Grief in the Time of Covid

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I wrote this piece over seven months ago. At the time, the death toll in the United States from Covid-19 was around 170,000, and (most) of the country was still reeling from the fact that we had passed 150,000. The virtual Democratic National Convention was just beginning, and Joe Biden had just announced Kamala Harris as his historic and ground-breaking pick for his running mate. Looking back now, I can isolate the comfort of the convention, the joy in Harris’s selection, and the space it gave me to take the breath I had been holding for months. But at the time, I was afraid, anxious, and still deeply grieving my grandmother, who died in April 2020 alone, in her nursing home, from Covid-19. The day I wrote this my husband, daughter, and I had all laid down for a family nap together. I woke up before the two of them with this piece almost fully formed in my head. If there is a rage stage of grief, I was in it. I thought about editing a lot of that out — you can hear it in almost every sentence, it seems — but I decided not to. For people to understand what this feels like, we need to be honest. It needs to be impressed upon the country – and some who live here more than others – that this pain has been multiplied (by now) over 500,000 times. That’s a river of pain, a wave of pain, an absolutely overwhelming suffocating crush of pain. When President Biden and Vice President Harris held the first memorial for the victims of Covid-19 on the eve of their inauguration, I felt cracked open. There was relief in the cracking, but there was pain, too. It’s the pain contained in the piece below. A hurt and a sorrow and a grieving that was so unbearable I had to write it out and trap it in the screen. Now I’m letting it go; not only to relieve my heart, but to remind everyone that although the vaccines are here, this isn’t over. And for a lot of us, it never will be.

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From the time my grandma was diagnosed with Covid-19 to the day she died was less than three weeks. When we first received word that her nursing home was quarantined, I thought “Ok, but we’ll see her when they reopen.” It’s August and, as far as I know, they have not [Ed. They had not. In fact, they stayed closed for more than a year.]. I can always tell from my mom’s tone of voice and the words she uses when something is wrong, so when she called two weeks later to tell me that someone in Grandma’s nursing home had tested positive, I knew Grandma had it too before Mom told me. One week later, Mom called to say they didn’t know how much time Grandma might have, but that things were bad, and we might want to consider going to the nursing home to see her.

I felt sick. “See her” was unmistakably euphemistic for “say goodbye.” I called my husband to let him know we needed to go to the nursing home. I relayed to him what my Mom had said: that Grandma’s room was on the first floor, that her bed was next to a window, and that we could park in the parking lot nearby and walk along the lawn right up to Grandma’s window to see her. Her window. Not into her room, not in a chair near her bed, not a spot at her feet. A window. After I explained all of this to my husband, I called my best friend and sobbed without breathing. I did not know where I would find the strength or motivation to pack up my daughter, get in my car, and drive to the place beside the window and what I knew would be, because of the fact that she was dying during a pandemic, the last time I would ever see her. It was not the same way that I had said “I don’t know how I’ll do this” when I really meant “this will be hard,” but an actual, literal lack of knowledge. How would I put one foot in front of the other, when I knew my destination was a nursing home window and saying goodbye to one of the most important people in my life?

We got in the car. My husband drove. My daughter gurgled. I cried. When we got to the parking lot next to the lawn next to the window, I saw that my parents had already arrived, and my aunt – who had been sitting outside Grandma’s window in a camping chair to keep her company over the previous several weeks – got out of her car to say hello from a distance. I could hear the tears in her voice as she told me that Grandma had been yelling earlier for someone to help her, and that she was in a lot of pain, but that the medicine should have started to work by now. My aunt, who has rarely cried in front of me, had tears in her eyes and her voice, and I could also hear her trying to be strong for me. I let my parents go first, and my mom told me that Grandma was sleeping. We walked up to the window, my husband carrying our nine-month-old daughter, and me pushing my legs forward against what felt like an actual physical but invisible tide. Of grief, maybe. When I got to the window, I spoke to my grandma quietly, knowing she couldn’t hear me, and that she might not know what I was saying even if she could. I told her I loved her, over and over and over, hearing the desperation in my voice. I watched her chest obsessively, watching it rise and fall, panicking in every second when I convinced myself it had stopped. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I said goodbye to my family. I told myself we could come back tomorrow and see if she was awake. As I walked back to the car, I knew she probably wouldn’t be and I knew I was lying to myself about my ability to make this trip twice. Just as my husband got the baby into her carseat, I heard my mom shout for me – Grandma was awake. I ran to the window, my husband hurriedly getting our daughter out of her carseat before following. Grandma’s eyes were barely open – it was clear she was heavily medicated – but she looked right at me. I grabbed my daughter from my husband, and with a wild combination of laughter and crying – the most hysterical, wild, and uncontrollable outpouring of emotion I have ever felt – showed her to my grandma.

Before she got sick, and even after dementia started taking her memory, whenever Grandma would walk into a room and see us, she always made a specific noise – a little exclamation of happiness and joy. That April day, I saw her mouth open, and Mom says she heard that happy little sound through the window. It was all my heart could take. I handed my daughter back to my husband and stumbled away, out of sight of the window so I wouldn’t alarm my grandma, and fell to the ground, sobbing. I knew in that instant that that was it. By the time I turned back around, grandma had fallen back asleep. I had said goodbye to her, but through glass. Without being able to touch her hands – hands that I can still remember now because I have the same ones – or kiss her, or tell her I love her and am so proud of being her granddaughter. It was pain like I have never known, and I felt like I was trying to hold my body together, while my mom and aunt tried to comfort me from over six feet away. We never realize how much we rely on touch when saying goodbye, whether it is for a moment or a lifetime. Once I had said my goodbye, I knew I had to leave. If walking up to that window for what I knew was the last time to see my grandmother was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, walking away was the second hardest. The car ride home felt interminable and exhausting.

Two nights later, around midnight, my phone rang. As I looked at my cellphone screen to see what time it was, I saw that I already had two missed calls. They were from Mom, and she was calling again on our landline. I knew what the call meant. I picked up the phone and my mom’s voice, calm but in pain, said the words I expected but dreaded, “Tiff, Grandma died.” I cried. But knowing she was gone was easier in comparison to the goodbye I’d had to make on Wednesday. I also knew, right away, that the grief and anger I felt would never leave. We had to wait almost three months to bury my grandmother’s ashes. When we did, it was a small group by necessity. It felt like such an inadequate farewell to a woman who had loomed so large in so many lives.

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I have wept while writing this. I am prone to tears, as anyone who has spent any sort of time with me can tell you. But these are not the tears of grief that I’ve felt before. There is no healing power in them. There is no catharsis in getting these words out of me, no draining of the poison that has lived in my veins and my heart since April 1. No lessening of the grief, no easing of the anger as I accept the circumstances and fact of my grandmother’s death. When my father’s mother died, I was angry for so long. For years, really. She died of cancer when she was not yet 70 and I was furious and carried that fury with me everywhere for a long time. But prayer and talking helped to lessen it into acceptance and now, thirteen years later, I still see the unfairness, but I can also feel the joy of having been her granddaughter at all. With my mother’s mother, the anger has changed, has moved beyond anger. The grief has changed. They have settled, morphed together into what feels like a tiny, metal ball, cold and hard, settled somewhere between the bottom of my heart and the top of my stomach. I know there’s no point in probing it, in examining why it’s still there. I know why. Cancer, which killed my grandmother thirteen years ago, is senseless and cruel. Despite being able to afford the best doctors and the best care available, my grandmother still died. There was nothing she, or the doctors, or any of the people who loved her, could do. We understood that, and so did grandma, who accepted it before the rest of us could wrap our minds around what “no more options” meant. Once I had accepted grandma’s acceptance, it was easier to start moving forward, and my anger and grief began to drain away until something like surrender took its place.

The reason that the bullet of anger and grief and screaming rage over my grandma’s death from Covid won’t ever leave is simple: with dementia, Grandma couldn’t grasp, much less accept, what was happening. And worst of all, it didn’t have to happen. If our government had stepped up; if the people in charge weren’t such pitiful, sorry excuses for human beings, much less leaders of what is supposedly the greatest nation on earth; if state leaders didn’t have to fight each other for supplies; if testing kits were not only distributed but actually worked; if those in national government chose to prevent the death of Americans rather than use the crisis as a political tool to stick it to Democratic governors; then maybe, just maybe, my grandmother would still be alive, and so would 160,000* other people. These facts will never change. There is no way to look back on the memory of frantically waving at my doped-up grandmother, holding my nine-month-old daughter out toward the window, and praying, praying that grandma would know who we were, and understand it as anything other than cruel, unusual, and unnecessary. There is no way to acceptance or understanding, because I will never accept, and I cannot understand, how a life lived so well, in the service of others, led to suffering and terror, with a pane of glass keeping pain and fear in and comfort and love out. I cannot accept and will never understand how and why my family was forced into that experience, in a situation that meant we could not comfort even each other. Grief in the time of Covid is different from any other grief I’ve ever known. It is cruel and unusual and lasting. It a small, cold, metal ball, permanently buried in my heart.

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* At the time I wrote this, about 160,000 people had died of Covid. Today, Dr. Deborah Birx indicated that although there was little we could to do to prevent the 100,000 deaths of the first surge, the over 450,000 since then, including my grandmother’s, might have been preventable.