When my cousins in Houston told me last fall that doctors suggested bringing their father home from the hospital and beginning hospice care, I immediately tried to figure out a way to get there.

It would be a complicated and risky trip, though. COVID struck my aunt and uncle in Texas a week after my husband and I got the virus in Missouri.

My uncle -- Abbas taya, my father’s older brother -- is 84 with a history of asthma and respiratory illness, and has struggled with memory issues in recent years. When his blood oxygen level dropped into the 50s -- a normal oxygen saturation is between 95% and 100% -- my cousin called an ambulance.

COVID pneumonia had infiltrated his weakened lungs. Doctors put him on 100% high-flow oxygen. He was a small step away from needing a ventilator, and a half step from the intensive care unit. His prognosis looked bleak.

It’s hard to imagine Abbas taya so sick and frail. When we were growing up, he was the life of the party, exuding joie de vivre and wanting others to enjoy life as thoroughly as he did. The most charismatic person in any room, his energy drew people to him.

I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying alone in COVID isolation.

By the time he became critically ill, it had been nearly two weeks since my positive test. My husband was recovering at home with supplemental oxygen. The St. Louis County Health Department had released us from quarantine. Technically, I could have found a way to travel to Texas.

But it was unclear whether my uncle would be released from his quarantine, or if I had enough protective antibodies to avoid getting sick again. My parents urged me to stay put, as did one of my closest friends, a doctor who has treated COVID patients throughout the pandemic.

My heart ached to be closer to my uncle, but I knew they were right. I prayed for him from a distance and received daily updates from my cousins. His body was weak, but his will to live was still irrepressible.

Miraculously, his lungs began to clear. His improvement left his doctors dumbfounded. After nearly three weeks in the hospital, he was transferred to a rehab facility, where he stayed for another two weeks. The severity and length of his illness atrophied his muscles to the point where he could no longer walk or stand.

He came home needing full-time care for the most basic life functions, and his road to recovery has been rough. He ended up back in the hospital twice, both times with pneumonia.

With more than 30 million cases of COVID in America, there’s no telling how many Americans are suffering from long-term complications or have become permanently disabled from this virus. There’s no exact tally of these COVID “long haulers,” but it’s likely in the tens of thousands.

In normal times, I see my uncle and aunt twice a year when I go home to visit my family. With the pandemic, I hadn’t seen them in more than a year.

Separation is harder when you know a loved one is suffering.

When we finally visited for spring break in March, I was fully vaccinated, as were they. I was excited to see them again, but also preparing myself for a notable decline in my uncle’s health.

When we arrived, he was asleep in his reclining chair in the family room. I chatted with his health aide, who told me my uncle had been able to stand briefly using his walker recently, after months of being immobile. That’s encouraging.

I knew that after my visit, his aide would have to help him into a wheelchair and take him to his bed. The virus has fundamentally changed the quality of his twilight years.

Destruction even in the wake of survival.

When he woke up, he peered at me across the room and asked who I was.

“It’s me, Aisha,” I said, as I walked closer to him.

His face lit up with recognition. We both laughed with joy as I hugged him. We joked, recalled old memories and swapped COVID survivor stories.

With more people getting vaccinated, there will be a wave of these emotional reunions.

It was a moment I didn’t think I would have again.

If your child’s mental health has tanked during the pandemic, there’s little comfort in knowing you’re not alone.

News reports have been sounding alarm sirens: rising numbers of suicidal children in emergency rooms, more children needing in-patient care after suicide attempts, teens and young adults suffering mental health crises at levels health professionals haven’t seen before, American students failing classes at record levels. High-achieving kids who have never struggled socially or at school are now failing, withdrawn, overwhelmed and unmotivated.

Many parents are desperate for help that has been harder to access. In talking to parents stressed about their kids’ anxiety and depression over the past year, I’ve heard how difficult it is to get a timely appointment with a therapist or psychiatrist since the demand has spiked.

“Everyone is seeing huge influxes,” said Nancy Spargo, CEO of Sparlin Mental Health in St. Louis. “We can’t hire more people because more people aren’t available.”

Instead, they have had to turn away some people seeking help.

“There’s nothing worse for a parent than not being able to help your kid, to watch your kid struggle,” she said.

Parents are also exhausted and emotionally tapped out at a time when maintaining an emotional connection with their children is critical. It’s past time for our country to invest resources in this generation’s mental health recovery.

President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief bill delivers $4.25 billion for mental health services, the largest amount behavioral health groups have received in a spending bill. But this may still be far from the amount needed to address historic levels of deteriorating mental health across the country.

Teens and young adults have been among the hardest hit in terms of mental health, so how do we help them heal?

Nance Roy, chief clinical officer at the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that works to prevent suicide among children and young adults, says the long-term mental health effects of the pandemic will ripple for the next several years. This has to be a long-term effort.

“It’s not all over once we are all vaccinated and back in school,” she said.

Schools must conduct a proper needs assessment: surveying students and parents about their mental health status and needs, destigmatizing conversations about it, and filling gaps in resources, access and training. Students need to know where they can easily access direct clinical services at school. Educators need to adjust expectations for students who will struggle as they return to the classroom structure.

Dr. Shannon Farris with the CHADS Coalition for Mental Health, a St. Louis-based nonprofit providing suicide prevention programming and crisis counseling, says the organization has continued to provide its “SOS: Signs of Suicide” prevention program to middle and high school students virtually during the pandemic. One local district decided to go even further, after a student-led survey suggested a catastrophic level of anguish. A survey done by the students at Lafayette and Marquette high schools in the Rockwood School District found that 65% of 852 students surveyed said they had considered suicide. Of 667 students asked, 160 said they had made an attempt to take their own lives.

Even in an informal student survey, these kinds of answers require an emergency response.

Students pleaded for the district to take immediate action, and school officials responded. They have also contracted with CHADS to train 16 more adults in a long-term prevention and awareness program. Farris advocates for training all the faculty and staff in a building, along with students, parents and community members. Ideally, the conversation about mental health continues long after the training ends.

It will take an all hands on deck to restore what so many adolescents have lost this past year.

“A lot of compassion and patience will go a whole, long way,” Spargo said.

NOTE: If you or someone you know needs help, text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line (741741). You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

The Gutraj family was on spring break in Memphis last year before the pandemic sparked mass shutdowns.

Like many of us, they were in a bit of denial about how dramatically life was about to change. Then, their children’s Missouri school district sent a notice that students wouldn’t be coming back to classrooms.

Within a few weeks, Valerie Gutraj began getting emails that her kids’ various summer camps were also getting canceled -- one by one. She and her husband both work full-time, so she scrambled to find a nanny for the summer. They adhered to safety guidelines, so whenever the nanny had a possible COVID exposure, she would quarantine away from them.

“(The kids) would wind up on the iPad for times that would make me cringe,” Gutraj said.

Ashley Cheatham also remembers the moment when her son’s camps canceled their sessions. Neither she nor her husband could work from home.

“In an act of desperation, I posted on Facebook that I’m basically screwed,” she said. A friend volunteered to babysit her son when she had to go to her retail job.

For working parents, summer camp is about more than their kids swimming, making crafts and hanging out with friends. It’s essential child care for children who have aged out of daycare but are too young to stay unsupervised all day.

While some camps tried to pivot to virtual programming, many were forced to cancel entirely.

The impact was felt nationally. Of the more than 15,000 camps in the U.S., 80% of overnight camps and 40% of day camps shuttered last summer, according to the American Camp Association. About 19.5 million children missed out on camp experiences.

This year, however, camp is back.

Summer camps have had more time and experience to prepare, and many are reopening with safety protocols in place or with hybrid options.

Parents may be just as ready for summer as their kids.

“I tear up thinking about my kids going back to building relationships as opposed to being little screen zombies,” Gutraj said. Cheatham is also looking forward to her son playing outdoors more. She’s keeping an eye out for affordable camp options that also have precautions in place.

Ron Heinz, owner of Code Ninjas in O’Fallon, Missouri, says he’s beginning to see business come back as parents become more comfortable with safety measures, increasing immunization rates and lower caseloads. But he has noticed that there is more hesitation to commit early this year.

“There’s a whole bunch who are waiting until it's closer,” he said. In pre-pandemic times, planning for the summer started far earlier in the year for working parents. Sada Lindsey remembers having an alert set on her calendar for the day registration opened in January last year. She would have a spreadsheet ready with the various dates and locations to cobble together a plan for the summer.

Her family ended up sharing a nanny with another family last summer after the camps shut down. This year, she is hopeful her daughter will get to have a more typical summer experience with her friends.

Jennifer Biermann spent last summer tag-teaming with her spouse while they worked from home and watched their kids, now 7 and 5. They purchased a large inflatable pool and water slides for the backyard. Biermann would sit outside working on her laptop on the patio while the children splashed in the water. She says she feels more comfortable sending her children back to camp this summer but is still nervous about the risk of transmitting infections. She would like to see a higher vaccination rate in the St. Louis area to help tamp down the spread.

But after a year marked with social distance, months of distance learning and missed milestone events, the return to camp feels like a long-anticipated return to normalcy.

Children who were cheated out of a year of their childhoods can ease back into carefree summer days.

“It’s a camp, but it feels like so much more than that,” Biermann said.