What COVID-19 Families Hear When Trump Brags About His Strength

Losing a loved one to COVID-19 is devastating in much the same way losing someone to any illness is. There are stages of grief—periods of confusion, anger, and immense sadness. But for many families experiencing a coronavirus-related loss, another feeling is tangled up with all the others: a penetrating and persistent sense of regret.

For Sabila Khan, whose father contracted COVID-19 at a short-term rehabilitation center, that regret takes the form of impossible what-ifs and if-onlys. she often wonders. Her father died on April 14, alone at a hospital just a few blocks from her home in Jersey City, New Jersey. “When your parents grow old, you are under no illusion that they will live forever, but never in my wildest dreams did I think he was going to die the way he did,”