Society is Failing a Generation of Grieving Children

COVID has created millions of orphans, as well as children and teenagers who lost at least one parent or guardian. Yet they’re expected to just continue going to school like nothing is happening.

Content Warning: this entire piece is about death of immediate family. Specifically, losing a parent at a young age. If this topic upsets you, you might want to sit this one out or proceed with caution.

It’s safe to say that the pandemic has brought out the absolute worst in people.

You’ve likely noticed just how much feudalistic, individualistic rot America has fomented over your lifetime. Those on the political left have always known, but the animosity is beyond overt as we enter the third year of this hell. Even if you’ve always been one of the people Tony Soprano dubbed a “happy wanderer” and considered yourself a good-hearted liberal, you’re likely over the shock by now of seeing just how callous and individualistic many of your countrymen are.

It’s just unavoidably in our faces, not much unlike the George Romero-esque spectacle of unmasked hordes spewing virus loads onto helpless service workers as they try to force their way into a takeout-only Applebee’s when we still took this goddamn plague seriously.

I actually had this piece sitting in my drafts since August 2021, making it five months until the time of publishing. This was partly due to the fracas of my then-upcoming cross-country move, but also because this topic is one that dredges up several unpleasant memories. Just so you know, I only re-traumatized myself to stridently say something that needs to be said: we as a nation are FAILING these kids. All of society is going to suffer for it.

Especially since it pains me to state that between the time of the first draft and publishing, this situation has only grown even worse.

Young people are defending their lives because the adults in charge have horribly failed them, and are well aware they’re being sent to their own slaughter.

Students went from marching for their lives against gun violence to walking out of schools that are not equipped to stop the spread of COVID.

To even say that these kids are being failed is an understatement. The simple act of wearing a piece of cloth over your face to stop shedding virus everywhere? A student’s concern and pain from losing a loved one to COVID was met with mocking by the school board.

If it wasn’t clear to you before how much America hates children, it SHOULD be clear to you now. Children are treated like having expensive luxury pets. Like property, rather than beings with agency who will become adults. When we have that mindset as a society, it’s how we get policies that prioritize punishing single mothers instead of ensuring children’s well-being.

The concept of children is romanticized. Actual children are being sent to their deaths so their parents can be at work, keeping that capitalist machine churning.

Treating children as simply a lifestyle choice, an individual problem to be solved and responsibility to shoulder, is why it’s this far into the 21st century and there’s no universal childcare in the US.

But now I must get to the real crux of this essay, and why witnessing this nation fail millions of children speaks to me on a personal level. It’s because I’ve been through the loss of a parent while a minor, and am aghast at what has been unfolding.

We are seeing millions of young people grieving parents, siblings, friends, teachers and classmates, and given less than zero support in this worldwide ongoing trauma. The National Institute of Health estimated that 140,000 minor children lost a parent or primary caregiver to COVID as of June 2021, NPR updated this estimate to 175,000 in October 2021.

I’m not a statistician, but I’m going to wager that this number is much higher given that both PCR and home tests were impossible for many people to safely receive in 2020, and the Biden administration has completely shit the bed on testing infrastructure while we’re stuck learning the rest of the Greek alphabet. This number also doesn’t account for the deaths of parents and guardians caused by non-COVID health problems but had to cancel surgeries or were unable to receive emergency care due to staffing shortages and packed ICUs.

As the healthcare system collapses alongside the education system, we grow numb as we look at numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths juxtaposed to school attendance rates and COVID caseloads.

We hope for lower percentages, for thousands to become hundreds and to no longer have that back in the mind fear that you’ll get into a car accident and barely be on life support in a hospital parking lot because the stats say there’s no room.

We want to see our friends, go on dates again, and not do risk calculus on going out to dinner. We just want this to be over.

But behind all those numbers we see on the news and social media every day are children who’ve lost one or both parents and have not yet come to terms with grief, guilt, and the massive toll such a loss will take.

When my mother died in 2000, I was met by a very different reaction than the one we’re seeing today.

At the age of 15, my mother died from health issues she’d been experiencing that year which seemed minor at first until she collapsed one day from a pulmonary embolism that had come to a head.

EMTs brought her to the hospital, but the prognosis looked good. Then four days later, her heart stopped. She’d only just turned 52.

There’s a lot I could say about my mother’s death that I don’t have the room for here. The short version is that she was abusive, but it’s still a hard thing for a 15-year-old to take. I also felt guilty — like I asked for her to die, when I just wanted her to get off my fucking back already.

Even when an abusive parent dies, there’s still actual grief involved. You grieve the parent-child relationship you perhaps could have had, you grieve the childhood you wanted but didn’t get, but in my case, I was overtaken by that guilt I mentioned. Now that she was dead, I had to live one of many lies. I was already used to compulsive lying as a coping strategy for the ceaseless abuse I’d endured all my life: what difference was one more?

Regardless of your relationship with a dead parent, it’s still a major loss that puts your life on hold. This is doubly so if you’re a minor.

And when mine died, it was a drastically different world.

My mother’s 52nd birthday was literally just about one year shy of 9/11, and the turn of the millennium was this push-pull between politics, economics, technology, and culture that culminated in embracing what we thought the future would like while desperately trying to keep things in the 20th century.

Want to know what hasn’t changed in the 22 years between the publishing of this piece and my mother’s death?

That women’s deaths are the only time we ever truly look at their potential as adults.

When it comes to the death of mothers in particular, it doesn’t matter if she was abusive, absent, too strict, or if she did a decent job but was just hobbled by American neofeudalism. She’s going to be elevated to sainthood because she’s a dead mother.

Dead mothers are the greatest thing to obstinate Americans: they’re the perfect chance to simper over a total stranger and project everything you ever wanted in a mother onto a dead woman. It’s easier to lament a dead mother not seeing her kids grow up than to provide any legislative and material support to her while she is living.

Dead fathers, and dead nonbinary parents and guardians, don’t get the same fanfare as a dead mother.

Because when you’re a minor child who loses a mother, holy shit is there fanfare. At least that was my experience.

So, because of the timing of when my mom died, I had a massive gap between her actual death and when I came back to school.

She died right before Thanksgiving, where we already had a small recess. Because of the tradition of shivah, I didn’t go to school for another week. As much as I loathed school, I ironically couldn’t wait to go back because I was tired of what seemed like trite conversations with my father while my sister showed almost no emotion about it despite flipping a shit over the tiniest things. All while I had to stare at the hole in the wall that was created when the cheap plaster gave way during my mother’s collapse. I didn’t want to be reminded of it.

When I did return, I was instantly summoned to the principal’s office where I was met by this tribunal of school officials. The principal and vice principal were there, as was the guidance counselor and district school psychologist.

Who just wanted me to talk about my fucking feelings. After I did that all week with our neighbors and my father’s co-workers.

It didn’t end at this tribunal, though. I was being watched, just like the constant surveillance these “caring” administrators traumatized me with as a young child.

Teachers constantly asked about my plight and pulled me aside after class. And I get it: for many of them, it’s their job to care and they know that a parent’s death is probably going to have an adverse impact on a student’s concentration and grades.

After a while, these gestures stopped. Homework was now expected to be turned in on time, being late for class got write-ups when they let it slide after the news, and the ineffective principal cared more about whether my clothes violated the dress code than anything that actually mattered.

Still, until I graduated high school, I was just that weird alternative girl WHO HAD A DEAD MOTHER. That’s what I was marked with by teachers and administrators.

And I get why they did this. School is usually the only place aside from home where a young person is apt to spend most of their time. A life shift that major puts youth at risk for things like depression, suicide, drug problems, and so on. Young people need both space to grieve and sort out their feelings, but also need support.

No matter how you cut it though, I wasn’t expected to immediately return to school and just turn in my busywork like nothing happened. Adults around me treated my mother’s death like the world stopped.

Let’s fast-forward to 2020, then present day where students are now walking out of classrooms that are just gigantic disease vectors.

We have thousands of young people whose parents died, and they are around the same age that I was. Except my mother died from an individual health problem and while I felt guilty as if I asked for it, I know I did not cause her death.

What about kids who have to be in school, and they’re going to spend their lives wondering if they killed their parents or other loved ones because of how quickly COVID spreads?

While pundits blather about how remote learning is supposedly so awful for students’ mental health, did they not stop to consider that watching their teachers and classmates die is also pretty damn traumatic?

They made me talk to the school psychologist, see the guidance counselor once a week, talk to teachers after class, and check in with an administrator once in a while after my mother died.

School districts’ response today to the thousands of students whose parents died is a shrug and “just go to class where the same thing that killed your parents is now even more contagious. By the way, you don’t even need a mask!”

Society owes these children.

They are owed a chance to actually build their potential and independence, and to have their basic needs met by virtue of being alive. (Big emphasis on that “being alive” part.)

They also need space to mourn, parse their grief, and in one of the most overlooked aspects of all this, receive proper support for their parents’ death care and final affairs. Take it from a former tax accountant, there’s 40 and 50-something adults who go weak in the knees over the stress of detangling their deceased parents’ estates.

How the fuck do you expect a grieving 16-year-old to handle that?

Not just in the actual unpacking of their grief, but also to not be swindled by a bad lawyer or accountant who may not have their best interests at heart? Especially if debt collectors come calling, or greedy family members who will pull a fast one with the dead parent’s assets?

WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT IN ALL OF THIS?

My heart is broken for this generation of children suffering incalculable grief and guilt, with the mere expectation of continuing this ongoing trauma in an attempt to stop the American trash empire from its inevitable collapse.