Bea Lantaff, 17, a Mariemont (Ohio) High School senior, joined us for an eight-week, 2023 summer workshop at The Barn. This is her story.

Covid.
When I hear the word, I hear her voice.

I smell the hand soap I used at the time she passed.

I taste those cherry- flavored Sweetart ropes from all the six-hour car rides from Cincinnati to Evansville, Ind.

Covid had its impact on many. But it didn’t just impact me. It hit me like a brick wall.

I remember looking at the news the day before my Grandma died of Covid.

The day before lockdown, I had just come from a cheer event and went to LaRosa’s pizza place down the street from Starbucks. The news said there were only 16 cases in Ohio. But something was up because the next day, as the last bell of eighth grade rang, kids were screaming with excitement about getting two weeks off.

Those two weeks turned into two years that rocked my world and still is having aftershocks.

When freshman year came, I had the option to go online all the way or in person. There were no vaccines out for 14 year olds yet, so I stayed online all year with no human interaction.

Now I am going into my senior year and I still feel like a middle schooler. I still write 2020 on assignments and forget I’m not 13.

People see the Covid death rates as a statistic. But losing my Grandma makes statistics seem irrelevant.

She had the biggest impact on my life so far, as I was closer to her than anyone else.

Her death also thrust me into a role I never could have anticipated, as I was the one who sometimes helped my devastated family navigate the aftermath of Grandma’s death.

They could not handle reading the unofficial will she left behind, really a little book where she wrote stories about her life and told us how to dress her for her funeral, things like that. As I read the little book aloud in the car to my family, I remember it felt as if the car were shrinking, somehow morphing into the small casket we had picked out.

Still, there was an upside. Those in my family still have not read the little book–they are too sad–so I’m glad I did.

Otherwise, we never would know that she liked poetry and that she and I share the same favorite flowers, white tulips.