Healing through storytelling: Coping with loss and grief during COVID-19

Writer/Interviewer: Laura Meoli-Ferrigon. Featuring Interviews with Shirley Taylor Dunn, LCSW-R, PhD. ABD, CASAC and Dean Russell of The City/MISSING THEM.

As of today, more than 875,000 people have died to COVID-19 in the United States. Globally, more than 5.6 million people have been lost to this pandemic. Those numbers, which grow each day, are impactful, but on paper (or on a screen), they are just merely numbers. For those, like me, who have lost a loved one to COVID-19, the grief associated with this ongoing rollercoaster hurts much more. The emerging variants, the politicization of masks and vaccines, the constant news coverage, and the people who pretend this is a hoax are especially painful, and sometimes overwhelming.

The news today is all COVID, all the time, and so these huge numbers can leave people feeling numb or disinterested. To really understand what it means for this amount of people to die is to take the pain of just one person losing a loved one, and multiplying that by the number of people who are grieving their loss. That exponential impact disproportionately affects people of color and those who are not as fortunate to have vaccines available.