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As Families Grieve, Grandparents Step Up [nytimes.com]

 

By Paula Span, Photographs by Todd Heisler, The New York Times, April 12, 2022

This is not what Ida Adams thought life would be like at 62.

She had planned to continue working as a housekeeper at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore until she turned 65. After retiring, she and her husband, Andre, also 62, thought they might travel a little — “get up and go whenever we felt like it.”

She didn’t expect to be hustling a seventh-grader off to school each weekday. But in January 2021, Ms. Adams’s daughter, Kimya Lomax, died of Covid-19 at 43 after three weeks alone in a hospital with no visitors permitted. She left behind a young daughter.

Suddenly the girl, Kimiya, now 13, was accompanying her grandmother to a funeral home to help select a white coffin. “I wanted her to have a say in her mother’s homegoing,” Ms. Adams said.

In December, a coalition called the Covid Collaborative estimated that about 167,000 American children like Kimiya had lost a parent or primary caregiver to the pandemic, with much higher rates among communities of color. More recently, researchers at Imperial College London put the number of children who have lost one or both parents at nearly 200,000.

Grandparents have always been the first line of defense in the wake of such tragedies. The nonprofit Generations United reports that prepandemic, 2.6 million American children already lived in “grandfamilies,” raised by relatives for reasons ranging from military deployment and incarceration to deaths from substance abuse, other illnesses or accidents. Many more grandparents provide other kinds of support — child care, transportation, financial help — when a parent dies.

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