Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, a deep divide exists among its survivors.
There are those who remember it in lighter ways — an era of sourdough starters and working-from-home.
And then there are those who remember COVID-19 and deaths it left in its wake.
More than a million people in the United States have died from COVID or COVID-related complications after the novel coronavirus led to a declaration of a national emergency in March 2020.
In the wake of a highly contagious virus, many people confronted with death found they weren’t able to grieve or celebrate their deceased families or friends in the ways they’d hoped. In some cases, state or local governments imposed restrictions on gatherings. In others, families worried about spreading the virus to a vulnerable loved one and imposed restrictions themselves.
Heidi Lovell and Sandy Colbs, both of McLean County, lost their mothers at the height of the pandemic.
The death of a parent changes a person forever in normal circumstances. The death of a parent during a viral pandemic — who could be prepared for that?
“Unless you know somebody that specifically died of COVID … you just kind of forget that people were dying, people were in the hospital, sick, people were having a hard time with other problems too,” Lovell said in an interview. “I don't need people to be like, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry your mom died during COVID,’ but like, life still happened, is what I’m saying.”
Lovell's mother died from lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system, in May 2020.
Colbs’ mother, a resident of an assisted living home near her other daughter in Atlanta, Ga., contracted COVID-19 around Christmas in 2020.
Both women struggled to be present for each of their mothers as medical facilities attempted to keep COVID from spreading among patients.
Lovell's mother had started her journey with cancer well before the word “coronavirus” entered the vernacular, and it had returned in November 2019. Before she made a return to Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago in March, Lovell’s mother visited a local emergency room in Bloomington-Normal.
“My sister wasn’t allowed to go in with her, but my mom couldn’t tell them what was wrong with her. We FaceTimed her at one point and were like, ‘Hey did you tell them what’s going on? Did you get any information?’ And she was like, ‘Oh I’m just sitting here.’ But she had an IV in,” Lovell said. “It was just hard to advocate for her when you couldn’t have extra people there.”
Colbs had previously taken some comfort in the fact that her sister was near her mother and could visit and help her frequently. But when the assisted living facility began to restrict visitors, a struggle to communicate began.
“We started at that point having Zoom chats or FaceTime chats with mom, but that was really challenging because she was not able to manage the technology, so we always had to have somebody from the facility set up the calls and they were overwhelmed with everything they had to do,” Colbs said.
Her sister would stand outside her mother’s first-floor window, trying to talk from the outside in, but Colbs’ mother couldn’t hear well and her hearing aids were often missing.
“For the most part, she understood [what was going on], but she struggled with mask-wearing. It was just very, very challenging. Even being around staff, which was risky, she wanted, needed, human contact,” Colbs said. “They had to deliver meals to her room. And my sister barely had time to find my mom’s hearing aids or take care of other logistical things in her room before it was time to leave.”
Like Colbs, Lovell did much of her advocacy work on behalf of her mother via phone. What she couldn’t do over the phone, she did via car: At one point, she recalled, neither Walmart or Amazon would deliver to the medical facility where her mother was staying, so she drove four hours back-to-back after dropping off clothing.
“I couldn't get in; they wouldn't let visitors in. I even joked with my mom that I was gonna try and find her window, but she was in the back of a building that I couldn't get to. So I dropped it off and went the two hours back home,” Lovell said.
Lovell’s mother was eventually released to hospice. She died at her home, surrounded by her family — a far cry from the hospital and rehab experiences where no one, hardly, had been allowed in the room.
Many people still weren’t gathering in mass groups in May 2020, so the guest list was limited to immediate family members and one family friend who streamed the funeral live on Facebook — an unexpected way to celebrate the life of a woman remembered for her love of adventure and her children and grandchildren.
“It’s so very surreal, having our friends and family just supporting us through comments and likes and hearts and things on a Facebook Live,” Lovell said. “My mom was a people person, and so it’s not that I don't agree with the lockdowns or anything … but she also deserved to have the people she loved around her.”
'To not forget what has happened'
Colbs found a slight silver lining in her mother’s Zoom funeral: Had it happened at any other point, she said, she might not have thought to record it. Because it happened during COVID, she has a recording she watches each year on the anniversary of her mother’s death.
Her mother contracted COVID after moving to a different assisted living facility and had to be taken to the hospital. Colbs’ sister brought items to comfort their mother — a favorite blanket and a photo album — but they were left with a staff member in the lobby as visitors weren’t permitted.
“I remember, on one of the Zoom calls from the hospital, thanking the nurse who was in the room because he touched my mom. He touched her shoulder, just put his hand on her shoulder,” Colbs said. “It was just excruciating to not be able to hold her hand and be there. She was lucid for the first couple of days, but after that, she was really non-responsive.”
Eventually, Colbs and her sister had to make a decision. Her mother’s condition failed to improve and her quality of life had deteriorated rapidly for multiple, medical reasons. She was moved to hospice care before passing away in January 2021. Colbs came down from Illinois, but she and her sister and other family members distanced themselves, even for the funeral, which was held on Zoom.
Her mother had been a force of nature, “feisty and political,” a loving surrogate parent to many children in the Atlanta area through her work as a special education professional and an LGBTQ advocate in her later years. To celebrate her vibrant life in a distanced, digital manner felt amiss, but Colbs said the family was working with the information they had at the time.
“What it lacked, of course, was the human touch — not being able to get hugs from folks and really feel like we were together in our grief process,” Colbs said. “We had a viewing of her body at the funeral home, but we were advised not to touch her body. Nobody knew at that point how transmission could happen.”
Though she remembers her mother fondly and is “at peace” with the decisions she and her sister made, Colbs said the experience has left her embittered.
“I’m bitter about the politics of how COVID was managed in those days. I think it could have been different. I don’t know if the vaccines could have come out any faster than they did, but I think the chaos that was sown around self-protection definitely played a role in the infection rates,” she said.
Though it’s been nearly five years since Lovell lost her mother, the death and the pandemic surrounding it still come up in her therapy sessions to this day.
“I just think I am forever changed by being my mom's advocate on the phone and trying to plan out everything that way. You don't get to go back and change it. You can imagine different scenarios and the best scenario, or what you would have wanted, or what my mom would have wanted, but you can't change it,” Lovell said. “You just move forward.”
Though many people have distanced themselves from the world as it was five years ago, Colbs said she, too, will never forget — which is why she wanted to tell her mother’s story.
“I always believe that it’s important to give voice to the losses that we experience. I think it’s important to share and honor their loved ones by telling their stories and to not forget what has happened,” she said. “I think for me that’s rooted in growing up in a Jewish family. We tell the story of the Holocaust for the same reason: We don’t want history to repeat itself.”
