The Final Pandemic Betrayal
Photo Illustrations by Aaron Turner
Lucy Esparza-Casarez thinks she caught the coronavirus while working the polls during California’s 2020 primary election, before bringing it home to her husband, David, her sister-in-law Yolanda, and her mother-in-law, Balvina. Though Lucy herself developed what she calls “the worst flu times 100,” David fared worse. Lucy took him to the hospital on March 20, the last time she saw him in the flesh. He died on April 3, nine days before their wedding anniversary, at the age of 69. Lucy said goodbye over Skype. During that time, Yolanda fell ill too; after two months in the hospital, she died on June 1. Balvina, meanwhile, recovered from her bout with COVID-19, but, distraught after losing two children in as many months, she died on June 16. Lucy found herself alone in her home for the first time in 23 years. Because the hospital never returned David’s belongings, she didn’t even have his wedding ring.
Lucy had coped with the losses of her father, sister, and mother in the two decades before the pandemic. But she told me that what she feels now is fundamentally different. She never got to comfort David before he died, never got to mourn him in the company of friends, and never escaped the constant reminders of the disease that killed him. Every news story twisted the knife. Every surge salted the wound. Two years later, she is still inundated by her grief. “And now people are saying we can get back to normal,” she told me. “What’s normal?”
The number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States has always been undercounted because such counts rely on often-inaccurate death certificates. But the total, as the CDC and other official sources suggest, will soon surpass 1 million. That number—the sum of a million individual tragedies—is almost too large to grasp, and only a few professions have borne visceral witness to the pandemic’s immense scale. Alanna Badgley has been an EMT since 2010, “and the number of people I’ve pronounced dead in the last two years has eclipsed that of the first 10,” she told me. Hari Close, a funeral director in Baltimore, told me that he cared for families who “were burying three or four people weeks apart.” Maureen O’Donnell, an obituary writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, told me that she usually writes “about people who had a beautiful arc to their life,” but during the pandemic, she has found herself writing about lives that were “cut short, like trees being cut down.” On average, each person who has died of COVID has done so roughly a decade before their time.
In just two years, COVID has become the in the U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of in the U.S. Each American who has died of COVID has left , creating a would be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense, incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors.
