatives and close friends often died alone.
Some mourners have found light after darkness. Since the pandemic, they have grown closer with their families and friends, embraced their own lives with more vigor and purpose, or turned to music or writing as a way to stitch themselves back together.
Still others say they are occupying a middle ground of grief.
Mary Anna Ball, a graduate student who lost several close family friends to Covid in her home state of West Virginia, said that she felt as though she would never catch up with her own mourning.
“It still feels kind of incomplete,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like there is that closure on any of it.”
Cleaved in Two
In Ann Arbor, Mich., Lisa Murray is still grieving her mother-in-law, Sandy Gatti, who died from the virus in February 2021.
Ms. Murray is no stranger to loss. Her own mother died in hospice in 2023, but that passing came peacefully, with family present.
“Sandy’s death stands out to me,” she said. “It feels like the hole has not closed, the wound has not closed. There’s this sense of injustice. Her death was so unnecessary. She was so close to getting a vaccine.”
Joy Netanya Thompson, an editor at a tech company in La Verne, Calif., lost her father to Covid in the summer of 2020, and then her beloved grandmother six months afterward.
“It feels so unmooring to lose a parent,” Ms. Thompson said. “It really feels like a part of you has been erased from the earth. And that was very profound.”
But it was the way Ms. Thompson’s father died — the isolation after weeks in the hospital — that made her grief linger, years later. She felt that her life had been cleaved in two: Before Grief and After Grief.
When her grandfather died in hospice care in 2023, she immediately felt the stark contrast between how he and her father spent their final days.
“I got to say goodbye to him,” Ms. Thompson said of her grandfather. “I got to hold his hand a couple different times in the last couple weeks. I got to tell him everything I wanted to tell him. And then we got to have a big memorial service and celebrate him. So I got to see the difference when you get to do the normal rituals.”
Looking Back in Anger
Like many Covid mourners, Amy Morris, 52, is still fighting one powerful emotion: anger.
Ms. Morris, who lives in Charlotte, N.C., watched helplessly from afar in late 2020 as her mother, Ilene Craft Boger, 85, fell ill in her assisted living facility and was transferred to a hospital. Ms. Boger, an accomplished jazz pianist who dressed impeccably, died a month later.
“The manner of her death still fills me with such rage that it takes my breath away,” Ms. Morris said.
Brian Owens, an artistic director in the film industry, has lost two aunts, an uncle and a nephew because of Covid.
He still feels a mix of frustration and grief. Though Mr. Owens’s family was in the United States, he was living in Canada, where Covid restrictions were far more stringent.
“You went to the grocery store and that was about it,” he said. “So that comparison added a layer of anger to the whole thing for me. I feel like so many of those deaths were preventable and we just didn’t prevent them.”
Others who lost relatives to the virus said they were dogged by lingering guilt.
Arjun Jalan, who lives in Boston, thinks about his father, far away in India.
Mr. Jalan’s mother, known in the family as a phenomenal hostess and cook, died in 2021, leaving his father widowed. For a long time, Mr. Jalan could not bear to look at photos of his mother. His father urged him to keep moving forward, to not worry about him or his loneliness.
Writing Your Way Through It
Before the pandemic, Nicholas Montemarano’s identity was wrapped around his love of fiction. He read relentlessly, wrote novels and taught creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.
But when his mother, Catherine, died of Covid in January 2021, Mr. Montemarano found himself turning to poetry instead. He wrote a memoir, an elegy to his mother, in verse.
I’m trying to make my bed and brush my teeth.I’m trying to remember her voicebefore her lungs quit. Song sparrows fly twigsto the flowerbed outside my window.This morning in overgrown grass under light rain,a butterfly alighted on my face.
He is one of many Covid mourners who have discovered more personal ways to resolve their grief.
For Kim Lowe, a filmmaker in Boston, that relief was found after the pandemic left a gaping hole in her sprawling family in Massachusetts.
Ms. Lowe’s mother died during the pandemic in 2021, though doctors could not determine the cause. Then all four of her mother’s siblings fell ill and died within the next two years, two from Covid and two from what Ms. Lowe called “collateral Covid” — when they could not easily see a doctor and saw their health falter as a result.
“It felt like an entire generation had been wiped out,” she said. “It was physical pain, it was mental pain, it was all-encompassing grief.”
Ms. Lowe has fought through much of her grief by leaning on her own generation, the cousins who live around the Boston area. Together, they have written down their family stories and history, including a beloved recipe for Portuguese soup — one that her mother’s generation kept only in their heads.
On the fifth anniversary of the pandemic, Ms. Lowe feels like a changed person.
“I felt as if I was given a gift of perspective and love and gratitude,” she said. “I make people feel so awkward because I’m always telling them how much I love them and appreciate them. I’m so much more loving and present.”
Gwendolyn W. Williams, who lives in Los Angeles, last saw two of her closest friends on Christmas Eve in 2019, when she made her usual 45-minute drive to their assisted living home for a visit.
Both friends contracted Covid and died — only eight days apart — when the virus swept through the facility in 2020.
Today, Ms. Williams said she moves through life a little differently. She was always devoted to her friends, some close enough to feel like family. But now even a passing thought can prompt her to call or text someone.
“I don’t let the moment pass me by,” Ms. Williams said. “You do what you can for people, you love when you can do it.”