2020 has been a year marked by loss across the world and in D.C. More than 700 D.C. residents have lost their lives during the pandemic. Unemployment filings have spiked. Businesses have shuttered. People have moved out. 

D.C. residents that spoke to DCist describe a shared sense of mourning over the year as a whole. Many of them spoke not just of one loss, but multiple throughout the year, resulting in a compounding sense of grief. One person told us about losing not only her job, but her entire career. Another says different expectations around COVID safety resulted in the loss of a friendship. Others lost experiences, income, health insurance, and loved ones.

A local clinic that treats grief tells DCist that the pandemic is itself a grief experience—one that is different for everyone, but intensely felt even by people who might consider themselves “lucky.” 

“We tell our clients we work with: the worst grief experience in the world is your own grief experience, because you’re experiencing it,” says Melissa Sellevaag, training director at the Wendt Center for Loss & Healing, which provides counseling services to grieving people as well as workshops on grief and loss to both grieving people and frontline workers. 

Stephanie Tulowetzke’s first loss this year was the most profound. Just days before the first COVID-19 case was recorded in the District, her mother, a veteran, died of a longtime illness. For three months after her mom’s death, Tulowetzke and her family could not lay her mom to rest due to wait times at Arlington National Cemetery (and their own hope that delaying longer might allow them to gather in person to grieve). 

“I grew up in Northern Virginia, so, like, having my mom buried in Arlington was going to be really nice once, like the world opens up,” she says.

A few months after her mother’s death, in May, Tulowetzke was also laid off. 

“My whole world changed this year,” Tulowetzke says. She describes herself as a typically cheerful person, but some days this year, she says she couldn’t see any bright side to things.

“There were times that I felt like so far from who I am,” she says. 

Those kinds of emotions are typical of grief, according to Sellevaag. People are experiencing “layers and layers of loss” this year, from the loss of life to losses in jobs or housing, she says. 

Many people who spoke to DCist said they felt that their particular losses weren’t as worthy of grief and attention, since they hadn’t lost family members to COVID-19. Sellevaag says this is common, and it’s because so many people are experiencing so many different types of loss. But she says the pandemic as a whole can be viewed in terms of grief. 

“When we start to name and frame COVID itself as a grief experience, people suddenly are like, that’s what I’m feeling, and now …I’m okay to feel what I’m feeling,” says  Sellevaag. 

Jenna Bernard, 37, also says she lost a few things this year: her job, her health insurance and, most jarringly, the entire industry where she’d built her career. Bernard has worked in D.C.’s hospitality industry for a decade, planning events for restaurants and clubs and recently working in event planning for Wolfgang Puck. But in March, as D.C.’s stay-at-home order went into effect, all of her events stopped and she was furloughed. A few months later, in May, Bernard  was laid off when The Source by Wolfgang Puck in Penn Quarter permanently closed. 

On top of her job, Bernard lost her health insurance—a major blow since she has chronic migraines—and had to get on COBRA, which is a form of transitional health insurance, to pay for her medications. “I now pay $700 a month for my insurance,” she says, adding this is more than half of her unemployment checks. 

But she’s also lost more: she doesn’t know what to do now. 

“I had a purpose, I had a calling. And I had something that I was really really good at. And that I love,” she says. “And I don’t know if it will ever come back.”

Bernard has leaned on a Facebook group with other hospitality workers in D.C. who lost their jobs this year, where members often talk about what they’re doing now: some, she says, are selling cars or insurance or putting degrees or skills in other areas to use. 

But Bernard, who also has a degree in international relations and politics, says she doesn’t want to pivot. Like many others in D.C., the hospitality industry was her career. 

“I got a job behind a bar to pay rent and I never left. Like I absolutely fell in love with it, and I think hospitality is so incredibly important. A good server, a good meal, can make or break your day,” she says.

Since losing her job, Bernard has been coping with anxiety medication, and crafting, particularly embroidery and cross-stitch. 

Sellevaag says that to cope with loss, it’s important to reframe the emotions you’re feeling not as “good” or “bad” emotions, but as comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. 

“When we have uncomfortable emotions, [we can] really identify ways that you can show compassion to yourself, and maybe tap into a support network that can show compassion to you as well,” she says. 

But Bernard knows that her coping mechanisms will not bring back the career that she’s mourning. 

“I don’t think I don’t think the events industry is going to bounce back at any point, at least not in D.C.,” she says. 

For some, losses this year have manifested in dangerous habits.

 Liz, a 23-year-old employee at an accounting firm who asked her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, was furloughed for May and June as other employees at her firm were laid off.  

As she struggled to come to terms with her new reality, Liz, who has a history of disordered eating and overexercising, says she fell back on those old coping mechanisms. 

“When bad news immediately hit, that was the first thing I thought of to do to cope,” she says. She eventually began making a routine for herself, including taking online classes, reading and doing yoga to cope more safely. 

Liz also described a loss in friendships. Over the summer, Liz says her roommate went on a trip to North Carolina. When she returned to D.C., Liz asked her to get a COVID-19 test, which her roommate refused. 

“I lost a lot of respect and faith,” Liz says. “For you not to respect, like, getting a test, for something life-threatening, made me lose a lot of respect.”

Others are grieving the year as a whole. Caroline Downing, 31, was sure 2020 was going to be her year after starting divorce proceedings with her husband last July.

On New Year’s eve of 2019, she says. “there’s a video of me walking down the hallway of my friend’s apartment building, and my friends behind me going, 2020 is Caroline winning!”

Instead, Downing says the pandemic has prolonged the finalization of her divorce. In the meantime, she’s moved back in with her parents in Laytonsville, Maryland, something she never thought she’d be doing at 31. It’s only about a 45-minute drive from D.C., but Downing says the separation from the city she loves during a crucial time in her life has still been a gut-punch. She finds herself grieving what 2020 could have been for her. 

“When it was announced that [Biden] won [the presidency] on that Saturday, I was home in Maryland,” she says. “I felt like my city was celebrating without me.” She adds she feels lucky to have her parents to lean on, but “my heart is still in D.C.”

She adds she likes to cope by mentally designing the apartment she will move into in Glover Park once her divorce is finalized, and planning her new single life. 

Building resilience, leaning on your support network, and sustaining yourself is what Sellevaag says the Wendt center has been guiding people through during the pandemic. There is hope on the way. The first vaccines were delivered to health care workers in D.C. on Monday, but there’s still a long road to recovery ahead. 

“How do you sustain yourself and this collective grief experience?” she asks. Part of it, she adds, is giving yourself permission to feel and leaning on a support network. 

“Grief doesn’t go away, right? We learn to live with grief, we learn to exist with it,” she says. 

Tulowetzke, still reeling from her mother’s death, has also been talking about building resilience with her therapist as well as leaning on her support network as she heads into the new year. This includes her dad who lives in Northern Virginia, whom she sees for physically distant drinks or dinner outside sometimes. She’s also gotten more into cooking and new music this year. She knows she isn’t the same person as she was before March, but through counseling and support, she is starting to feel more aligned with the optimistic, friendly person she was before. 

“This version of me—it makes sense, like, obviously I have been impacted and changed by the terrible things that have happened this year,” she says, “but I also still feel like myself again, which is really nice to come back to.”

This story has been updated to specify that Tulowetzke was laid off from her job.