Fiana Tulip lost her mother to COVID-19 on the Fourth of July. Like so many others, she was not able to see her or say goodbye.
For Tulip, 41, that was the only beginning of an avalanche of personal and financial loss and hardship brought on by a pandemic that has now claimed the lives of nearly half a million people in the United States alone. The heavy emotional toll was just too much to process, short-circuiting her ability to grieve.
"There's sometimes situations where people do have to delay their grief, there isn't enough space, emotionally, to do it," Sonya Lott, a psychologist who specializes in prolonged grief, said.