Via The New York Times: As U.S. Deaths Approach 300,000, Obituaries Force Reckoning with Covid. Excerpt:
CHICAGO — When Kim Miller sat down in her Illinois house to compose her husband’s obituary, she could not hold back.
Not about the coronavirus that had left Scott, her fit, healthy spouse who loved to swim, golf and putter in the garden, gasping for breath and unable to move his limbs as he stood at the kitchen counter. Not about what had killed him swiftly and cruelly in only a few days.
“This disease is real, it is serious and it is deadly,” she wrote in his obituary. “Wear the mask, socially distance, if not for yourself then for others who may lose a loved one to the disease.”
“I couldn’t just write that he lived and died and had two children,” said Ms. Miller, a retired college professor, who wept as she spoke of her husband of 25 years. “I wanted people to read this and really read this.”
By Sunday, deaths from the coronavirus were approaching 300,000 in the United States, a toll comparable to losing the entire population of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. Reports of new deaths have more than doubled in the last month to an average of nearly 2,400 each day, more than any other point in the pandemic. The deaths have been announced in the traditional fashion, in obituaries and notices on websites and in newspapers that have followed the same format for decades, noting birthplaces, family members, jobs and passions.
But in recent months, as the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States grows steadily higher, families who have lost relatives to the disease are writing the pandemic more deeply into the death notices they submit to funeral homes and the materials they share with newspapers’ obituary writers. They are crafting pleas for mask wearing, rebuking those who believe the virus is a hoax and describing, in blunt detail, the loneliness and physical suffering that the coronavirus inflicted on the dying.
“In the beginning, families wanted to keep Covid more private,” said Charles S. Childs Jr., an owner of A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home in Chicago, where he has seen a surge of virus deaths in the last month. “That has changed. Now they want to make it public.”
Over decades, families have often declined to write in an obituary how their relative died when there was anxiety or fear attached to the cause, whether it was AIDS, an opioid overdose or suicide. But as the public has grown more aware of once-unfamiliar infectious diseases, mental illness and drug addiction, the tendency to conceal has slowly given way to candor.
After Shirley Flores, a postmaster and mother of three, died in Las Cruces, N.M., her family noted in her obituary: “She died a very painful lonely death because we weren’t allowed in to hold her hand and sit with her. Please take Covid-19 seriously, protect yourself and those you love.”
