Hundreds of thousands of families spend holidays with an empty seat at the table

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It did not have to be this way.





Hundreds of thousands of families spend holidays with an empty seat at the table


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/holiday-celebrations-covid-mourning/2020/12/21/d6582fac-40d1-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html




Hundreds of thousands of families in the United States who lost loved ones to covid-19 are spending their first winter holidays with an empty seat at the table. (Remko de Waal/ANP/AFP)





Dec. 22, 2020 at 5:00 a.m. CST

December used to be Haoua and Joseph Diatta’s favorite month. Her birthday is Christmas Eve, their wedding anniversary is Dec. 29 and their daughter was born Jan. 1.

All year, they looked forward to celebrating Christmas and Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, together, proud to be an interfaith couple.

But Haoua, 67, last saw her husband from an ambulance window April 1. She can still picture him, his gentle face and wide smile, standing in front of their D.C. house before running to his car and trailing her to the hospital. She recovered from covid-19 after a month in the hospital. The 71-year-old career diplomat who had shown her the world did not.

They were supposed to celebrate 45 years of marriage this winter with a big family dinner on Christmas Eve. Now Haoua will spend the holidays with just one of her four children.
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“Every time I think about spending the holiday apart from my other kids, I get tears in my eyes,” she said. “But I don’t want to give any chance, any chance, for covid to come back into my life.”

To get through the month, Haoua said she will focus on writing a book about her late husband’s life.

Hundreds of thousands of families in the United States who lost loved ones to covid-19 are spending their first winter holidays with an empty seat at the table. They are figuring out whether to hang lights, if they should continue old traditions and how to stomach the holiday cards of smiling families when the pandemic has shattered their own. And through it all, they are trapped at home, desperate to mourn with relatives but acutely aware of the risks of coming together.

Faces of the dead: Remembering Americans who have died of coronavirus

The holiday season has also shed light on how the pandemic has upended institutions meant to provide solace during times of grief. Counseling sessions and support groups are almost all virtual. Places of worship, which can provide comfort during winter holidays, have proved vulnerable to coronavirus outbreaks.
Choranda Johnson and her dad, Kevin Taylor, after singing together at church December 2019. (Courtesy of Choranda Johnson)

Choranda Johnson, a 39-year-old veteran in Delaware, begged her dad not to return to church in the summer. But Kevin Taylor trusted his pastors, and they decided to reopen for in-person services in the late spring.
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After months of strict quarantine, where Taylor and Johnson saw each other only for masked walks, Taylor returned to the pews with hundreds of others. Days after, he woke up with sniffles and a runny nose. About a month later, as hundreds of other parishioners lined up for coronavirus testing and the state forced the church to temporarily shutter, the 63-year-old Air Force veteran was dead.

Now less than a week away from her first Christmas without her dad, Johnson has struggled to embrace the holiday spirit.

“I don’t feel like celebrating anything,” she said. “I want to scream most days.”

Johnson said her dad, a man who always seemed to be smiling, would have wanted her to enjoy the holiday with her family. But her fear of catching and spreading the coronavirus has further complicated plans for a holiday already sullied by grief. After days of back-and-forth, she decided to skip seeing her siblings and her mom, who is suddenly alone in the house she shared with her husband for 43 years.

“None of us want to experience the kind of hell that we all went through again,” Johnson said, reflecting on the “weeks of limbo” when she and the rest of her family waited to see if anyone else would fall ill...............................................................................