Families still grappling with devastating loss due to COVID-19

COVID-19 is sending ripples of grief through the nation. With each death, a network of bereaved family members struggles to recover. For Ailyn Jimenez, the past two years have brought heartbreak after heartbreak.“They were like one after the other, you know what I mean? Like you don’t even have a break to kind of grieve one before you’re grieving the next,” she says. COVID-19 took two of her uncles and four of her close friends. “I lost a very good college friend that I have known for many years and I just couldn’t believe it. She just had a baby like two years ago.” The pandemic also left gaping holes in her work at Catholic Guardian Services in New York, where she helps find permanent homes for children in foster care. Eight of the foster mothers she works with died of COVID, leaving behind the children in their care.“My heart broke for them and particularly one that was being adopted and that was completely disrupted,” says Jimenez. More than a million Americans have now died of COVID-19. Research at Penn State University shows for each of those deaths, at least nine family members are left behind as survivors. “Our results would imply that with over a million individuals who died of COVID-19, that over nine million people had lost a parent, sibling, spouse, child or grandparent in the U.S.,“ says Ashton Verdery, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography, who helped lead the study. “I think that it’s going to be 50 or 60 years before a large proportion of the population doesn’t remember that their grandparent passed away in this kind of acute mortality shock that influenced the country.”Each death sending ripples of grief that will change American families long after the pandemic loosens its grip.