Mourning and memorializing in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT

This short essay engages the efforts of artists, activists, and mourners to memorialize those who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. These commemorative sites provide needed correctives to the physical absences, political opportunism, and statistical abstractions that have tended to personify the pandemic. As with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the tropes of individualism and tactility materialize frequently in conversations about these displays. Despite the generative impulses of these memorials, it is imperative that these creations move beyond performative gestures of sentimentality to ensure that the civic agony inflicted by anti-science and far-right movements is not repeated.

KEYWORDS:

• Memorials
• COVID-19
• pandemics
• tactility
• public emotionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Darcy Spencer, “COVID-19 White Flag Memorial Installation Comes to an End on National Mall,” NBC Washington, October 3, 2021, https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/covid-19-white-flag-memorial-installation-comes-to-an-end-on-national-mall/2820218/

2 Maea Lenei Buhre, “How this Artist Visualized the Scale of Human Loss to COVID-19,” PBS Newshour, February 19, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-this-artist-visualized-the-scale-of-human-loss-to-covid-19.

3 Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, “What the 700,000 Flags I Put on the National Mall Really Mean,” Washington Post, October 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/01/national-mall-covid-flags-explanation/

4 I am not attempting to surmise a utopic cultural cohesion about COVID’s narrative arc. Fragmentation, erasure, and forgetting are all components of the politics of memory. Scholars such as Kendall Phillips remind us that people “look to memory, especially the memories of important events, not only to remember those events for themselves, but also to urge others to remember them, for the promise of the past presented to us.” See Kendall Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 208–23.

5 See, for example, the tussle over New York City’s plans for a memorial to essential workers in Battery Park that sparked controversy with residents. Ashley Wong, “Battery Park Monument for Essential Workers Paused After Protests,” New York Times, July 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/nyregion/battery-park-monument-essential-workers-protests.html

6 Alissa Wilkinson, “We Were Here,” Vox, March 24, 2021, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22289453/covid-19-memorial-coronavirus-deaths-monument.

7 Zachary Small, “Hardly Any 1918 Flu Memorials Exist. Will We Remember COVID-19 Differently?” National Public Radio, December 8, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/940802688/hardly-any-1918-flu-memorials-exist-will-we-remember-covid-19-differently.

8 David Segal, “Why are there Almost No Memorials to the Flu of 1918,” New York Times, May 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/1918-flu-memorials.html.

9 The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, MSNBC, February 26, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vte5U_fRCCk.

10 Jeffrey A. Bennett, “A Stitch in Time: Public Emotionality and the Repertoire of Citizenship,” in Remembering the AIDS Quilt, ed. Charles E. Morris III (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011): 133–58.

11 I am not suggesting that the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are resoundingly similar. They are, in fact, very different. I point to these parallels only to think through the ways memorials often run counter to the scientific reasoning that sometimes characterizes these two pandemics.

12 Firstenberg, “What the 700,000 Flags I Put on the National Mall Really Mean.”

13 Megan Barber, “What America’s First Ad Hoc COVID Memorials Look Like,” Curbed, November 13, 2020, https://www.curbed.com/2020/11/coronavirus-deaths-covid-memorials-remembering-victims.html.

14 Tresa Baldas, Brendel Hightower, Nushrat Rahman, and Julie Hinds, “Detroit’s Belle Isle Becomes a Place to Mourn, Celebrate the Lives lost to COVID,” Detroit Free Press, September 3, 2020, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2020/08/31/detroit-memorial-drive-belle-isle-coronavirus-victims/5677762002/

15 Andrew Stanton, “Cape Ann Museum Holds Online Opening for COVID-19 Memorial,” Boston Globe, March 10, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/11/metro/cape-ann-museum-holds-online-opening-covid-19-memorial/

16 Wilkinson, “We Were Here.”

17 Joshua Barajas, “Why We Need COVID Memorials Now,” PBS News Hour, February 22, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-we-need-covid-memorials-now-and-for-the-future.

18 Wilkinson, “We Were Here.”

19 Ian Bogost, “How will the Future Remember COVID-19,” The Atlantic, November 24, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/11/what-should-a-covid-19-memorial-be/617137/

20 Wilkinson, “We Were Here.”

21 Barajas, “Why We Need COVID Memorials Now.”

22 Susan Young, “Teen Daughter of Woman Who Helped Make AIDS Quilt Stitches Together New Tribute to COVID Victims,” People, January 13, 2021, https://people.com/human-interest/teen-stitches-together-covid-19-quilt-honoring-victims/

23 Sydney Combs, “How Art Helps Us Make Sense of COVID-19’s Incomprehensible Toll,” National Geographic, November 18, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-art-helps-make-sense-covid-19-incomprehensible-toll

24 See Daniel C. Brouwer and Charles E. Morris, “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107 (2021): 160–84.

25 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 265.

26 See Marina Levina, “Queering Intimacy, Six Feet Apart,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7 (2020): 195–200.

27 See, Cecília Tomori, Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Benjamin Mason Meier, Aparna Nair, “Your Health is in Your Hands? US CDC COVID-19 Mask Guidance Reveals the Moral Foundations of Public Health,” EClinical Medicine 38 (2021): 1–2.

28 Daniel C. Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt’s Search for a Homeland,” in Remembering the AIDS Quilt, ed. Charles E. Morris III (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011): 177.