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Grieving Covid Losses, Five Years Later
In April 2020, when Sara Rochon lost her oldest brother to Covid, her grief felt all-consuming.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
“It still feels kind of incomplete,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like there is that closure on any of it.”
Cleaved in Two
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.”
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.
“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.
“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
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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.
“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.”
A cotton field in north Louisiana.
Dylan Hawkins
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Dylan Hawkins
NEW ORLEANS – James Davis had the best year in his entire farming career this year.
The third-generation Black row crop farmer estimated picking almost 1,300 pounds of cotton, an average of 50 bushels of soybeans, and an average of around 155 bushels of corn on 2,500 acres of his farmland in northeast Louisiana.
But with U.S. commodities facing steep retaliatory tariffs overseas, he says he and many other farmers can’t sell their crops for enough to cover the loans they take out to fund the growing season.
The tariffs, Davis said, are making it almost impossible to survive.
“To have that kind of yield and still not be able to pay all your bills, that tells you something is broken in the farming industry,” Davis said.
In order to plan for next year, farmers need relief now, Davis said. At a recent meeting with his banker, the bank projected 2026 revenues in order to secure crop loans, and the cash flow math wasn’t adding up — the farm’s expected income wasn’t enough to cover operating loans once input costs, equipment notes, land rent and insurance premiums were factored in.
The Trump administration announced just this week a new $12 billion package of one-time bridge payments for American farmers like Davis, aimed at helping them recover from temporary market disruptions and high production costs.
“This relief will provide much needed certainty as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops,” Trump said during a White House roundtable event. “It’ll help them continue their efforts to lower food prices for American families.”
Davis says that type of help can’t come soon enough.
“Without bailouts, it is hard to make crop loans work on paper,” he said in an interview with NPR on Monday.
James Davis asks a question at a panel on farm finances at the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Davis is a third-generation Black row crop farmer who said that despite having the best year he’s ever had in his farming career, he’s still struggling to pay his bills.
Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
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Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
At the same time, however, the Trump Administration dismantled decades-old USDA programs designed to assist Black farmers by eliminating the “socially disadvantaged” designation, including programs like the 2501 Program, which many Black row-crop farmers rely on for access to credit, technical assistance, and conservation support that are otherwise difficult to secure at county-level USDA offices. The USDA did not respond to requests for interviews or comment.
Those supports, experts said, were designed to help smaller farmers and farmers of color remain on the land.
Welcome relief may not come in time
The Farmer Bridge Assistance Program accounts for up to $11 billion of the newly announced package, and offers proportional payments to farmers growing major commodities, including row crops like soybeans, corn and cotton.
Payments are expected to begin by February of next year, and are designed to offset losses from the 2025 crop year.
For many farmers, that isn’t soon enough. While the bridge payment may help with crop loans, there are immediate bills due for many in the coming weeks.
“This needs to show up like Santa Claus underneath the Christmas tree, to be honest with you,” said PJ Haynie, a fifth-generation Black farmer with rice operations in Virginia and Arkansas and chairman of the National Black Growers Council, which met in New Orleans this week for its annual conference.
“Our landlords want their money by the end of the year — our seed and input and chemical and equipment companies that we have to make payments by the end of the year,” he said.
Some farmers may have relationships with bankers and companies that will work with them and extend payment deadlines a few months, Haynie said — others don’t. And farmers are grateful for any support they receive, but, Haynie said, the one-time bridge payments aren’t enough.
“They still won’t make us whole because of the losses that we’ve incurred because of the markets, the tariffs, the trade,” he said. “But every dollar helps.”
Farmers already face challenges like unpredictable weather, pests and stagnant commodity prices, as well as rising input costs including machinery and fertilizer purchases. “We plant and we pray,” as Haynie put it. Tariffs have only compounded those challenges.
Black farmers face additional challenges
Black farmers like Haynie and Davis make up less than 2% of all U.S. farmers — and Black row-crop farmers, like those at this week’s conference, are an even smaller slice of that.
“Our herd is small,” Haynie said, “and if we can protect the herd, the herd will grow.”
Black farmers have asked the federal government for loan relief and other assistance for decades. A century ago, Black farmers owned at least 16 million acres of land. Today, Haynie said they hold around 2 million.
Following the Civil War, Black Americans were promised “40 acres and a mule” by the federal government, but many say that promise never came to pass.
Over the course of the past 100 years, the amount of Black-owned farmland dropped by 90%, according to Data for Progress, due to higher rates of loan and credit denials, lack of legal and industry support and “outright acts of violence and intimidation.”
Advocates say the inability for Black farmers to get a start, and later the sharp drop in farming population, is in part due to what they call USDA’s discriminatory lending practices, and often specific loan officers’ biases. The agency is the subject of an ongoing discrimination class action lawsuit by Black farmers and additional litigation due to those and other allegations.
Much of that history plays into how Black farmers approach the Trump administration.
“The Black row crop farm community needs the support of the administration,” Haynie said. “I can’t … buy an $800,000 combine to sell $4 corn. The math doesn’t math on that.”
All farmers — “Black or white” — are responding to the same depressed prices, he said. But Black farmers, he argues, already a small percentage of total U.S. growers, and often operating at a smaller scale, have less buffer to absorb sudden market shocks.
As farmers look at their projected costs next year, economists say they’re also navigating deep uncertainty in global markets.
“I think that a lot of farmers are still very much looking at the next year with some trepidation, thinking that their margins will continue to be very, very tight,” said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C.
U.S. trade with China — historically the top buyer of American soybeans and other row crops — has not rebounded to pre–trade war levels despite a new agreement. Meanwhile, Glauber said, countries like Brazil have expanded production dramatically, seizing market share during the trade war and becoming the world’s top soybean exporter — a long-term structural shift that U.S. growers now have to compete against.
Finis Stribling III (left) and John Green II (right) take a break during the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Both Stribling and Green were plagued by bad weather at the start of this year’s growing season, and both said tariffs have only made things harder.
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He added that crops grown in the Mississippi River Delta, such as cotton and soybeans, have been hit especially hard by low prices and retaliatory tariffs.
Finis Stribling III farms 800 acres of cotton, rice, corn, soybeans and wheat in Arkansas and Tennessee. At the National Black Growers Council’s conference, he told NPR 2025 was another year of what he calls “farming in deficit.”
“We had too much rain early, then drought,” he said. “And when you finally get a crop in the field, the price support isn’t strong enough to cover the cost of production.”
Sitting next to him during a lunch break at the conference, another Arkansas row crop farmer John Lee II, put it bluntly: “What I’m worried about is next year. What do we do in 2026 when we go to the bank to try and get a loan? I’m concerned about the notion of going to the bank this upcoming year and not being able to get a loan because we can’t make the loan cash flow.”
Both also said the new tariff relief will help — but not nearly to the degree many outside agriculture may think.
“From the outside looking in, non-farm community, you say $12 billion seems like a lot of money,” Stribling said. “But when you look at the cost of production and the money that’s spent in agriculture, $12 billion is really just a drop in the bucket. It’s almost like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”
More than 400 law enforcement personnel have been deployed as police search for the suspect in a shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island in which two students were killed and nine wounded, US officials said.
The Ivy League university in Providence remained in lockdown early on Sunday, several hours after a suspect with a firearm entered a building where students were taking exams on Saturday. Streets around the campus were packed with emergency vehicles hours after the shooting, and security was heightened around the city as law enforcement agencies continued their manhunt.
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The suspect remained at large, officials said, as police worked with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search streets and buildings around the campus to find the individual.
Saturday’s shooting is the second major incident of gun violence on a university campus this week.
Providence deputy police chief Timothy O’Hara said the suspect had not been identified.
Officials said they would release a video of the suspect, a male possibly in his 30s and dressed in black, who O’Hara said may have been wearing a mask. He said officials had retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but that police were not prepared to release more details of the attack.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has confirmed that two students were killed and nine people were injured in the attack.
At a news conference, Smiley said university leaders became aware of the shooting at about 4:05pm local time (21:05 GMT), when emergency responders received a 911 call.
Smiley declined to identify the shooting victims, citing the ongoing investigation. However, he sought to reassure the community, despite a shelter-in-place order for the Brown campus and the surrounding neighbourhood.
“We have no reason to believe there are any additional threats at this time,” he said.
The university’s president, Christina Paxton, explained she had been on a flight to Washington, DC, when she learned of the shooting. She immediately returned to Providence to attend a night-time news conference.
“This is a day that we hoped never would come to our community. It is deeply devastating for all of us,” Paxton said in a written statement.
At the news conference, Paxton said she was told the victims were students.
Suspect remains at large
At approximately 4:22pm local time (21:22 GMT), the university issued its first emergency update, warning that there was an armed man near the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building.
“Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice,” the university said in its update.
“Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself.”
Upon arriving at the scene, law enforcement swept the building, according to Providence police’s O’Hara.
“They did a systematic search of the building. However, no suspect was located at that time,” O’Hara said.
The university had to withdraw an early announcement that a suspect had been apprehended, writing, “Police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s).”
US President Donald Trump published a similar retraction on his online platform, Truth Social, after erroneously posting at about 5:44pm (22:44 GMT) that a suspect had been detained.
Mayor Smiley said there were 400 law enforcement officers in the area to search for the suspect.
He also encouraged witnesses to come forward with any information about the shooting.
The seventh-oldest university in the US, Brown is considered part of the prestigious Ivy League, a cluster of private research colleges in the northeast. Its student body numbers 11,005, according to its website.
On December 9, Kentucky State University in the southern city of Frankfort also experienced gunfire on campus, killing one student and leaving a second critically injured.
The suspect in that case was identified as Jacob Lee Bard, the parent of a student at the school.
new video loaded: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
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At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
Students remained locked in their dorms and classrooms as the police searched for the shooter, who was described as a man wearing black. At least two people are dead, and eight are in critical condition.
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At 4:00 in the afternoon, we received a call. 4:05 was when the initial call came in to Brown University of a report of an active shooter. I can confirm that there are two individuals who have died this afternoon, and there are another eight in critical status. We do not have a shooter in custody at this time. There is a shelter in place in effect for the greater Brown University area. If you live on or near Brown’s campus, we are encouraging you to stay home and stay inside. This is a sad state of our country right now where you have to plan for these things. And hopefully the community takes some comfort to know that their Providence leadership has planned for this occurrence, including very recently.
By McKinnon de Kuyper
December 13, 2025
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