The Coronavirus Is Stealing Our Ability to Grieve
My aunt and cousins had to wear masks and stand dozens of meters away at the cemetery as men in protective suits laid my uncle into the grave.
My uncle had been sick for a couple of days, they told me, with a fever, cough, headache. The symptoms were nothing extraordinary, but this time was different. COVID-19 had been spreading uncontrollably throughout Tehran for weeks. And the cancer treatments my uncle had endured for the past few years had obliterated his immune system. His wife and adult children did all they could: quarantining him in a separate room and disinfecting the entire house daily. He was in his 80s and had cancer. They knew he was vulnerable.
His symptoms started slowly but cascaded rapidly into shortness of breath. That was when they rushed him to a hospital, in a taxi.
