Grief’s toll: Experts offer advice on coping as state COVID deaths top 10,000
Oklahoma reached a somber milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic Thursday as the state’s death toll surpassed 10,000.
Deaths from the virus had slowed considerably before a late-summer surge, fueled by the delta variant, filled hospitals and sickened thousands more Oklahomans.
“This count represents the lives of our friends, neighbors and loved ones, and any number of deaths will always be too many,” Health Commissioner Dr. Lance Frye said in a statement Thursday, adding that further loss of life is preventable with vaccinations and other mitigation strategies.
About this time last year, Oklahoma recorded the state’s 1,000th COVID-19 death.
New cases have begun to slow in Oklahoma, but the rate of new deaths is still high — and may remain high for several weeks, experts have said. More than 1,100 people died of COVID-19 in August and September across Oklahoma, according to provisional death figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Across the U.S., 1 in 500 people have died of COVID-19. The number is even higher in Oklahoma, where 1 in about 400 have died.
The toll can be difficult to make sense of, said Dr. Sara Coffey, an associate clinical professor at Oklahoma State University’s Center for Health Sciences and a co-leader of the Help for the Healer Project Echo, a group that aims to support health care workers during the pandemic.
Earlier this year, a Tulsa doctor described the pandemic as a “slow-rolling mass casualty event.” Especially for health care workers, that’s made it harder to appropriately mourn, Coffey said.
“In our health care community, the work is not yet done,” she said. “So the ability to pause is not there, and it really creates a toll for the individuals on the frontlines working with the community.”
The prolonged nature of the pandemic can be complicated for anyone grieving a COVID-19 loss, said Heather Warfield, a therapist and clinical and programs director at Calm Waters Center for Children and Families, which offers grief support in Oklahoma City.
Feeling safe is a critical part of coping with grief, Warfield said. With the virus still out there, that can challenge our sense of safety, she said.
“There are definitely barriers in coping with our grief when that same experience, or that same entity, is out there and could strike again,” she said.
Even for those who haven’t lost a loved one, the weight of the pandemic can take a toll, Warfield said.
“Hearing stories and seeing news articles and seeing the numbers — sometimes, all the information becomes overwhelming and too much,” she said.
Being mindful
The experts urged people struggling to find time for self-care, which could look different for different people, Warfield said.
“It can mean setting boundaries with interacting with certain people … but it can also look like doing things for yourself to cope with your feelings, whether that be journaling, exercising, getting out in the sunshine, but also resting,” she said.
Similarly, as part of the Project Echo group, health care workers work through mindfulness exercises in addition to the education they receive through the meetings. Mindfulness, Coffey said, could look like meditation, yoga or simply taking time to reflect.
At Calm Waters, which offers both grief support groups and grief counseling, there’s been a huge increase in demand for its services in the last year and a half, Executive Director Erin Engelke said.
“I anticipate that we’ll continue to see that grow as more and more people get to a point of, ‘I can’t do this on my own anymore. I do need help,’” she said.
Before COVID-19, Calm Waters was seeing about three counseling clients a week. Now, that’s swelled to 106 a week, and likely will keep rising, Engelke said.
“We need people to feel that it’s OK to ask for help,” Engelke said. “We know that there continues to be a stigma around getting mental health support — there is absolutely no shame in that.”