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Grieving Covid Losses, Five Years Later

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Grieving Covid Losses, Five Years Later

Sophie Park for The New York Times

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In April 2020, when Sara Rochon lost her oldest brother to Covid, her grief felt all-consuming.

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From her home in Florida, Ms. Rochon was pained by thoughts of her brother’s last days, alone without his wife, children and siblings in his hospital room in Ohio. In those early, paralyzing weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Rochon could not attend his funeral, a gathering limited to only a handful of immediate family members who lived nearby.

“It was unbearable,” she said.

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Five years later, Ms. Rochon still thinks of her brother, Joseph Hanna, nearly every day.

But her grief has changed shape. Now when Mr. Hanna pops into her head, she remembers his face cracking a grin, his shock of thick white hair, his six-foot-one figure striding into a room.

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Sara Rochon, right, and her sister, Nina Hanna, at their brother’s gravesite in Youngstown, Ohio.

Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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This grief led to changes in her own life. Ms. Rochon, a retired teacher, decided to move back to Ohio, to be closer to her family.

“I can think of him with a smile and not a tear,” she said. “My grief hasn’t gone away. It’s just different.”

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More than 1.2 million Americans died in the coronavirus pandemic. For their grieving families, the fifth anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning is an aching reminder of what they have lost.

Rituals were upended. Families were robbed of the ability to care for their loved ones, which, under normal circumstances, can help ease their emotional pain. The deaths themselves were often endured from a distance, with nurses holding up iPads to allow the sick to say goodbye to their relatives and spouses. And afterward, families were left to congregate and remember their loved ones by Zoom.

“It was a perfect storm of all the bad things,” said Holly Prigerson, chair of diagnostics in radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a longtime researcher on grief.

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Just as Covid continues to affect people who are older or have underlying health conditions, it also still has a hold on bereaved families, five years on.

In interviews, many people say they are still mired in anger and crushing grief, unable to forget the particular cruelty of the pandemic: that their spouses, relatives and close friends often died alone.

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Some mourners have found light after darkness. Since the pandemic, they have grown closer with their families and friends, embraced their own lives with more vigor and purpose, or turned to music or writing as a way to stitch themselves back together.

Still others say they are occupying a middle ground of grief.

Mary Anna Ball, a graduate student who lost several close family friends to Covid in her home state of West Virginia, said that she felt as though she would never catch up with her own mourning.

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“It still feels kind of incomplete,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like there is that closure on any of it.”

Cleaved in Two

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In Ann Arbor, Mich., Lisa Murray is still grieving her mother-in-law, Sandy Gatti, who died from the virus in February 2021.

Ms. Murray is no stranger to loss. Her own mother died in hospice in 2023, but that passing came peacefully, with family present.

“Sandy’s death stands out to me,” she said. “It feels like the hole has not closed, the wound has not closed. There’s this sense of injustice. Her death was so unnecessary. She was so close to getting a vaccine.”

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Joy Netanya Thompson, an editor at a tech company in La Verne, Calif., lost her father to Covid in the summer of 2020, and then her beloved grandmother six months afterward.

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Joy Netanya Thompson with a sewing box that belonged to her grandmother, who died six months after her father.

Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times

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“It feels so unmooring to lose a parent,” Ms. Thompson said. “It really feels like a part of you has been erased from the earth. And that was very profound.”

But it was the way Ms. Thompson’s father died — the isolation after weeks in the hospital — that made her grief linger, years later. She felt that her life had been cleaved in two: Before Grief and After Grief.

When her grandfather died in hospice care in 2023, she immediately felt the stark contrast between how he and her father spent their final days.

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“I got to say goodbye to him,” Ms. Thompson said of her grandfather. “I got to hold his hand a couple different times in the last couple weeks. I got to tell him everything I wanted to tell him. And then we got to have a big memorial service and celebrate him. So I got to see the difference when you get to do the normal rituals.”

Looking Back in Anger

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Like many Covid mourners, Amy Morris, 52, is still fighting one powerful emotion: anger.

Ms. Morris, who lives in Charlotte, N.C., watched helplessly from afar in late 2020 as her mother, Ilene Craft Boger, 85, fell ill in her assisted living facility and was transferred to a hospital. Ms. Boger, an accomplished jazz pianist who dressed impeccably, died a month later.

“The manner of her death still fills me with such rage that it takes my breath away,” Ms. Morris said.

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Brian Owens, an artistic director in the film industry, has lost two aunts, an uncle and a nephew because of Covid.

He still feels a mix of frustration and grief. Though Mr. Owens’s family was in the United States, he was living in Canada, where Covid restrictions were far more stringent.

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“You went to the grocery store and that was about it,” he said. “So that comparison added a layer of anger to the whole thing for me. I feel like so many of those deaths were preventable and we just didn’t prevent them.”

Others who lost relatives to the virus said they were dogged by lingering guilt.

Arjun Jalan, who lives in Boston, thinks about his father, far away in India.

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“I hadn’t seen my mom in 15 months and would never see her again,” Arjun Jalan said of his mother, who died in the pandemic.

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Sophie Park for The New York Times

Mr. Jalan’s mother, known in the family as a phenomenal hostess and cook, died in 2021, leaving his father widowed. For a long time, Mr. Jalan could not bear to look at photos of his mother. His father urged him to keep moving forward, to not worry about him or his loneliness.

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Writing Your Way Through It

Before the pandemic, Nicholas Montemarano’s identity was wrapped around his love of fiction. He read relentlessly, wrote novels and taught creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

But when his mother, Catherine, died of Covid in January 2021, Mr. Montemarano found himself turning to poetry instead. He wrote a memoir, an elegy to his mother, in verse.

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I’m trying to make my bed and brush my teeth.I’m trying to remember her voicebefore her lungs quit. Song sparrows fly twigsto the flowerbed outside my window.This morning in overgrown grass under light rain,a butterfly alighted on my face.

He is one of many Covid mourners who have discovered more personal ways to resolve their grief.

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For Kim Lowe, a filmmaker in Boston, that relief was found after the pandemic left a gaping hole in her sprawling family in Massachusetts.

Ms. Lowe’s mother died during the pandemic in 2021, though doctors could not determine the cause. Then all four of her mother’s siblings fell ill and died within the next two years, two from Covid and two from what Ms. Lowe called “collateral Covid” — when they could not easily see a doctor and saw their health falter as a result.

“It felt like an entire generation had been wiped out,” she said. “It was physical pain, it was mental pain, it was all-encompassing grief.”

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Ms. Lowe has fought through much of her grief by leaning on her own generation, the cousins who live around the Boston area. Together, they have written down their family stories and history, including a beloved recipe for Portuguese soup — one that her mother’s generation kept only in their heads.

On the fifth anniversary of the pandemic, Ms. Lowe feels like a changed person.

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“I felt as if I was given a gift of perspective and love and gratitude,” she said. “I make people feel so awkward because I’m always telling them how much I love them and appreciate them. I’m so much more loving and present.”

Gwendolyn W. Williams, who lives in Los Angeles, last saw two of her closest friends on Christmas Eve in 2019, when she made her usual 45-minute drive to their assisted living home for a visit.

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Two of Gwendolyn Williams’s friends died in the same assisted living facility during the pandemic.

Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times

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Both friends contracted Covid and died — only eight days apart — when the virus swept through the facility in 2020.

Today, Ms. Williams said she moves through life a little differently. She was always devoted to her friends, some close enough to feel like family. But now even a passing thought can prompt her to call or text someone.

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“I don’t let the moment pass me by,” Ms. Williams said. “You do what you can for people, you love when you can do it.”

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.

One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.

The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said.

All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.

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Several “partnering law enforcement agencies assigned to the Reflecting Pool” working with US Park Police were involved in detaining the two men and one woman — including officers from Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and California.

One of the officers said in court documents that Thiers “admitted to removing a piece of blue sealant from the Reflecting Pool and still had it in his hand when I made contact with him.”

The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.

Lawyers for Thiers and Dennison-Gibby declined to comment. CNN has reached out to Carreno’s attorney.

If found guilty of destruction of property, the defendants could be fined up to $1,000 and face a maximum of 180 days behind bars.

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The New York Times first reported that three additional people had been charged with damaging the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals caused major damage to the pool by gashing the lining after his administration spent more than $14 million on renovations, though he has not provided evidence to support that claim. The officers who charged Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby did not accuse them of gashing the lining.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, DC, last week for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn — unlike Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby – was charged with destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000 which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Crews began draining the Reflecting Pool over the weekend to make repairs, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for the second time in three months.

The move comes after weeks of problems – algae blooms, green-hued water, a chipping bottom and the administration’s allegations of vandalism – that have plagued the iconic landmark, making its woes the subject of national interest.

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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