Last June, Cherry Creek High School student Samantha Shoflick and her mother Megan were strolling around Greenwood Village and reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world.

The Shoflick’s like many others began reading and hearing about stories of those who died after contracting the virus. But despite the number of cases in Colorado declining throughout the month of June, a family friend of Shoflick’s had just lost their mother to COVID-19.

“My husband had a friend whose parents were in a nursing home, and the wife contracted COVID, so they had to separate them,” said Megan Shoflick. “She ended up dying, and for the husband to say goodbye to her, the family had to climb a ladder with an iPad and bring it to his window and do it that way.

“It was just so heart breaking and we began asking ourselves ‘how can we help those who are grieving?'”

But after a lot of thinking and planning the mother-daughter tandem launched Covituary.org, where the families who lost someone to COVID-19 can memorialize their loved one and not just have them become a statistic.

“Even in normal circumstances, it’s difficult when you lose a loved one, but when you can’t even have the traditional support from your family, community and friends, it’s much worse,” said 17-year-old Samantha Shoflick. 

“We hope and strive that this website will allow people to grieve and get support while the world is changing around us like never before.”

After six-months of development and preparation, Covituary.org went online in January and to date has had 68 users register for free to memorialize their grandparents, parents, siblings and extended family members. 

The site is free of charge and is offered in ten languages including Spanish, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Russian and Portuguese.

Despite having challenges getting users to sign-up at first, many like Lynda MacFarland from San Diego learned about the site and joined.

MacFarland was told from her cousin who lives in Lakewood about Covituary.org, and the family decided to make a page in honor of their father, Anthony J. Tummillo, 87, who died of COVID-19 in January in Texas.

“This gives a face and a name to any COVID victim out there, beyond their family or their local newspaper obituary,” MacFarland said. “And I just think that matters because there have been so many deaths associated to COVID, and after hearing about it for so long, we get immune and numb to those numbers. So to have a place and share who my dad was with the world is just a good feeling.”

Tummilo’s family that includes multiple children and 26 great-grandchildren was able to host a funeral, but with most of the family living outside of Georgetown Texas, which is 30 minutes north of Austin, they opted to stay home to play it safe.

But despite most of his family not being able to attend the funeral service, many of them got involved in the memorial page, and allowed them to grieve together in a non-traditional way.

“It was great looking through old photos of our dad, and even finding some new ones we’d never seen before,” MacFarland said. “And while I was writing the post on his page, we were all in a better state of mind since we weren’t in shock anymore, and were allowed to grieve.”

And since signing up for the memorial page and creating her father’s page, she and her family have enjoyed reading about others across the globe who had died from COVID-19, and aren’t thankful enough for the Shoflick’s for creating the site.

“For this young lady to feel prompted  and desire to do something to honor the memories of these folks who are just largely numbers for the rest of America (and the world) was just so touching, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it,” said MacFarland.

“There are just so many wonderful stories of people in trying times and just doing it without expecting any compensation and I’m just glad to see it was a young teenage girl this time.”

And to the Shoflick’s that was their main objective for the site the entire time.

“We just wanted a way to give back to everyone and give people a platform to have each story told,” said Samantha Shoflick.

“We are hoping more people will continue to join and memorialize their loved ones who have died of COVID-19, and hope the site can help families grieve, while also sharing the story of their loved one to the world.”