As U.S. Deaths Approach 300,000, Obituaries Force Reckoning with COVID

CHICAGO — When Kim Miller sat down in her Illinois house to compose her husband’s obituary, she could not hold back.

Not about the coronavirus that had left Scott, her fit, healthy spouse who loved to swim, golf and putter in the garden, gasping for breath and unable to move his limbs as he stood at the kitchen counter. Not about what had killed him swiftly and cruelly in only a few days.

“This disease is real, it is serious and it is deadly,” she wrote in his obituary. “Wear the mask, socially distance, if not for yourself then for others who may lose a loved one to the disease.”

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“I couldn’t just write that he lived and died and had two children,” said Kim Miller, a retired college professor, who wept as she spoke of her husband of 25 years. “I wanted people to read this and really read this.”

By Sunday, deaths from the coronavirus were approaching 300,000 in the United States, a toll comparable to losing the entire population of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. Reports of new deaths have more than doubled in the last month to an average of nearly 2,400 each day, more than any other point in the pandemic. The deaths have been announced in the traditional fashion, in obituaries and notices on websites and in newspapers that have followed the same format for decades, noting birthplaces, family members, jobs and passions.

But in recent months, as the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States grows steadily higher, families who have lost relatives to the disease are writing the pandemic more deeply into the death notices they submit to funeral homes and the materials they share with newspapers’ obituary writers. They are crafting pleas for mask wearing, rebuking those who believe the virus is a hoax and describing, in blunt detail, the loneliness and physical suffering that the coronavirus inflicted on the dying.

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