Tim Steller's opinion: Those we lost in pandemic times deserve public recognition

It was one of the cruel twists of the COVID-19 era:

The virus caused so many painful losses, but public-health restrictions kept loved ones from giving the dead their due at funerals or memorial services.

Even in the best of times, some people die alone and unnoticed. But that phenomenon became its own epidemic of unacknowledged loss last year.

That’s changing, but we have so much catching up to do.

Gradually, especially in this traditional month of recognizing our ancestors and the deceased, many family members of those who died in the dark days from roughly March 2020 to March 2021 are finding ways to celebrate the lives of lost loved ones.

This Saturday, for example, Richard Elías’ family is holding a celebration of life for Elías, the Pima County supervisor who died unexpectedly in March 2020. It’s from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 6 at Mission Garden, 946 W. Mission Lane.

This is the second celebration of Elías’ life, but the first one was virtual. Not exactly the real thing.

During much of 2020, many Catholic churches limited attendance at funerals to five to 10 people. Even for those who had funerals, many did not have real gatherings of extended family, friends and acquaintances.

This has all made it harder to get past the pandemic, as Tara Krebbs, of the group Marked by Covid, explained to me.

“What they’re seeing from a lot of people is because there’s a lack of a service and a lack of being able to grieve together, they’re having a hard time moving past it and accepting the death in general,” she said.

Phoebe Chalk-Wadsworth's mother, Anna Marie Chalk, died in April 2020, 18 months ago, but not of COVID-19. They were able to have a small funeral but nothing that would bring together all the friends, family, coworkers and student who knew her during her career at the University of Arizona. 

Since then, it's been hard for Chalk-Wadsworth to run into people who knew her mother one by one. 

"For the family members, every time you see somebody new, it brings up the emotion," she said. 

Now the family is having a memorial service at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Jim Click Hall of Champions on the UA campus. That should allow everyone to share the catharsis of gathering, grieving and sharing stories.

Even with all the people who are pulling together a celebration, there remain many others who haven’t yet and perhaps never will.

I spoke with Carol Brown, a Tucsonan whose father Richard Brown died of COVID-19 in July 2020. The whole period of his death was tough, culminating in her entering Tucson Medical Center with COVID-19 two days after his passing.

The institutions involved treated the transactions like a biohazard exercise.

“His body was picked up at the hospital by the crematory. And the ashes were delivered to the house sight unseen,” she said of her sister Linda Brown’s house.

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“There was an arrangement to put it in a box,” she said. Her sister “got the urn out of the box, took it to the church and left it on a cart. Again, everything was done with texts and phone calls.”

“It was extremely clinical. Everyone was scared to death.”

Carol Brown and her two sisters finally were able to get together in June at the house in Paradise Valley that had belonged to their grandparents.

“We worked on his house and talked about my parents the whole time. That was hard, very hard,” she said.

She’s not sure if they’ll ever have a real funeral now. The family is dispersed, many of the members on the East Coast and in Canada, and her father’s friends are mostly gone.

“I would like to have something, but it’s kind of like, ‘What would we do?’ There’s nobody who at this point would come. That’s sad, to me.”

Diane Castro is facing a similar problem.

Her mother, Gloria Andrade, died in the early weeks of the pandemic, and Castro herself ended up hospitalized, intubated and unconscious for 17 days. My colleague Carmen Duarte wrote about the experience in a Star article published in July 2020.

Castro’s brother handled their mother’s burial while Castro was hospitalized. Since then, they’ve thought several times of holding a service, but each time a new variant flares up or other factors make it impossible.

Castro’s solace is that the newspaper story served as the sort of commemoration that so many people have lacked in these months.

Some day, they’ll have their proper funeral, though.

“We’ll have a rosary and a Mass,” she said. “We’ll still go to the cemetery. We’ll have a gathering to go and honor mom. Tell all her stories.”

Andrade is buried at Holy Hope Cemetery, which I happened to visit Tuesday afternoon. Families were coming and going, visiting their loved-ones’ graves on All Souls Day, El Día de Los Muertos. It was, as always, a fulfilling scene of commemoration. People with lawn chairs and tables, sitting around graves, sharing memories and playing music.

But not everybody gets that remembrance or is part of that tradition.

It’s fortunate that in Tucson we have another, related civic tradition in the All Souls Procession, which happens this Sunday, Nov. 7. Last year’s procession didn’t happen at all due to COVID-19 restrictions and risks. This year it will have a special meaning, perhaps more solemn than ever.

I’ve never been a big participant in the procession, but this year it feels like the right thing to do, to remember those we know who haven’t been recognized well enough. And to think about those we don’t know at all who passed from this Earth during that difficult year.

They deserve to be noticed and remembered.