Many Across the County Experiencing Prolonged Grief Due to Losses From COVID

Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 -- 1:01 PM

(AP) Kelly Brown’s 74-year-old father got sick first with COVID-19, followed by her 71-year-old mom just two days later.

John and Judy Trzebiatowski died of the illness just a week apart last August, sending Brown into a black tunnel of grief that doesn’t seem to have an end.

Health restrictions stripped away the things that normally help people deal with death, such as bedside visits at the Wisconsin hospital where they were treated and a big funeral with hugs and tears.

That left Brown to deal with her sorrow on her own, and now she’s having a hard time seeing a way forward. With more than 605,000 dead of COVID-19 in the United States and nearly 4 million worldwide, Brown is among the thousands or more who could be experiencing prolonged grief, the kind of mourning that experts say can prevent people from moving beyond a death and functioning normally again.

Natalia Skritskaya, an expert on grieving, said it’s too early to say whether prolonged grieving, also known as complicated grief, will be a major complication from the pandemic, because it isn’t yet over, with thousands still dying daily worldwide, including hundreds in the United States.

Many mourners have yet to pass the one-year anniversary of a loss, and few studies have been published so far on the psychiatric fallout, she said. But prolonged grief is both real and potentially debilitating, said Skritskaya, a research scientist and clinical psychologist with the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University in New York.

She noted that it can be treated with therapy in which participants talk through their experience and feelings.

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