"The Final Pandemic Betrayal. Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic."
Here are some excerpts:
"Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover. The U.S. seems intent on brushing aside its losses in its desire to move past the crisis. But the grief of millions of people is not going away. 'There’s no end to the grief,' Lucy Esparza-Casarez told me. 'It changes. It morphs into something different. But it’s ongoing.'"
"Grievers must also deal with lies and mocking. On the day that Esparza-Casarez’s husband died in April 2020, she watched a press conference in which Donald Trump stated that the virus 'is going away.' Zach, an artist who lives in St. Louis, saw a clip of Ted Cruz mocking masks at the Conservative Political Action Conference while his father lay dying in a hospital. (The Atlantic has agreed to identify him by only his first name to avoid heightening tensions in his family that have already been exacerbated by the pandemic.) 'It was just a punch in the gut … the mania, the cheering, the applause,' he told me. 'Imagine if you lost someone to cancer and half the country was making fun of cancer all the time,' he said. 'Imagine that it’s just everywhere, every day, and it doesn’t go away.'"
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