“Everyone is having a fear response,” Rekha told me. They’re grasping for signs that their choices, or their lack of preexisting conditions, make them safe. But that instinct easily turns data into stigma. If someone’s death fits with population-wide trends—if they were older,
chronically ill, or
unvaccinated—their loss is explicable, and therefore dismissible. The compulsion to explain away a death is so strong that although Rekha’s mother was thriving, beyond having high blood pressure, even people who knew her were quick to retrofit poor health onto their memories. They’ll claim she was frail, as if “COVID was the last little bit of her dying anyway,” Rekha told me. “And, like,
You were around her, and she was fine!”
At the other extreme, people whose deaths
don’t fit with population-wide trends are also dismissed as statistical outliers who inconveniently complicate accepted notions of safety. Teresita Horne keeps hearing that kids aren’t at risk from COVID, even though she knows many parents who have lost children of Donovan’s age. “You don’t hear about them,” she told me. The odds that a child will die of COVID
are incredibly low, but if your child is part of the numerator, it doesn’t matter how large the denominator is. Similarly, vaccines are
extremely effective at preventing COVID deaths—but some vaccinated people still die, Christina’s mother among them. “Everyone assumes she wasn’t vaccinated,” she told me. “They want to believe that people didn’t do all the things they needed to do to be safe—and that’s not true for a lot of people.” When Cleavon Gilman, an ER doctor, honors such folks on Twitter, he gets accused of undermining confidence in vaccines, or even being an anti-vaxxer. “It’s gotten to the point where if someone was vaccinated and died from COVID, people think you shouldn’t talk about it,” he told me.
Grievers must also deal with lies and mocking. On the day that Esparza-Casarez’s husband died in April 2020, she
watched a press conference in which Donald Trump stated that the virus “is going away.” Zach, an artist who lives in St. Louis,
saw a clip of Ted Cruz mocking masks at the Conservative Political Action Conference while his father lay dying in a hospital. (
The Atlantic has agreed to identify him by only his first name to avoid heightening tensions in his family that have already been exacerbated by the pandemic.) “It was just a punch in the gut … the mania, the cheering, the applause,” he told me. “Imagine if you lost someone to cancer and half the country was making fun of cancer all the time,” he said. “Imagine that it’s just everywhere, every day, and it doesn’t go away.”
