By Ashley R. Williams, CNN
Four years ago, Jody Settle and her spouse toasted with Guinness beers and a takeout they had bought at a bustling Irish pub in New York City, abandoned during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was the last St. Patrick’s Day meal the couple would share. Settle, 58, died from the virus 33 days later on April 19, 2020, one of nearly 1. 2 million people in the United States who succumbed to Covid-19. since 2020.
Ed Koenig, Settle’s longtime partner, remembers Settle’s nonviolent face when he last visited her in the hospital. Willie Nelson’s edition of “Always On My Mind” played nearby as Koenig kissed Settle’s forehead through his protective gear.
A year ago, the World Health Organization declared the end of Covid-19 a global public health emergency. The U. S. let its own public health emergency expire about a week after the WHO’s announcement.
Stay-at-home orders are gone, and much of society has emerged from the pandemic.
But the pain of Covid-19 persists for many people.
On the fourth anniversary of Settle’s death, and wanting to cry, Koenig wrote about her ex-spouse on the Covid-19 memorial online page WhoWeLost. In part, he shared, “Yes, in fact, you’ll be on my mind. “
The website, introduced in 2020 in Kentucky and home to around 2000 published and unpublished articles, serves as a virtual haven for Koenig and many others. Those who are still grieving can write about their losses in an environment without comments, interactions, judgments, web. trolls and the poisonous nature of social media conversations about the virus, even if Covid-19 is real, according to the site’s founder, Martha. Greenwald.
“It’s their sacred area to say whatever they want without throwing all that cruelty at them,” Greenwald, a poet and former English instructor from New Jersey, said of his nonprofit website.
Greenwald, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, began the WhoWeLost task for grieving Kentuckians, encouraged by the state’s public health commissioner, who in October 2020 asked the state’s citizens to share their concerns about Covid-19 with him. Recommendation for those who share their memories. Greenwald expanded the online page nationally after a 2021 article published on an NPR affiliate’s online page garnered widespread praise.
“I think the need for the site, in a way, is greater because fewer people are paying attention (to Covid-19),” Greenwald told CNN. “It’s one of the last places we still pay attention to. “
Researchers who read the effect of the pandemic found that grieving people among Covid-19 patients experienced higher rates of prolonged grief disorder compared to pre-pandemic stages.
Overall, this disorder, characterized by acute and persistent grief, affects 7 to 10 percent of adults and five to 10 percent of children, according to the American Psychiatric Association. In a 2023 study, researchers from the United Kingdom found that other people were more than three times more likely to experience prolonged symptoms of grief disorder thirteen months after they had enjoyed the pandemic than they were before the pandemic.
“There’s this nagging feeling that their loved ones and their own grief was never allowed to exist, so it’s very repressed and still burning beneath the surface for a lot of them,” Greenwald said of the WhoWeLost. org authors. (For) other people whose loved ones died at the beginning of Covid, there is no funeral, so all the stories that could have been told at that vigil did not happen. You can write those stories here.
Wilmard Santiago, the 65-year-old brother of New York resident Wiandy Santiago, died of Covid-19 in April 2020, a week after being put on a ventilator. The family, limited to 10 funeral attendees 6 feet apart, was unable to hold a service for him until two months after his passing.
She says she can’t mourn her brother along with her family.
“(We cried) over a Zoom call,” Wiandy Santiago told CNN. “There’s nothing like being able to stand by your loved one’s side and mourn your brother, sister, spouse, child. “
Her stepson, Alberto Locascio, died from the virus in September 2021, a week before his birthday.
“Unless you experience it, you don’t perceive why it doesn’t go away,” she said of what she described as “complicated grief” in an article in WhoWeLost. org.
As he spoke, his eyes moistened. She says she wondered what her older brother’s last thoughts would be. He died alone in a Bronx hospital, without his wife and two children by his side.
“How did it feel? Were you afraid?” Santiago said through tears, his voice shaking with pain for never being able to say goodbye.
She says she sought solace by writing about her vanquished loved ones through the WhoWeLost project.
For the more than two years, he has used the site to write poignant stories about the lives of his brother and stepson, such as how Wilmard enjoyed photography and the Yankees, or how Locascio, a kind, gentle soul whom his family considered his protector. “Scrolling through Locascio’s son’s recent prom photos sparked a combination of emotions in him,” he recently wrote on the website.
“I’m dissatisfied for Nicholas, who would have enjoyed having his father with him. So satisfied and so dissatisfied,” Santiago wrote.
He talks about his persistent pain in many messages.
“I think healing comes from writing, from releasing emotions,” she said.
Greenwald agrees. She is a special adviser to Rituals in the Making, a study assignment in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University that in part tested how other people cope with grief when their general rituals, such as funerals, are interrupted.
“Rituals can help surviving family members and friends feel that the loss is acknowledged,” said Sarah Wagner, principal investigator at Rituals in the Making. “When that doesn’t happen, grief is prolonged and intensified in many ways, and that’s what we’re seeing with the pandemic. “
Before finding WhoWeLost, Koenig turned to social media for help for others mourning others related to Covid-19 deaths, but says disorders arose in those contexts, when trolls bombarded mourners with horrific comments.
“Covid is not real, they died for anything else. “According to Koenig, this is a typical reaction in social media posts.
Even as Covid-19 deaths numbered in the tens of thousands during the pandemic, a sector of society driven by misinformation, fueled by political polarization, ignored the severity of the virus. Others have denied their lifestyles despite evidence to the contrary provided through public information. Fitness experts.
A 2020 YouGov study found that 13% of respondents in the U. S. The U. S. believed that the coronavirus, or the virus that causes Covid-19, existed. The Poynter Institute’s fact-checking website, Politifact, called allegations denying, minimizing or spreading misinformation about Covid-19 the “lie of the year” in 2020.
Koenig says the most offensive comments he heard were cursed-filled death wishes directed at the LGBTQ community.
“Anyway, all you perverts are going to hell, so who cares?” Koenig remembers reading.
In WhoWeLost. org, those facing prolonged grief are free to divert their reports from those negative online conversations, Greenwald says. Most of the comments Greenwald says he saw were about humiliated victims suffering from more than one condition or disease at a time. .
“If they posted that their mother died of cancer, they would receive the same old ‘sorry for your loss’, but if they posted that their mother had died of Covid, then the comments might be something like ‘well, doesn’t she have it?'”cancer?’ or ‘I had a problem downtown’ or ‘I smoked,'” Greenwald said.
Even if no one shames them about their comorbidities or denies the existence of Covid-19, Greenwald says other grieving people probably feel like no one needs to hear about what they’re going through.
WhoWeLost’s job is to listen, Greenwald says.
“I know a lot of other people who will say, ‘My colleagues don’t need to hear about this, or they’re tiptoeing,'” he said. “We need to listen to what you have to say, even if everyone needs you to do it. “up close. “
Paige Gavin, a master’s student who is also involved in Rituals in the Making, said of WhoWeLost, “The ability to grieve other people to reflect on the positive aspect of seeing the loved one, not only in their death, but in the life they lived, I think that’s been one of the benefits, and still having the position to tell that story.
Wagner described WhoWeLost as an area for the bereaved on their own terms.
“Since there’s been so much politicization, I think it’s an opportunity for other people to reflect on how Covid hasn’t explained their enjoyment,” Wagner said. “Covid was very polarizing and yet this is an area that should not be compromised with Covid at all. “
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