How do we grieve the hundreds of thousands of people the COVID-19 pandemic has killed?
We posed this question to five writers.
Grief is a strange thing. One might describe the pain we feel as love, stopped at the source. Grief is what happens to love when its subject is no longer there, when it has no one to receive it. The effect is pain.
Something similar happens with communal grief. We feel the pain of loss when we recognize humanity—our own or that of our loved ones—in the tragedy. The nation grieved in 1986 as we watched the tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger, the turn from pride and wonder as a schoolteacher traveled into space to shock and sorrow upon viewing her very public death. We grieved as a nation in 2001 as a mundane morning was disrupted by the televised deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in terrorist attacks.
Those moments of tragedy, like countless others, brought us together in a shared outpouring of grief over the passing of people we didn’t know. We didn’t have to know them to shoulder the pain with their families and grieve their loss. It was visceral.
