What It’s Like to Write About COVID-19 While It’s Killing Your Mom

There’s a special kind of cognitive dissonance that comes with typing the words
“COVID-19 mortality” while your phone is buzzing with missed calls from the ICU.
On one screen, you’re polishing a paragraph about viral transmission and vaccine
uptake. On the other, your family group chat is exploding with, “Has anyone heard
from the nurse?” and “They just turned up her oxygen again.”

By now, more than 1.2 million people in the United States have died from COVID-19,
making it one of the deadliest disasters in the country’s history. It was the
third-leading cause of death in 2020 and remained a top killer for several years
before finally dropping out of the top 10 causes of death in 2024.
Those numbers are huge, abstract, and horrifying. But when one of those numbers
has your mother’s name attached, the pandemic stops being an event you cover and
turns into the story that is actively rewriting your life.

Writing about COVID-19 while it’s killing your mom means living in two timelines
at once: the professional one, full of deadlines and style guides, and the
personal one, full of fear, guilt, and the occasional badly timed joke because
if you don’t laugh, you’ll probably scream.

The Split-Screen Life of a COVID Writer

Journalists and health writers have described covering the pandemic while living
through it as a “split-screen existence”: one half of your brain in reporter
mode, the other drowning in grief and anxiety.
You’re interviewing epidemiologists about hospital capacity while mentally
listing the questions you forgot to ask your mom’s doctor. You’re editing a
paragraph about vaccine equity while wondering if your mom caught the virus
at her appointment, on the bus, or during that one quick stop in the grocery store.

The work itself doesn’t pause. COVID-19 has never politely stepped aside and
said, “Hey, your mom is in the ICU; I’ll slow down for a minute.” Instead, new
variants appear, guidance shifts, and data dashboards update on schedule, even
when your heart absolutely does not.

Press Releases, Case Counts, and Late-Night Phone Calls

On paper, your job is straightforward: explain what’s happening. Translate
case counts, hospitalizations, and death statistics into human language. Break
down complex research into something readers can understand. The CDC updates its
burden estimates weekly, tracking hospitalizations and deaths so public health
officials can plan.

In reality, you’re trying to interpret charts while watching the call timer on
your phone creep past 20 minutes because you’re on hold with the nurse’s station.
You hit mute, ask a source to repeat themselves, jot down a quote, then unmute
when you hear, “Hello? Is anyone still there?” from the hospital line.

You tell your editor you’ll have the story in an hour. You don’t mention that
you might have to pause to approve consent forms for experimental treatments,
or that you’re refreshing your inbox waiting for lab results that feel more
important than any headline you’ll ever write.

The Cruelty of Distance: Loving Someone You Can’t Visit

One of the defining cruelties of COVID-19 has been separation. In many hospitals,
family members were restricted or banned from visiting, especially during earlier
waves. Physicians have spoken about how painful it was to care for isolated
patients with no loved ones at the bedside, knowing those families were sitting
at home, waiting for updates from strangers in scrubs.

If your mom is one of those patients, you live on borrowed details: her oxygen
saturation, her blood pressure, whether she “seemed more comfortable today.”
You become fluent in numbers you never wanted to learn. You cling to adjectives
like “stable,” knowing that in ICU language, “stable” sometimes just means
“hasn’t gotten worse yet.”

What Video Calls Don’t Show

When the staff can manage it, they call you on a tablet or phone so you can see
her. The screen freezes, the audio cuts out, and somehow your mother still
apologizes for being “such a bother,” as if nearly dying of a global virus is
something she scheduled just to inconvenience you.

Families around the world have described the anguish of watching loved ones
deteriorate remotely, or losing them after they contracted COVID-19 in healthcare
settings where the risks weren’t clearly communicated.
When you’re also writing about those systemic failures, you feel them under your
skin. You quote experts on infection control while asking yourself, silently,
why the system couldn’t protect your mom.

Video calls don’t show the smell of hospital antiseptic that clings to your
memory, or the silence of her bedroom at home, where her slippers are still
neatly tucked under the bed, waiting for feet that won’t return.

Grief With a Deadline

Grief is messy and nonlinear. Journalism is not. Journalism wants a clear arc:
lede, nut graf, rising tension, quote from an expert, hopeful closing.
Grief wants to fling your laptop out the window, curl up on the floor, and eat
stale crackers in the dark while ignoring your email.

Caregivers and family members of COVID patients have reported high rates of
stress, anxiety, depression, and even PTSD symptoms. Studies of informal
caregivers in the United States found concerning levels of distress and
dysfunctional copingmore substance use, more disengagement, less active
problem-solving.
In other words: your brain is not exactly in Pulitzer shape.

And yet, the stories keep coming. A new booster. A long COVID study. Another
wave in another state. Your editor pings you: “Any chance we can get a quick
explainer on this by 5 p.m.?” You stare at the message, thinking, “Sure, as
long as my entire life doesn’t fall apart again before then.”

When “Objectivity” Feels Impossible

Writing about COVID while it’s killing your mom forces you to confront the myth
of pure objectivity. You can still be accurate, fair, and meticulous, but you
can’t pretend you’re untouched. When you type “death rate,” your fingers know
exactly what that phrase means. When you describe “vulnerable populations,”
you see your mother’s face.

You compensate by being even more careful. You double-check statistics. You
read primary sources. You call extra experts. You try to ensure that nothing
in your copy is shaped by wishful thinking or denial. You let your personal
experience inform your empathy, your questions, your storytellingbut not your
facts.

Dark Humor as a Life Raft

This is where the dark humor sneaks in, not because COVID is funny (it isn’t),
but because sometimes the only way to carry a pain this heavy is to wrap it in
a joke that’s slightly too sharp.

You start making tiny, private jokes with yourself:

• “I’ve become so good at tracking oxygen saturation, I should get continuing
  education credits.”
• “If I write one more ‘what you need to know about COVID right now’ article,
  the virus should at least put me on payroll.”
• “This is the worst side quest ever: ‘Level up in medical literacy by losing
  your mom!’”

None of these gags will ever make it into your published work, of course. But
they keep you from drowning in seriousness. Gallows humor is a common coping
mechanism among healthcare workers, journalists, and caregiversnot because
they’re callous, but because they’re constantly face-to-face with unbearable
realities and need some way, any way, to stay functional.

What Other Families Taught Me

When your mom is dying of COVID-19, you become a connoisseur of other people’s
stories. You read essays by adult children who lost their mothers to the virus
and who describe the surreal quiet after the funeral, the loneliness of grieving
in partial isolation, and the strange gratitude for a world that briefly slowed
down enough to allow them to mourn.

You learn about families whose loved ones died in nursing homes they weren’t
warned were already experiencing outbreaks.
You see your own fear reflected in their words: the rage at systems that failed,
the guilt over decisions made with incomplete information, the ache of not being
there at the end.

You read accounts from people who still live with long COVID years later,
whose lives have been permanently reshaped by the virus.
Their stories remind you that the pandemic is not just a series of waves; it’s
a permanent low tide in some people’s lives, pulling away careers, hobbies,
and energy they may never get back.

These narratives teach you how to write about your own situation with more
honesty. They give you permission to admit that you are not okay, that you are
both “professional explainer of COVID” and “person whose mom might not make it
to the next holiday.”

What I Wish I’d Known Earlier

If you’re writing about COVID-19 while someone you love is fighting it, there
are a few things I wish someone had told me:

1. Your Brain Is Doing the Best It Can

Stress and grief change how you think. Caregiver research has shown that
prolonged strain can lead to chronic anxiety, sleep problems, and impaired
concentration.
So if you reread the same paragraph five times before it makes sense, it’s not
because you’re suddenly bad at your job. It’s because your nervous system is
trying to process a five-alarm fire while you’re also asking it to meet a
deadline.

2. Boundaries Are Not Betrayal

It’s okay to tell your editor, “I need to log off for an hour when the doctor
calls.” It’s okay to decline an assignment about a specific aspect of COVID
that is too raw for you right nowsay, end-of-life care in nursing homes, or
the way families say goodbye over video calls.

You are not “unprofessional” for having a human limit. You are a person whose
bandwidth is being consumed by an emergency. The fact that you’re still showing
up to write at all is already remarkable.

3. You’re Allowed to Be Both Angry and Grateful

You might feel grateful for the nurses who hold your mom’s hand when you can’t,
and furious at the systems that left hospitals short-staffed and overwhelmed.
You might appreciate vaccines and treatments that have improved outcomes over
time, while still grieving that they weren’t widely available early enough for
people like your mom.

Those emotions can coexist. You don’t need to tidy them up into a clean moral
or a neat “lesson learned.” Sometimes the lesson is simply that life can be
unimaginably unfair, and we are all improvising our way through it.

Learning to Live With the Story

Eventuallymaybe weeks, maybe months after she’s goneyou will write your first
COVID article that doesn’t make you cry. You’ll notice it only afterward. You’ll
hit “send,” sit back, and realize the tears didn’t come this time.

That doesn’t mean you’re “over it.” Grief after a pandemic loss often lingers
in complicated ways, especially when the world around you is loudly declaring
that “COVID is over now.”
But some sharp edges soften. The story becomes less like an open wound and more
like a scar you trace with your thumb when you’re alone.

You’ll always know what it’s like to write about COVID-19 while it was killing
your mom. You’ll carry that knowledge into every sentence you craft about
public health, risk, and collective responsibility. When you see numbers on a
chart, you’ll remember the shape of her handwriting on a sticky note by the
phone, the sound of her voice saying, “Don’t worry about me, honey. Just do
your work.”

And you’ll keep doing the worknot because it protects you from pain, but because
telling the truth about what happened is one of the few things that still feels
solid under your feet.

Additional Reflections From the Front Lines of Grief and Reporting

Here’s the part that usually gets edited out of polished pandemic narratives:
the deeply unglamorous, slightly ridiculous details that live alongside the
heartbreak.

Like the way you start structuring your day around two types of briefings:
the official ones, where government agencies outline case trends and vaccination
campaigns, and the unofficial ones, where the night nurse calls and begins with,
“Okay, let me walk you through how she did today.” You jot down both in the same
notebook. One page has phrases like “immune escape” and “updated guidance.”
The next has “finally slept a few hours without the mask” and “laughed at a bad
joke about hospital food.”

Or how your search history becomes a chaotic mix of “CDC hospitalization data,”
“how to explain high-flow oxygen to family,” and “is it normal to forget what day
it is when you’re caregiving and working full-time.” Honestly, that last one
should probably be in the DSM just labeled Pandemic Brain.

There are the tiny decisions you agonize over that no one warns you about:
Should you take the big assignment that might bring in enough money to cover
a few more months of her prescriptions, even though it means being less available
the week her condition could turn? Should you tell your editor the real reason
you missed a call, or just blame “bad Wi-Fi” instead of “I was sobbing in my
car in the hospital parking lot”?

You also notice how the professional and personal bleed into each other in
surprising, sometimes healing ways. Because you live and breathe COVID research,
you’re able to ask your mom’s doctors targeted questions. You know what that
new antiviral does and why they’re watching her kidney function. When a doctor
explains something vaguely, you politely ask for specifics, because you’ve read
the study they’re referencing. Your work becomes a small shield, even if it
can’t stop the worst from happening.

After she’s gone, the shield cracksbut it doesn’t disappear. You find yourself
drawn to stories that humanize the pandemic’s long tail: caregivers rebuilding
their lives, communities honoring those they lost, patients navigating long
COVID and trying to return to something like normal.
You approach these interviews differently now. You ask gentler questions. You
leave longer silences. You understand the weird impulse to apologize for crying
during a Zoom call.

You also, slowly, reclaim small pockets of joy that have nothing to do with
COVID at all. You bake the cake your mom used to make on your birthday, even
though you ruin the frosting the first time. You rewatch the show you two loved,
and you’re startled to realize you can laugh without feeling disloyal.

The pandemic took your mother, but it didn’t take every version of you. One
version is a grieving child. Another is a tired professional. Another is the
person who still loves dumb memes, weirdly specific snacks, and group chats
that spiral into chaos over nothing. You are allowed to be all of them. In fact,
being all of them might be the only way to keep going.

Writing about COVID-19 while it was killing your mom will always be one of the
hardest things you ever did. But in that impossible overlapbetween journalist
and daughter, between storyteller and survivoryou discover something quiet and
stubborn: a commitment to honoring her, and everyone like her, by refusing to
let their stories vanish into a statistic.