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As the numbers of deaths caused by Covid-19 continues to increase in the United States, there’s a new concern about the mental health of surviving family members as they go through the grieving process.
A new Penn State study shows that every death from Covid-19 will impact approximately nine surviving close family members. They define the ‘’kinship network” as grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and children.
Ashton Verdery, associate professor of sociology, demography and social data analytics, and an affiliate of the Population Research Institute and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State, puts the impact into perspective.
“For example, if the virus kills 190,000 people, 1.7 million will experience the loss of a close relative,” he says. “It’s very helpful to have a sense of the potential impacts that the pandemic could have. And, for employers, it calls attention to policies around family leave and paid leave. At the federal level, it might inform officials about possible extensions for FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act). There could also be some implications for caretaking. For example, a lot of children grow up in grandparent-led houses and they would be impacted.”
“There are a substantial number of people who may be losing parents that we would consider younger adults and a substantial number of people may be losing spouses who are in their 50s or 60s,” he adds.
Grieving multiple losses
While the study points out the trajectory of grief from each individual death, there is also the potential, by the nature of a widespread pandemic, that there will be people who will experience multiple losses.
Grief expert David Kessler says, “Multiple deaths are such a hard, hard grief to process. We often think about someone dying and forget this might not be [the survivor’s] first loss. Tragically, it might not be their last one.”
He says the Covid-19 grief has been unlike anything else. “We’re just dealing with the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “There’s never been a time in our history when people have had loved ones die and they weren’t able to say goodbye, they weren’t able to have a funeral, and weren’t able to grieve collectively. Health grief needs community.”
He continues, “When we see that almost 140,000 people have died—that would be the equivalent of over 1000 planes crashing in the last six months. Can you imagine our world if 1000 planes had crashed? These people’s grief is going unwitnessed. We’re not meant to be islands of grief.”
Until someone is personally affected by a loved one dying from Covid-19, they may become conditioned to seeing case numbers on TV, but Kessler says “once you lose just one person in your family your life is changed forever.”
During this time, he has transitioned from in-person grief counseling and training to creating a free, private online Facebook support group: Grief, Releasing Pain, Remembering Love & Finding Meaning. The first day brought in 1,000 people and it’s grown to more than 20,000.
“I think we’re seeing a lot of anger from people in grief,” he says. “One woman was furious that the world isn’t taking it seriously after her mother died of Covid-19 in a nursing home. We have to first recognize that anger is a part of grief.”
“I’ve been to Ground Zero. I’ve helped on plane crashes. I went to Houston during the flooding,” he continues. “We were always able to have people showing up and creating community and taking care of one another. I’ve never seen a situation where all that is absent. Grief is isolating in a normal world, but this is extreme isolation. We’ll see a lot of compounded grief, complicated grief and a lot of trauma after this ends.”
“We’re all going to have to go through the pain and find meaning. We don’t want these people to have died for no reason.”