How Will We Remember?: Memorializing COVID-19
Angela Wigglesworth was driving through Washington D.C. on the interstate when she saw a woman looking out on a field of white flags. Captivated, she pulled over to the side of the road, and asked the woman what the flags were for. The woman was artist Suzanne Firstenburg. She had set up over 200,000 white flags in the oval field, and told Wigglesworth that each one marked someone lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When hearing this, Wigglesworth stared back at Firstenburg. She got out of her car, looked for a moment on the small flags waving in the wind and began to cry.“It was a very overwhelming feeling.”
Just one month prior, Wigglesworth had lost her mother, Ricki Lenoard, to the virus. Wigglesworth ended up sharing her story and added a flag to the memorial. She placed the flag near the root of a tree. “My Mom really was the root of my family,” said Wigglesworth, “it was the perfect place for her to be.” Today, that flag sits alongside a selection of other flags from the installation in the hands of the Smithsonian.
To date, over half a million people in America have lost their lives to this pandemic. And countless more have lost their jobs, or someone close to them. There are no words to genuinely summarize the devastation and upheaval that society has endured in its wake.
That, of course, does not bear repeating. I’m sure you, like everyone else, have lost something or someone since last March. Now, one can only hope, the end is near: Americans are getting vaccinated at record speeds, and cases are in decline. The Center for Disease Control even announced recently that if you are not in a crowd and you have been fully vaccinated, you don’t have to wear your mask outside.
After more than a full year, it’s ending. Life, in many ways, is returning to the way it was before. But can we just move on? How will we remember this time? How can we heal together from this unprecedented tragedy?
America has memorials commemorating past calamities and tragedies that brought unwarranted death. Monuments like the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, and the 9/11 Memorial in New York, provide places for people to reflect, and a way to immortalize the emotions, feelings, and events that took place. COVID-19 is different however: it wasn’t a war, or a terror attack. It is a disease that affected just about everyone, everywhere, from New York to New Delhi. So what would its memorial look like?
Monuments have been used to help people heal for centuries. In 1679, the last of the great Bubonic plagues struck Vienna. The Hapsburg King, Leopold I, vowed that if God were to take mercy on the people of Vienna, and the plague was lifted, that he would erect a statue, a column of mercy, in his honor.
The plague eventually did subside and Leopold kept his promise,commissioning the construction of the column. When finished, it was a 69 foot tall marble-and-gold column that shows how the piety of Leopold and the mercy of God saved the people of Vienna. Proving popular, similar plague columns were erected all across western Europe, mixing the design of Roman columns of victory with Catholic iconography.
Leopold’s column is the origin of large disease memorials in the Western world. But today, we know more about disease and how they spread enough to say that they are not necessarily the embodiment of God’s punishment, but rather, are unfeeling, non-discriminatory organisms that use our bodies to reproduce, and spread, often killing or harming us in the process. The SARS-CoV-2 virus didn’t care whether or not we prayed, nor that it wreaked havoc on our world. Human suffering is its means and its end is our extinction.
Moreover, it does little to console those who survived, or even to acknowledge the loss, by proclaiming victory over death. Although we are nearing the end of the pandemic, very few have anything to feel victorious about.
Grief from the loss of a loved one is a difficult and long process. Dianne Brennan, a grief counselor and founder of the 2020 Grief Project, said that there can be a lot of guilt in those that survive. “Society so often expects us to grieve in a certain way,” said Brennan, “and when we’ve lost a loved one, we can sometimes feel a guilt for not giving them the goodbye we feel they deserve.”
But the COVID-19 pandemic also wasn’t perceived the same way by everyone. There were certain groups that were victimized by COVID-19 more than others. Poorer and minority communities were hit particularly hard by the virus, while there are others that doubted its danger or even its existence at all. It may prove difficult to erect a memorial that can speak to that diversity of feelings and emotions.
Like with many moments, there was a competition to determine the design of the National September 11 Memorial in New York. One featured plinths that rose from the ground, resembling a sort of cemetery. The judges, however, were not interested in choosing a memorial that emphasized death, and preferred the grounds where the buildings stood.
The final design was Reflecting Absence, the memorial that sits there today. The reflecting pools not only fill in the footprints of the buildings, but list names of the victims with meaningful connections between them used to organize them. The flowing water also drowns out the city sounds and allows for quiet, solemn reflection.
Baring little marks of death or politics, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a simple black wall that rises out from the earth, with the names of the fallen inscribed on it. With no patriotic imagery or outright statement, it allows for everyone to experience their own emotions and feelings they have about the war. If you stand in front of the memorial and look past its inlaid names, in those black granite walls, you see your own reflection looking back at you.
But does the nature of a pandemic allow us to follow these models? The virus lasted over a year. It was not a single event, nor was it a war, strictly speaking, to where there was a distinct record of people who served and perished. If there was one, it was a different kind of combat, with workers in hospitals around the country risking their lives to staunch the caseload.
For Dr. Saul Cohen, a head emergency room Doctor at Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts, it often seemed like the floor of the ER resembled a battlefield. “We would divide the floor into color-coded zones,” he said. “The green zone was for COVID, red zone for broken bones, and so on. Fairly quickly the green zone would get larger and larger, and then take over the yellow zone.”
Dr. Cohen saw firsthand a seemingly endless stream of patients come in, get intubated and never recover. Patients, passing away behind closed doors, their loved ones unable to get near them for risk that they would get sick themselves. “It was really depressing frankly, but also frustrating, because we understood how COVID spread,” he told me in an interview. “I know that a lot of people got sick that didn’t need to, because their kid or someone in their family didn’t wear a mask.”
Dr. Cohen said that finding a definitive list of victims’ names for a memorial might not be possible.
“With all the new variants of Covid we are seeing, we are not sure that even vaccinated people won’t have to keep getting vaccinated,” says Cohen. “We may see events like this happen every few years, and it’s entirely possible that the last person to die from COVID-19 or hasn’t been born yet.”
Experts are now saying that it is unlikely the United States will ever reach herd immunity now due to the development of new COVID-19 variants and vaccine hesitancy. How can you immortalize a pandemic that could keep going?
At the southern tip of St. Vincent’s Park in Manhattan’s West Village stands the AIDS Memorial. It was designed by architect Mateo Paiva and his studio. It was made not just to commemorate those who have died in the past, but for all those people who continue to pass away and suffer from AIDS. Like COVID-19, AIDS was a plague that swept across the nation in the 1980s and 90s, killing nearly 675,000 people to date. According to the CDC, around 13,000 people still die of AIDS in America every year.
“It was important to make something for the city that it didn’t have,” Paiva told me, “and it was a unique opportunity to build a memorial for something that is still happening.”
It was originally designed as a speculative idea in a competition put on by two LGBTQ+ Activists, Christopher Tepper and Paul Kelterborn. The proposed site would be on what used to be St. Vincent Hospital, where many AIDS patients checked in and never checked out. The memorial today itself sits on the former site of the hospital morgue.
Paiva’s initial design was intended to cover the entire triangular park, but instead he was only able to cover the very tip of it. It was a triangular structure on a triangular park. Triangles — an important symbol for LGBTQ+activism — have their origin in German concentration camps during World War II, where homosexuals were forced to wear an upside down pink triangle. The triangle has since been used as a symbol of the LGBTQ+ struggle and sometimes has been inverted and alternatively colored.
Paiva’s memorial is also shaped like a triangle to conform to the shape of the park itself. He was careful to note that he didn’t want the symbols to be explained, rather, for people to draw their own conclusions on the meaning of the memorial. “A triangle is also the simplest possible structure, and we wanted to make the canopy’s footprint as minimal as possible. In that way it is both recognizable but very open,” said Paiva.
The canopy is made of slats that form smaller triangles around the triangular structure, providing shade, but giving the ability for wind and light to pass through. The benches are under a canopy and in the center is a raised circular table. Around it is Walt Whitman’s A Song of Myself, etched circularly around the table. The poem is a hopeful celebration of life. “We wanted to make a memorial that celebrated life, not one about death,” Paiva said.
Death is always tragic, and the death of a single person can send shockwaves through countless others. When Suzanne Firstenburg heard Lt. Governor Dan Patrick from Texas say on television “174,000 is just a number,” the social activist and artist was taken aback. She was disgusted, she said, at how politicians expected elderly people to “lay down their lives for the Dow [Jones]’’ and that somehow the performance of the economy was more important than people’s lives.
Firstenburg, aside from being an artist, worked in hospice care, and said that it was there she learned firsthand just how valuable the senior community is, and how often their lives are devalued. She had seen other memorials in the DC area;one with American flags placed on the lawn, and another with rows of empty black chairs. However, they were not representative of the individual. “Each empty chair each represented ten people, so even here, it’s impossible to grasp the true scale. In order to pay respect to each life, it was important that the symbols be one to one,” said Firstenburg.
So she placed 174,000 white flags in an oval field. One for each individual casualty. The idea for flags came from a few factors. First, Firstenburg funded the project herself, and white flags were inexpensive. Furthermore she thought it would have been inappropriate to use the American flag in a politically charged presidential election year. She also arranged them in an array so that it wouldn’t look like Arlington Cemetery.
“The juxtaposition with Arlington was chilling to me, Arlington being the place where we honor those who kept us safe. This installation was honoring those that we did not keep safe.” Firstenburg said.
For her, a white flag represented the federal government’s response to the virus. It was raising the white flag in defeat, as America led the world in COVID-related fatalities as well as fatalities per capita. “I wanted to show people the scale, but I also wanted to show that this didn’t have to happen.”
The white flags also allowed for an opportunity for further individualization. She reached out on social media and created a website where people could customize a flag, adding a name and information so that the individual was even better represented. As people continued to pass, Firstenburg kept adding flags, one for each death, and visitors to the website, on social media and in person kept customizing flags.
Unfortunately, there came a point where Firstenburg could no longer add any more. The oval area where they stood had a capacity of 258,000 flags. So Firstenburg took the memorial online, where she and a professor from George Washington University geotagged each flag where it stood as well as adding pictures and digitally storing all of the information from each flag. The website is still active today.
When I asked Firstenburg about making a permanent installation of flags, she said that doing that would come with particular challenges. By April 2021, the U.S. has half a million COVID-related deaths, so finding a place to put that many flags would be a tall task. For reference, Arlington Cemetery has only 400,000 grave stones, and some have multiple bodies buried beneath.
She also asked an important question: who gets to be included? So many others had their lives completely upended due to the pandemic. How do we immortalize them too?
It may not only be about remembering COVID deaths, but COVID lives, too. Journalist Laura Bliss from Bloomberg CityLab has always had a longstanding interest in maps, and their power to reveal and inform us about the places we live and care about. She has been authoring a newsletter for Bloomberg using different types of maps called “MapLab” since 2017, and when the pandemic hit, she came up with the idea to ask her readers to draw maps of their quarantine lives. The response was immense.
Hundreds of people from six different continents sent in maps. Some were detailed and specific, while others were more abstract. Some maps showed floor plans of someone’s apartment and their movements throughout the day; others were maps through the mind, showing the feelings and emotions. “It showed how people’s lives had changed,” Bliss told me, “and also how people’s relationships with their neighborhoods have changed.”
Currently, Bliss is working to publish a book of these maps. She gathered more maps to capture a greater variety of voices, specifically those frontline workers.“This project is an archive of this moment, so it was up to us to make it as diverse a collection as possible,” she said. The book will stand as a testament to the remarkably unique ways that people’s lives have been changed this last year.“It helped to get out onto paper a lot of these complicated emotions and experiences,” she said. “It’s really extraordinary, and I think it’s something that’s really hard to accomplish with any other medium.”
There is no one way to encapsulate the grief and the hardships people have had to endure and are still enduring during this pandemic. But one thought that keeps coming back to me — will people even want to remember?
When the 1918 influenza pandemic concluded, some people rejoiced, some even burned their masks. But for the most part, people tried to forget about it. There are almost no monuments to those who passed, and there is little artistic representation of the event of any type from the time.
Historian Geoffery Rice believes that the reason so little representation exists of the pandemic is that very few Americans noticed the pandemic and most forgot what they had noticed upon the pandemic’s conclusion. Rice also said that there were more deaths in America during that pandemic than necessary because the government at the time did very little to enforce the wearing of masks or other measures.
There are more forgotten graves in the U.S. today. Hart Island in New York has been used for 150 years as a burial ground for the city’s unclaimed deaths. During the height of the pandemic, thousands of unclaimed people were buried in mass unmarked graves on the island. It is estimated that around a tenth of the people who died of COVID in the city are buried on the island.
Currently, Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project are holding public hearings to determine how the space should be used and how to memorialize and remember these individuals. “We’re not looking to build anything out there,” Hunt said. “It is the largest natural burial ground in the country. Natural burials are woodland burials. We would like to see the island reforested and memorials become cloud based rather than physical.”
In the years directly after the 1918 Influenza outbreak, when everyone forgot about the pandemic, they also forgot this crucial lesson. I doubt that will be an acceptable conclusion for survivors of COVID. Everyone noticed, everyone was affected. And it doesn’t seem likely that we will ever forget.
And it is brutally important that we never forget. When Firstenburg was first getting interviewed by the press about her white flag installation, she remembers speaking at length with an older reporter from a Japanese TV station. He told her that when he was growing up, he idolized America. He thought everything American was the greatest — our music, our movies, our culture — and now looking at the flags, his heart was broken. America did not do the greatest job here, and we did not have to lose as many people as we lost.
Dr. Michael Olstrom wrote in his book Deadliest Enemy that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic, and is likely not the most deadly we’ve seen. It is important that we remember those we lost — their stories, their lives, their loves, and the collective struggle we all went through in the process, just as equally as much as the mistakes we made. Understand why so many of us passed away, and prepare to make sure it never happens again.
We can’t keep making small white flags forever.
