COVID-19 has killed more than 621,000 people in America so far. It has also robbed us of our ability to grieve together. Grief experts haven’t really encountered this phenomenon—this delayed group mourning—before. But lots of people have spent some part of the past year and a half like I have, fumbling their way through loss on their own.

Funerals and similar traditions exist to provide assurance and acknowledgment to loved ones; those ceremonies are delayed, sometimes indefinitely, when verification of death is impossible. Families of missing soldiers or kidnapped children tend to have a harder time with grief because their losses are wrapped in uncertainty. “If we don’t have evidence of some sort, somehow, cognitively, it’s difficult for us to realize they actually have died,” Pauline Boss, a family therapist and an author who studies these sorts of ambiguous losses, told me. Ambiguous loss applies in the case of COVID-19 too, Boss said. Those taken by the disease are gone, their deaths verified. But many of the people they’ve left behind are nevertheless unable to mark their losses with the usual traditions. The virus has disrupted our oldest rituals.

Some people have not been especially bothered by this disruption; perhaps they found relief grieving privately, and without having to host a stuffy luncheon or prepare remarks. But for many people who have lost a friend or a relative during the pandemic, the experience has been disorienting. “The last 18 months have been a time of unreality. All the physical touchstones have disappeared or been altered,” Megan Devine, a psychotherapist and the author of the book It’s OK That You’re Not OK, told me. Funerals bring a kind of reality to the experience of death that some people need.