COVID Diaries: Sarah Jones

The 700,000 Death Toll An atheist stumbles toward a way to grieve.

- Sarah Jones

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, a friend died, and for weeks afterward, I thought I saw him everywhere. I didn’t suspect him of haunting me; it was more that people resembled him so strongly I believed, temporarily, that he was still alive. In September, when I learned another young friend had died in a tragic accident, I wondered if I’d see him, too. Human beings are uncomfortable with absence. We like to find patterns, fill in blanks. An individual death creates a void in reality, and almost two years of constant death has left most of us groping in the dark.

By the start of October, more than 700,000 people had died of covid-19 in the United States. A recent memorial on the National Mall takes this absence and renders it tangible. Better than an open letter, more sinew than a ghost. On the even grass before the Washington Monument, there were hundreds of thousands of white flags—a national surrender. I could plant a flag for my grandfather, who died of the virus nearly a year ago. But the gesture feels thin. Not that the memorial is a bad idea: It may provoke in the viewer feelings of sadness or regret or the emotion that arises in response to an absence, an emotion I cannot name but that is as close to fatigue as it is to grief or nostalgia. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial—whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.