More Than 250,000 Are Dead. Why Is There So Little Collective Grief?
Tags: Coronavirus, Grief, Public Health, Covid 19, Pandemic

InMay, artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada began painting a 20,000-square-foot mural of a Queen’s, New York doctor named Ydelfonso Decoo. A pediatrician nearing retirement, Decoo worked on the front lines in New York City this spring and ultimately succumbed to Covid-19.

Rodriguez-Gerada, an internationally acclaimed artist, partnered with SOMOS Community Care, a health network that serves immigrants and other organizations, to create the mural in a parking lot outside The Queens Museum, almost in the shadow of the iconic Unisphere globe from New York’s 1964 World’s Fair.

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Called Somos La Luz (We Are The Light), the work is meant to highlight the disproportionate toll the virus was taking on Latino and Black communities and put a human face behind the dizzying numbers of dead, with its mammoth scale representing the unfathomable enormity of this ongoing tragedy.

“It’s not just making something big, just for the sake of it, it’s also because what you’re saying is [this] important enough that it merits it,” says Rodriguez-Gerada.

In a YouTube video about the project posted in September, he said he hopes the mural will “call attention to the need to come together to mourn together during this pandemic,” and noted “In New York City the coronavirus is killing Latinos and Blacks at double the rate that it is killing whites and Asians. […] When we hear numbers, 100,000, 120,000, 140,000 deaths we should focus on the fact that each one in that 140,000 is a person who has died, who has left a family that is mourning, and how that impacts these families times 140,000.”

Artist Jorge Rodríguez paints a portrait of a doctor on May 27, 2020 in Queens, New York. Photo: VIEW press/Getty Images

Since he recorded that video the number of deaths from Covid-19 has risen by more than 110,000 and is increasing as we type this. Yet Rodriguez-Gerada’s mural remains something of a rarity in the Covid age: a public expression of our collective grief over the terrible toll the coronavirus has taken. In Washington D.C., artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg designed an installation where a white flag is erected in memory of each victim lost to Covid-19. Also in D.C. in early October, 20,000 chairs were set up by the group Covid Survivors for Change at a park near the White House, each representing 10 Americans who died from the virus. Newspapers have listed the names of the dead and newscasters recount the grim toll daily, but despite these important and touching efforts, the ongoing tragedy has not engendered the same kind of visible mourning as past national tragedies such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina.

“When you look back at all the other losses we’ve encountered there’s been visuals.”

The reasons for this are unclear. Since the pandemic began, when he has focused on the virus at all, President Donald Trump has been determined to highlight the positive despite the negative reality. A large portion of the population believes the falsehoods that the virus is a hoax or the numbers of dead are inflated, and grief itself has become politicized with some worrying that too much focus on rising death counts will discourage economic recovery. But these factors alone can’t explain the lack of collective response.

“When you look back at all the other losses we’ve encountered there’s been visuals,” says David Kessler, a grief expert who runs grief.com, a website that offers resources for people suffering from various forms of grief, and is author of the book Finding Meaning. He adds, “When you look at 9/11 or the AIDS epidemic, we’ve had visuals.”

In a way that is unique to modern history, the coronavirus has prevented people from coming together to mourn. Public funerals and large public memorials of any kind are still frequently prohibited or made difficult by shutdown measures. As a result, “We’re not seeing the funerals, we’re not seeing the caskets,” Kessler says.

Twenty thousand chairs, each representing 1,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States are lined up on the Ellipse for the first National Covid-19 Remembrance October 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Beyond just eliminating the visuals of death and grief, these restrictions are also changing the process of bereavement.

“Mourning and grief occur in groups,” says Christy A. Denckla, PhD, an assistant professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a clinical psychologist who specializes in grief and trauma. “Traditionally people gather in some way physically to mourn and grieve and collectively support one another. That’s of course impossible in Covid. So some of the very natural or typical ways that people might gather to commemorate loss and grief are impossible now.”

Denckla adds, “One of the things that separates this from prior national events where we faced large numbers of death is it’s not over. This is ongoing. Oftentimes in commemorating the dead, it’s in hindsight that we engage in this process of collective remembering and collective mourning and the collective storytelling and all of the narrative and human grieving processes.”

The scale of this tragedy may be, counterintuitively, another factor complicating collective mourning. M. Katherine Shear, MD, a psychiatrist and founder and director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, says the tragedy of 9/11 occurred in one day in select locations and while massive in scope, was something people could at least attempt to wrap their heads around. With Covid-19, “it’s hard to conceive of all those people,” she says, “I even have trouble. When you talk about the World Trade Center, there’s a way in which I think of all those people dying at once. You talk about the pandemic, it has been eight or nine months now since we started seeing these increased death rates, and that feels so, so spread out, and it feels so individual somehow.”

Washington, D.C. artist, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, 61, of Bethesda, works on Tuesday October 20, 2020 to set up a public art project honoring people who have died in the pandemic. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In Albert Camus’ classic and recently much-quoted novel The Plague, the main character Dr. Bernard Rieux struggles with this question as he tries to comprehend the estimated 100 million people who have died from plagues throughout history. “But what are a hundred million deaths?” he wonders. “When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” Recalling the plague at Constantinople that, according to the ancient historian Procopius, caused 10,000 deaths in a single day, Rieux still can’t visualize this smaller but still enormous mass casualty. “Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?”

But just because we’re having trouble articulating our feelings collectively or coming to grips with the scale of all that has happened, it doesn’t mean we’re not grieving, although we’re not necessarily grieving the dead.

“The discomfort you’re feeling is grief,” Kissler says. “The world we all knew in January is gone forever.”

The year 2020 has been characterized for all by losses big and small. “There are losses of financial resources, of routines, of employment. The loss of visiting with family members,” Denckla says. “There’s the loss of arts events and sporting events, and it’s really across every domain that there have been losses.”

For many, it is hard to spend time thinking of the tragedy of others when they are dealing with job loss, the daily worry of contracting the virus, and intense financial uncertainty, and even food insecurity as food banks across the nation are taxed. An important and bitterly contentious election and a long-overdue reckoning with racism have also demanded our attention this year.

On top of this, the normal struggles and difficulties of regular life have been compounded by the pandemic. Receiving needed treatments, finding childcare, and dealing with death from other causes have all become more complicated. Even just going to the grocery store requires a mini risk-benefit analysis.

Shear likens our mental state to a computer with too many windows open. “I don’t know about you, but I have like 60 bazillion things running on my computer until it starts to get so slow that I have to start closing things, and it’s kind of like that,” she says. “There are all these things running in the background, for all of us, in our heads, so we can’t focus on anything really 100%.”