‘I just need so much love and support right now’
Coping with loss amid isolation, without comfort of bereavement rituals, ‘so much more intense’
GILROY >> One year ago, Stacey Silva’s father became one of the Bay Area’s earliest victims of COVID-19, a time when family members were only starting to realize what it meant for a loved one to die behind glass, beyond touch, before whispers of gratitude could be shared.
Like so many others coping with loss during the pandemic, Silva has faced the reality of what it means to grieve in isolation.
She found an outlet. In searing video posts, she has taken her grief to her Facebook page. Sitting in front of a carved wooden urn holding her father’s ashes — and a blue vase carrying those of her mother who died of cancer 10 months earlier — the 43-year-old breaks down in tears, the way she might have in private if a friend were sitting on a couch next to her.
She wears no makeup. Her nose turns red. Her chin quivers.
“I’m coming on here looking like a mess to ask for everyone’s prayers and thoughts,” she said through sniffles in a recent post. “It’s so hard to believe he’s been gone a year. I just need so much love and support right now from wherever I can get it, you guys.”
With more than 536,000 coronavirus-related deaths across the country and 57,000 in California so far, the pandemic has robbed millions of people not only of their loved ones but of the rituals that help them cope.
For those who lost loved ones, the pandemic has meant processing both grief and trauma. For some like Silva, whose parents lived with
her, it feels like the stages of grief have often stopped at depression.
Silva’s Facebook friends have watched her chronicle of sorrows, her anger when people called the coronavirus “fake news,” her regret that she didn’t say a last goodbye, her melancholy after listening to a sad song on the radio.
In the San Joaquin Valley, Edward Hartwig lost both parents, Richard and Mercedes, to the coronavirus two weeks apart last April. Ever since, Edward, a 30-year-old machine technician, has lived alone in the house they shared in the town of Lathrop.
“You had the phone calls from people and the text messages and video calls and things like that, but there were times when all you wanted was a hug and that just wasn’t available,” he said. “The intimacy was lost, the coping mechanisms were lost.”
If the state wasn’t on lockdown, he said, “I know for a fact that my friends would have dragged me out to a bar if they could have.”
He kept his mother’s treasured Christmas decorations up for a year — a tribute to her and her love of the holiday that she used to let linger all winter. He’s still having trouble taking down the tree. His mother handwrapped and packed each special ornament.
“To say it’s been difficult to advance would be an understatement,” he said. “It’s difficult to get rid of things that remind me so much of the people you loved. You essentially have to dissolve two lives and move on with yours.”
With his siblings more than an hour away, “a lot of my grieving has been done by myself.”
Denied the traditions of bereavement, those having the hardest time coping are starting to experience “prolonged grief disorder,” therapists say, where grief seems to persist endlessly.
“We always feel lonely after someone dies, but it’s so much more intense because of the social distancing, the interference with any kind of comfort,” said Dr. M. Katherine Shear, founder and director of The Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University. “It’s very clear that there are so many things about COVID deaths or any death during the pandemic that are making it so much harder to adapt to the loss, to really accept the reality of what happened and restore our capacity to move forward in a positive way. That’s where rituals help. No one really grieves well alone.”
In Salinas, social worker Stephanie Gonzalez, who works for Coastal Kids Home Care, has experienced grief in two ways during the pandemic. Not only has she been helping a teenager who lost his mother to COVID-19 in December, but she is also dealing with the loss of her own mother, Ofelia Gonzalez, who had several ailments including the coronavirus and died in January.
Finding the boy someone who could help him overcome his mother’s death was further complicated by the shelter-in-place order, which discouraged close contact with anyone outside the household. Gonzalez endured the same challenge herself.
“Our moms are everything to us,” Gonzalez said. It’s difficult “figuring out who it is that I’m going to be venting to now, who is going to be there to emotionally support me, who is that person for me.”
Neither Gonzalez nor the teenager she counseled could be with their mothers when they died — another excruciating pain. Gonzalez was allowed a final 10 minutes on Zoom.
“I don’t want to say it’s inhumane, but just because you’re not there in person to say goodbye, it’s been one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with,” she said.
Silva experienced that same disconnect when her father, Gary Young, a 66-year-old retired cabinetmaker, was hospitalized at Gilroy’s St. Louise Regional Hospital in mid-March last year. A few days before he died, he called her at 4 a.m. to say he was being put on a ventilator. But a BiPAP machine covered his face. His voice was muffled. She couldn’t understand him. The call ended in frustration.
“I didn’t get to tell my dad I loved him,” she said. “To not have that last communication with my dad, that I knew he could hear me, it haunts me.”
In her mother’s final moments, Silva attained a measure of closure when more than a dozen relatives and friends gathered before Melody Young succumbed to cancer. They were at her hospital bedside when she briefly opened her eyes, a sign they took as a thank you for letting her go. Afterward, Silva found comfort in the articles she was allowed to bring home — her mother’s clothes and the pillowcase where she last rested her head.
When her father died on March 17 — among the Bay Area’s first 10 people whose death was blamed on the coronavirus — she watched through two sets of double glass doors as the heart monitor went dark. His clothes and bedding, she said, were bundled up and thrown away as biohazard waste.
In her year of grieving on Facebook, Silva, 43, wrote on Thanksgiving of missing her parents. At Christmas, she posted about taking candy canes to Lowe’s, where her father had worked, and distributing them in the hardware aisles like her dad did.
And as the one-year anniversary of his death approached, she posted live videos, breaking down into tears. She apologized for being “an ugly crier” and lamented that on Wednesday’s anniversary day, her wife, Jazz Silva, will be away on a long-awaited training program.
“This is so hard to come on here and ask for help,” she said, “but I really need it now.”
As she stifled sobs, heart emojis flitted up the screen and more than 100 messages from Facebook friends filled the comments section below.
“I miss you,” she said looking into the camera, then promised to compose herself and “go hug my doggies.
“They always make me feel better.”