The coronavirus pandemic is changing the landscape of grief and end-of-life planning
In the four months since biomedical researcher Nikki Walter died of cancer, her husband has had trouble sleeping through the night. Eric Walter has had to contend with his wife’s death while in isolation, due to social distancing measures amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“For obvious reasons, this is a bad time,” he said, “but it’s literally the worst time of my life.”
Eric and his 21-year-old son, Jacob Walter, agreed to remain careful in their social distancing practices with a few close friends in order to share hugs when needed, which helped. It’s hard to live without any physical contact when you’ve been sleeping next to the same person for 30 years, Eric said.
“It’s been terrible,” he said. “We kind of had everything that was helping us cope ripped away, and a lot of the worst of that was just physical contact.”
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In January, when Nikki’s illness took a sudden turn, Jacob boarded an emergency flight home from a study-abroad trip in Egypt to see his mother. He arrived hours after Nikki’s death. Now, he’s taking university classes online while staying at home with his father.
In mid-February, the family held an end-of-life celebration, and hundreds of people came. Eric said that while many were shaken by Nikki’s death at that time, he can’t help but feel her absence has been lost on others who are caught up in the swirl of the pandemic.
Nikki, who died five weeks before her 50th birthday, conducted research at Oregon Health & Science University. When she wasn’t busy working, she put time into supporting Eric and Jacob, who make music together. The family loved travel and backpacking.
“We were very tight, and still are,” Eric said. “We shared pretty much everything.”
After his wife’s death, Eric planned trips to the coast, signed up for yoga classes and tried acupuncture — undertakings he thought would keep him connected to others as he grieved.
But come March, those in-person interactions came full stop as Gov. Kate Brown imposed social distancing measures to ease the demand on hospitals in Oregon. That’s when Eric’s mental health started heading toward what he describes as a “really dark place.” He’s sought virtual therapy, but it can be far from comforting at times.
“It just doesn’t work for me,” he said. “I think the screen was making me pretend things weren’t as bad as they were.”
He’s seen plenty of posts on social media encouraging people to make the most of the pandemic by connecting closely with family.
“For those of us who lost that, there’s no silver lining,” he said. “It’s just been one kind of anxiety-provoking thing after another.”
It’s not just a lack of in-person contact that’s made healing difficult. The economy, slowed by shutdowns nationwide, is complicating plans to potentially sell the Walters’ family home in the Metzger neighborhood, which comes with a considerable mortgage. Eric can pay it for now, but not for the long term.
Nikki’s job provided the family with steady income, while Eric, a poet and musician, won’t be able to earn income performing for audiences for the foreseeable future. Before Nikki’s death, he took time away from his projects to focus on caring for her.
“I really don’t know how I’m going to figure out my work,” he said.
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Eric is not alone. He’s coping with personal loss against a backdrop of thousands of tragedies nationwide.
The U.S. recently passed the threshold of 100,000 coronavirus-related deaths. And in Oregon, preliminary data show the number of weekly deaths has surpassed five-year averages in 2020 since mid-March.
Holly Pruett, an life-cycle celebrant who is close to the Walter family, said COVID-19 could be changing the landscape of death and grief as the U.S. knows it. She said that making plans around a death, including for an end-of-life celebration, can be soothing for those who are dying and for their survivors.
Pre-packaged responses to death will likely serve people less and less, she said, while flexible and adaptable responses are being utilized during the pandemic.
“The kind of flexibility and adaptations being called for are qualities that will probably serve us in the long run,” she said.
Pruett is no stranger to helping people adapt to death under different circumstances. As a celebrant, she works with people to create flexible celebrations. She once worked with a woman to commemorate the death of her mother 18 years after she had died. Her key message during the pandemic? It’s never too late to celebrate someone.
Catherine Beckett, a grief therapist who knows Pruett, agrees. Her own husband, Tom Beckett, died unexpectedly on Mother’s Day weekend of causes unrelated to COVID-19. She decided not to hold a virtual funeral or memorial.
“I would rather wait a year or more if needed, just because of who Tom was. And, the size of his community that he touched. But we have looked to other venues to connect virtually in the meantime,” Beckett said.
Friends and family leave photos, trinkets and flowers on the porch for her family to place on an altar for Tom inside their home. On Facebook, a memorial page provides a seemingly endless scroll of emotional and loving memories surrounding Tom from friends and former students.
“Feeling the intensity of the memories and loving tributes being posted by his former students and friends is both beautiful and painful, I can only take it in a little bit at a time. It’s like looking at the sun,” Catherine wrote on the page recently.
But, she said, none of that is the same as being able to connect with people in person.
“And I think that’s particularly hard for my 15-year-old son. To not have in-person access to peer support right now is very difficult,” she said.
“It’s such an intimate experience, this end-of-life time. For the patients and families. And to still provide our care in a meaningful way can be challenging."
And even if Multnomah County begins reopening soon, in-person services like that might not be available in Portland for some time. That’s what Renee Dupre suspects. She’s a clinical hospice supervisor at Housecall Providers, an organization that provides at-home care to people in the Portland metropolitan area.
Before the pandemic, social workers, nurses, chaplains and others working through Housecall Providers once racked up around 400 home visits a week in the area, providing hospice care to people in the final phase of terminal illness.
Now? Dupre estimates the organization is making maybe 50 hospice care visits a week.
Instead, the organization put a new telehealth program into rapid action to check on patients. Initially, the organization had trouble obtaining enough personal protective equipment for home visits, but at this point, Dupre said, it’s more about keeping everyone safe, which comes at an undeniable cost.
“It’s such an intimate experience, this end-of-life time. For the patients and families. And to still provide our care in a meaningful way can be challenging,” she said. “Especially the psychosocial and spiritual care really is dependent on physical presence.”
Because many patients served by Housecall Providers are in adult foster care homes, Dupre said, the precautions taken to guard against potentially spreading the novel coronavirus are high.
Family members are facing unimagined barriers to partaking in end-of-life care for loved ones. There are adult children who haven’t seen their dying parents in months. Family members who lack personal transportation may fear a trip on public transportation to see mom or dad because it could increase coronavirus transmission. And then there’s the pain associated with trying to explain to a person who’s dying why their relatives are wearing personal protective equipment — or why they are visiting digitally rather than in person.
But there’s an incidental silver lining that comes with the move to digital, said bereavement coordinator Rondi Hunt, who provides resources and support to families after a patient dies in hospice.
“I'm doing a lot more over the phone,” she said, “and probably having a lot more phone contact with folks because they are at home and people are feeling very isolated and not getting much interaction otherwise. I’m actually talking to people probably more than I did before.”
Three months have passed since the governor issued her stay-home order, and as the last county in Oregon works to enter phase one of reopening, Eric Walter is still riding the unwelcome rollercoaster of grief. He knows it will be a topsy-turvy ride, pandemic or not.
But more recently, he’s started inviting friends into the family’s home to light incense and candles at the altar of Nikki’s blue and gold urn — colors reminiscent of a painting she was working on close to the time of her death.
To have the energy of other people in the space where so much grieving has occurred in isolation seems to provide a slight relief.
“That was missing. It was hard not to have that,” Eric said.
Email Street Roots Staff Reporter Jessica Pollard at jessica@streetroots.org . Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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