It was the nursing home where her mother was living, and battling late-stage dementia. She was having difficulty breathing, and had to be rushed to the hospital. She died in the ICU there two days later, just five days short of what would have been her 94th birthday. “Under normal circumstances, I suspect the funeral would have been attended by 100 or more people,” notes Schwab, who now lives in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida, but spent most of her life in New York City. “Family, friends of my mom, friends of mine, and friends of my brother. A few people would have spoken and sung her praises. She was very active in her congregation and was loved by many.” Also, under normal circumstances, she and her brother, who are Jewish, would have sat shiva for a week — the traditional mourning period in their faith — giving friends and family an opportunity to pay their respects. However, by then, gatherings of two or more people were no longer permitted in New York City, where they had taken their mother’s body to be buried, next to their late father. All of which made it challenging for the family to process their grief. “My dad passed away just a couple of years ago and he got a full send-off, including an army honor guard, having been a decorated soldier in World War II, and the shiva was both emotional and exhausting, so I didn’t think I’d miss it, but I did,” Schwab says. “I feel like I let my mother down, not being able to give her the funeral she would have wanted and, really, deserved.” And as the fatalities rise, so does the grief that follows in their wake. A study published in the March 2020 issue of the journal Applied Demography suggested that if roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population is infected with the virus, more than one million Americans will lose a parent, and more than two million will lose at least one grandparent. If the worst-case scenario develops, and 40 percent of Americans become infected, nearly five million people will lose at least one parent, and more than nine million will see at least one grandparent die. And, like the Schwab family, many have had to hold scaled down funerals — if they’ve been able to stage a funeral for their loved ones at all — because of prohibitions against mass gatherings. Losing a loved one is always difficult, but the pandemic has created new, unanticipated complications. “Something that I think is important to acknowledge here is that even under normal circumstances, during the initial days and weeks after a loss, there shouldn’t be a lot of movement or activity,” says Dan Wolfson, PsyD, a senior staff psychologist at Rennicke and Associates in New York City. “We don’t want people going back to work right away, for example. During this time period it is completely healthy to shut things down, be with family, and take care of yourself. But the big thing that’s lacking now, given that we can’t have normal funerals and other observances, is social support, and that’s significant,” Dr. Wolfson says.
Technology Offers New Options for Communal Mourning
On March 16, the day after Ruth Schwab died, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that funerals should be limited to close relatives and streamed online for other mourners. Wolfson, who specializes in grief counseling and serves on the advisory board for an online grief support website called Modern Loss, agrees that technology has opened up new possibilities for families unable to come together to mourn lost loved ones — for whatever reason, not just the pandemic — but also notes that connections enabled by streamed services “aren’t the same as receiving a hug or sitting with someone.” Indeed, funerals — or sitting shiva, in the case of the Schwabs —are vital for processing grief. “One of the things that helps us move forward after the death of someone close to us is accepting that loss,” Wolfson explains. “For the lack of a better phrase, the funeral makes it real. It also gives us a chance to see the lives of those we lost acknowledged by our community.”
Shared Grieving Can Happen in Other Ways, Too
“Now, we need to be adaptive, and we can be, to some degree, thanks to technology,” adds Danielle King, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Rice University in Houston who specializes in resilience. “But before people schedule an online funeral, they can reflect on what they hope and need to get out of the event. For example, is it a sense of closure? Is it felt social support?” If the objective is addressing these emotional needs while acknowledging the significance of the lost loved one in your life, technology may not be the only tool you can use, Dr. King says. Online forums can allow groups to share positive memories of the departed, but there are other ways to memorialize them as well. “Perhaps you can write a letter to the person who has just passed, or you and your family can agree to [each] light a sky lantern separately, on the same night, at the same time,” she notes. “There is no one right way to be resilient and to grieve. We know ourselves and our unique, evolving needs.”
Set Boundaries, Even for Streamed Services or Online Gatherings
If you decide to stream services, both King and Wolfson advise you to set boundaries and stick to them. According to Wolfson, for example, in-person shiva observances allow relatives and friends to sit with grieving families at appointed times, but also include private time for families to have a few moments to themselves to mourn and contemplate their loss. “Just because we are connected to our phones and computers doesn’t mean we need to be on-call all the time — especially when we’re grieving,” he notes. One option is to schedule a video group chat with friends and family with a defined start and end time. King says family members can volunteer to speak and share positive memories and stories about the deceased. However, organize it so that those who are going to speak are set up beforehand, and given a time limit, so that the event doesn’t run for hours. “You want to start the grieving process so you can move through it, and this allows everyone an equal opportunity,” King says. “It’s about finding ways to still experience positive emotions even during difficult times, alongside the more somber and difficult emotions we, rightfully, experience in grief.”
Consider Having a Memorial Service Later, After the Pandemic
Another way to acknowledge lost loved ones is to schedule services for later — perhaps the one-year anniversary of their passing — when, hopefully, the COVID-19 pandemic will be under control and the social distancing restrictions a thing of the past, Wolfson suggests. But you don’t need to decide now, when the sense of loss is still fresh — in fact, it’s probably best you don’t. It’s never a good idea to make more decisions than we have to while grieving, he notes. Those who lose loved ones in the midst of the pandemic also have an unfortunate reminder of their loss for as long as the outbreak continues — the disease itself. As long as the pandemic goes on, and remains in the news and the topic of conversation, people who have seen loved ones die in recent weeks may have a hard time moving past their sense of loss and grief. “It can create a sense of feeling stuck,” Wolfson says.
Community Support Is Powerful, When It Happens
As a New Yorker, he compares it to what many of those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, feel when the anniversary of the attacks comes around every year. In a way, though, this can be turned into a positive, Wolfson notes, because when people acknowledge major events, they also acknowledge those lost as a result of them. “In a way, the world is sharing your grief and acknowledging your loss, and that can be very powerful,” he explains. One day, when the world has hopefully moved past the COVID-19 pandemic, “we may see the same sort of outpouring of community support for those affected,” he adds. “However, right now, I am just seeing reporting of the numbers and not individual stories. That’s sad to me.” The Schwabs still haven’t decided how, or if, they’ll honor their mother in another way, either now or at a later date. For now, they adapted with what they called a “no-public shiva” at their home in Florida. “It was strange, yet comforting, getting phone calls and emails and texts from so many, some I didn’t even know, some I haven’t heard from for ages,” Lori Schwab says.
