How to mourn half a million lives
Faith leaders struggle to help amid COVID’s ‘go it alone’ grief
GREENWICH — America reached a grim milestone during the COVID-19 crisis last week when the official count of deaths nationwide from the virus passed 500,000.
Greenwich on Wednesday reached its own sad total: 81 residents have died with COVID-19 in the past year, according to the town Department of Health. For residents, the grief has been a constant ache since the state’s first case was confirmed in March.
Those in the town’s faith community have reached out hands and hope to those who looked to them for strength, but after 12 months of stress, they have learned to practice — and preach — patience.
The Rev. Patrick Collins, senior pastor at First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich, began to memorialize those lost to the virus last spring by placing white flags on the lawn at the church on Sound Beach Avenue, each flag representing a Connecticut resident who died with COVID-19.
Collins got to 4,400 flags before he stopped the project last June. As of Feb. 25, Connecticut’s death toll stood at 7,622.
“The grieving process is such an important part of being a human,” Collins said last week. “What the hardest thing I’ve noticed is that people have had to go it alone. Whether it’s someone who died of COVID or a family member that passed and had to be alone, I’ve found it’s the hardest thing to address with folks. That is where real grief is around and you can’t share in those moments.”
Collins is not immune to that isolation, either. He said he has felt it deeply when receiving phone calls from residents who have lost loved ones and want to hold a memorial service, something that is difficult to do during a pandemic.
Although many have become more accepting of what the church can and can’t do during a pandemic, it has been difficult for congregants hoping every week to hear that the end of the isolation is in sight, he said.
“When we put our hopes and faith in dates and it keeps getting pushed back, then it just makes it that much harder to cope with everything,” Collins said. “We put so much faith in finding an end and then it just keeps going.”
When it comes to people seeking counsel or answers, Collins said there is no simple answer.
“What we’re going through is not a punishment, I don’t think,” he said. “It’s not God testing us. It’s part of being human and having to deal with loss.
“We can be hopeful for getting out of this, but it’s important as human beings to take a step back and to grieve what we’ve lost. It’s important to look back and to honor those people who have died.
“If the end of this is going to have any significance or hope to it, we have to recognize what we’ve been through and what we’re going through as a community, even if we’re doing it alone. The hopeful future has no significance if we don’t recognize the pain that we’re going through.”
At Temple Sholom in central Greenwich, Rabbi Mitchell Hurvitz said that any loss of a loved one is difficult — but when it is due to COVID-19, “it’s an extra layer of tragedy and trauma.”
This is particularly true, Hurvitz said, when you can’t visit someone’s bedside or offer traditional support and comfort. Particularly in the first few months of the pandemic, Hurvitz said there was a spike in losses in the congregation. There were no visits for the burial, or no one could practice the Jewish mourning tradition of sitting shivah in person because of social distancing needs.
“When we confront circumstances where we have significantly less control to no control, it can be very challenging,” Hurvitz said. “To try and focus our energies on that which we can do is what I’m finding to be the most therapeutic way to spiritually counsel people.”
To that end, Temple Sholom has encouraged its members to focus on “acts of love and kindness to try and help others,” he said.
It has expanded its social action projects from feeding the hungry and dropping off meals at homes of residents who cannot go out to gathering clothing and coats for those in need and helping local seniors to register for and travel to their vaccine appointments.
First Selectman Fred Camillo said he has lost people he knows to the coronavirus, including one friend who died this month at the age of 63.
He came at the outbreak with the perspective of a person whose great-grandmother and great-grandfather, both Cos Cob residents, died nine days apart during the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. That forced his Uncle Joe to become, at age 14, the head of a household for six brothers and sisters.
“This is something no one had expected to happen in our lifetime,” Camillo said of the pandemic. “It’s certainly something we’ll never forget, and it’s absolutely something we still have in front of us. We see daylight. We see the other side of this in the near future. But to someone who has lost a friend or a family member, it’s beyond heartbreaking.”
Camillo said it has been particularly hard to understand the impact of the virus on an emotional level.
“That’s what’s dangerous about this virus, we just don’t know,” he said. “I know people who died after getting it even though they had no underlying conditions. We just don’t know and that’s why you have to take it so seriously.”
“When we confront circumstances where we have significantly less control to no control, it can be very challenging. To try and focus our energies on that which we can do is what I’m finding to be the most therapeutic way to spiritually counsel people.”
Rabbi Mitchell Hurvitz, Temple Sholom