A20 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022
it flooded.
As t hey figured o ut how to resist eviction, the
family decided they’d be better off living else-
where. B ut without the Medicare c hecks Faree-
da got for caring for her mother, money was
tight.
“Losing a financial contributor is a huge
thing,” Bianca said. “People take advantage
when you are younger and losing a parent.
You’re in a vulnerable situation.” Watching her
relatives die has corroded her t rust — in family,
employers, the health system. Although she’s
fully vaccinated, Bianca said she understands
the mistrust that makes others hesitant to get
the shot.
Her employer at a financial services firm
gave her bereavement leave but then asked her
to work in person. When some customers
resisted putting on a mask, calling the practice
“ridiculous,” Bianca told them, “My mother
died of covid,” and sometimes they would
actually cry, and she would feel responsible.
She’s expected to “be resilient” as a grieving
woman of color in America, Bianca said.
Her job felt untenable, but when she inter-
viewed for another and mentioned her moth-
er’s death, she heard from a friend that they’d
decided a gainst hiring her b ecause, s he s aid, “it
sounds like I have a lot going on.”
As life around her edges back to normal, she
and her brother feel robbed of the chance to
grieve their mother’s passing. Her loss has
barely been acknowledged, by her community
and by a country that she says seems eager to
forget. Bianca started working with Marked by
Covid, a n organization t hat has p ushed f or acts
of remembrance such a s a moment of s ilence a t
the Super Bowl and an annual Covid Memorial
Day — memorials that have not happened.
The silence eats at Bianca. She and her
brother created a GoFundMe page for their
mother and people generously donated
$11,000, b ut beyond t he m oney, t here’s b een t oo
much silence.
“In our culture, death is talked about all the
time,” she said. “We actually did 40 days of
grieving, and we did a little ceremony after
that. Why is it such an American thing to be so
traumatized by death and grief, as if it’s not
something normal?”W
hen covid stole Fareeda Beharry
from their lives, her family lost not
only their matriarch and primary
breadwinner but also their anchor.
Beharry, a Guyanese immigrant who died in
New York City in May 2020, in the first huge
surge of the virus’s devastation, was the mother
who handed out apples to children on the
street, organized birthday and h oliday c elebra-
tions for her extended family, made mac and
cheese for her kids because she thought it was
quintessentially American, and held t he family
together when things got tough.
Covid had already hit the Beharry clan hard
when Fareeda fell ill. In l ate March, as the virus
spread through the city, overwhelming its hos-
pitals, Fareeda’s mother caught the virus and
died. So did one of Fareeda’s brothers. Then
Fareeda started feeling unwell.
The path of contagion was never confirmed,
but Fareeda’s adult children suspect that the
wife of one of Fareeda’s brothers, a health
worker who lived in an apartment one floor
below Fareeda’s place in Queens, brought the
virus home with her from her job at Elmhurst
Hospital.
On April 11, Fareeda was taken to the hospi-
tal. After weeks on a ventilator, she d ied on May
28, d ays after suffering a pulmonary embolism.
She was 60 years old.
Almost immediately, her family frayed. To
this day, friction among the relatives persists
over how Fareeda caught the virus, according to
her children. Bianca, 32, and Ramesh, 33, said
they no longer speak to their aunt and uncle and
have never hashed out what happened when the
virus swept through their family.
Everyone remains haunted by what might
have been done differently, Ramesh said. He
knows his mother would want her children to
forgive their relatives, but Ramesh has no
desire to reconnect.
“I just feel so low-energy about it now,” he
said. “It’s gone past from anger to just, not
apathy, but just like without her, I don’t see, I
don’t f eel this [sense of ] family. It w as r eally her
making it come together.”
The family gatherings that Fareeda orga-
nized don’t take place anymore.
Over the past two years, Fareeda’s absence
has loomed over everything the family has
gone through. Their landlord tried to force
Bianca and her father out of their apartment,
even though they had a lease and the city had
placed a m oratorium on e victing tenants, B ian-
ca said. Then pipes burst in the apartment and
A frayed family
BIANCA BEHARRYBIANCA BEHARRYELIAS WILLIAMS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)Bianca and Ramesh Beharry, top, lost
their mother, Fareeda Beharry, by
herself at bottom left and with her
husband at bottom right, to covid.Build With
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