MANILA— An early morning text message sent Emmy rushing to her younger brother’s room upstairs in Quezon City in March. Their mother, intubated just hours earlier, had lost her battle with COVID-19 after a week.

Like thousands of others who succumbed to the new coronavirus, she died alone, attached to a machine in an intensive care unit away from home, watched over by unfamiliar faces behind hazmat suits.

Grief is ordinarily shared in rituals of tight embraces and physical presence.

But Emmy knew these were extraordinary times, with the world struggling to contain a virus that has infected more than a million people and killed at least 50,000 of them as of Friday.

• DOH announces 385 new COVID-19 cases; total breaches 3,000

Here, the fear of dying alone becomes a reality with the virus keeping families away from patients in isolation as a strict precaution.

Emmy’s mother had to be moved swiftly from the hospital after her passing, then brought straight to the crematorium following the government’s strict protocol.

Instead of a wake, images of the deceased just before her body was wheeled into a pre-heated chamber were live-streamed to a Facebook group of close family members.

That was the last time she saw her mother.

“There was no other choice, she really had to be alone,” Emmy conceded, recalling that she and her brother even had to keep a 1-meter distance between them as they wept during home quarantine following news of their mom’s passing.

“It’s one of the hardest things na nangyari sa ‘min. Alam mo yun? Kahit umiiyak sya, hindi mo s’ya ma-comfort.”

[It’s one of the hardest things that happened to my family. He was crying but I couldn’t even comfort him.]

ABS-CBN News is withholding her real name upon her request out of respect for her family’s privacy.

‘LIKE SHE’S JUST ON QUARANTINE’

More than 2 weeks since her mother’s passing, Emmy is still struggling through a process of grieving made even more difficult by the lack of physical interaction between them throughout the ordeal.

“Parang hindi mo maramdaman na wala na siya kasi wala ka ring ibang taong nakikita e,” said Emmy, who’s staying with her brother in Quezon City during the Luzon-wide lockdown.

[You can’t seem to feel her absence because I hardly see other people.]

“Parang naka-quarantine lang din siya somewhere. Parang ganun 'yung feeling.”

[It’s like she is also just under quarantine somewhere. Such is the feeling.]

Not only has the fast-spreading new coronavirus reconfigured border securities and community behavior, it has also affected the way people grieve.

“It’s a very new and frightening situation,” Dr. Lourdes Carandang, a Manila-based specialist in family psychology, said of COVID-19 patients dying alone.

“It’s difficult to deal with because this has never happened before.”

Which is why rituals such as wakes and funerals are important, she said, because of their “therapeutic” value for those who were left behind.

• READ: Grieving without goodbyes: Families turn to faith to mourn loved ones who died during Luzon lockdown

HEALING

Gatherings allow relatives and friends to commiserate with families over their loss, helping them through the different stages of grief, she said.

“But what we’re seeing now is the loss of ritual” because people are confined to their homes, she told ABS-CBN News.

“We are being deprived of a healing and therapeutic ritual, which is the wake.”

On their own, surviving family members may gather at home, observing physical distance still, and express individual feelings about a departed loved one, she said.

“It’s important that each of them speak,” she said. “You can’t move on without going through the pain.”

The urn containing the ashes of Emmy’s mother arrived a few days ago. Once the lockdown is lifted and the COVID-19 crisis is over, her family plans to hold not a belated funeral, but a “celebration of her life.”