The missing one million
More than one million Americans died during the Covid-19 pandemic. Five years later, they remain largely invisible.
Patricia Dowd is a name that many Americans likely do not know.
She was the first American to die from Covid-19, found dead in her home by her daughter on February 6, 2020. Initially ruled a heart attack, an autopsy revealed she was positive for Covid-19 and had died from complications from the infection. She was described by her daughter, Kaila Dowd, as a best friend who “gave the best hugs.”
Patricia Dowd’s name can be found publicly online, though not without some effort. She is mentioned on Wikipedia, and there are a handful of news stories about her, largely from 2020 and 2021 in California-based media outlets. Her death was reported as a local story, of interest to the San Jose regional community where she lived. To the national media, she was a data point in a broader debate as to when the American government knew (or should have known) that Covid-19 was circulating throughout the country.
Patricia Dowd represents one of the many tragedies of the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2019 and hit the United States in full intensity five years ago this month: while we drowned in a sea of data, graphs, charts and trendlines about the virus, we knew little of the names, stories and faces who lost their lives. Approximately, 1.2 million Americans died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic—and Americans are still dying from the disease, though, thankfully in far fewer numbers. The fatalities are more than the Spanish Flu, World War II, Vietnam War and 9/11 put together, a staggering loss unprecedented in American history.
Yet over the past five years, the public sphere has rarely spoken about the dead. We know more about the January 6 rioters than we do people that died from coronavirus. Nowhere in America, to my knowledge, are all of the names of Covid-19’s victims listed in a single comprehensive database, and only a few grassroots efforts have attempted to even do so.
Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg has led one such effort. In fall 2021, Firstenberg, a D.C.-based artist and activist, conceived of and installed a temporary exhibition on the National Mall of more than 701,000 white flags, one for every individual killed by Covid-19 up until that point. Originally envisioned as 666,000 flags, during the “delta variant” surge of 2021 she and her volunteers added, on average, 2,000 flags each day—roughly the equivalent of the 9/11 terror attacks every 24 hours.
Simultaneously, with the help of a software engineer named Jeremiah Lindemann, they established the “In America, Covid Lost Loved Ones” website, with stories and photographs submitted by families and friends. A sample of the deceased include:
Gina Ilbery, December 2020, Illinois: “Even in the hospital with COVID just before she passed my mom, Gina Ilbery, was sending my wife ways to restore the table she gave to us and ways to renovate our house. She was always thinking of others and would do anything she could for them. She taught me the meaning of selflessness. She was an amazing woman, and an excellent role model. I miss her every day.”
Loretta Banks, November 2020, Arkansas: “A wonderful sister and a loving person. She was the mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great grandmother, sister, aunt and friend to us all. Always smiling, always willing to lend a helping hand or her famous motherly advice. She never left the company of anyone without telling them that she loved them. And she meant it. She was loved by all and will be missed by all those who were fortunate enough to know her.”
Holmes “Snuffy” Smith, October 2020, Louisiana: Pipe welder, “Husband, Daddy, Popa, Son, Brother, Uncle, Friend…you are missed beyond description, loved for a million lifetimes.”
Frank Ojeda Jr., August 2021, Washington state: “A kind and gentle man. Born in Cameron TX, he was the oldest brother to 11 siblings, a husband, and father to two daughters and one son. He loved his family, always making them the center of his life. He loved sports and was an umpire for youth baseball.”
Casey Marie Retz, August 2021, Montana: “This beautiful soul was a nurse, mother, wife, sister, daughter, grandma, friend, she lived loved and laughed for 64 years. Leaving behind so much family that is heartbroken.”
Jeffery Scott Denzer, March 2021, South Dakota: “We honor our husband & dad, Jeff Denzer, 54, who fought a tough, 4 mo. battle with Covid. He lived by the words, “Be a giver, not a taker.”
Eliza Grigsby, December 2020, Kentucky: “a loving wife, mother and grandmother who is missed every day.”
Thomas Dale Coon, May 2020, Maine: “Thomas Coon “The Rogue Ranger” an Allagash Ranger for 25 years in the North Maine Woods. A friend to many and loved by all who knew him!”
James Ryan Tomberlin, September 2021, Georgia: “Ryan was my husband of 18 years and my best friend. He was only 41 years old, leaving behind me and our daughter who is now 17 years old…He impacted so many lives and has left a huge void in the lives of those who loved him.”
Joan Earnest Skup, December 2020, Florida: “Joan was an artistic person, always looking for the next craft project to do. She loved making arts and crafts for her family. She was married to her husband, David, for 48 years and had two wonderful boys.”
These are only ten out of the tens-of-thousands of victims. Firstenberg estimates that she documented 20,000 individuals—meaning that more than 680,000 flags remain unattached to a specific person. Her efforts ceased at the end of 2021, the flags now preserved in her archive, meaning that more than 500,000 deceased Americans never even got a white flag.
Will the Americans who died during the pandemic ever receive a permanent, lasting memorial? Just past the five-year anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning, it may feel premature to ask such a question; however, history shows that, in fact, conversations about how to memorialize a tragedy can begin in the very immediate aftermath.
For example, after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 167 and injured 684 people, “unsolicited memorial ideas poured into the mayor’s and governor’s offices within hours,” writes historian Edward T. Linenthal.[1] Within months, the mayor of Oklahoma City had convened a task force of 350 people that included survivors and family members who, through discussion and negotiation, devised a plan to create a space for remembrance and mourning, coupled with a civic space to “protest the shattering impact of violence.”[2] Included in the memorial was a list of names.
The inclusion of names drew inspiration from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which also did not take very long to come to fruition. U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975 with more than 58,000 Americans killed. Only four years later, a movement had emerged to build a memorial, led by the veterans themselves. The wall opened three years after that, in 1982, “warp speed in Washington,” according to founder Jan Scruggs.[3]
On the flip side, there are memorialization processes that have taken decades, if not centuries. It took a century to build memorials to the victims of the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, which killed more than 675,000 people. “When I looked for memorials to the flu, I found nothing,” said Brian Zecchinelli to the New York Times in 2020. One of the flu’s victims was Zecchinelli’s grandfather, who died at age 35. On the 100-year anniversary of the influenza pandemic, Zecchinelli commissioned a five-ton granite memorial in his hometown of Barre, Vermont. Other local memorials do exist in the U.S. and around the world. Yet, America still does not have a federal memorial to that pandemic, even as it scarred an entire generation.
During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Quilt became a temporary, grassroots memorial on the National Mall that was powered by art and activism, similar to Firstenberg’s white flags. It represented the more than 400,000 Americans who died of HIV/AIDS, devastating families and communities in ways similar to the Spanish flu. (Like the white flags, the AIDS Quilt only bore the names of a fraction of the total dead). The AIDS Quilt had a profound effect on those who saw it (including me), and inspired the creation of a permanent AIDS Memorial in San Francisco that, eventually, was elevated to a national memorial via legislation.
“Memorializing is a tricky business,” said long-time public historian Richard Rabinowitz, a mentor of mine who has worked on nearly every type of public history exhibit, park or memorial in the U.S. during his amazing career. I called Richard on Zoom earlier this month asking him to help me think through ideas for this essay.
“Memorialization has radically changed in your lifetime,” he began by telling me. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a major break, in many ways. 9/11, Oklahoma City—the people who are being commemorated are victims, not heroes.”
From Richard’s vantage point, the American memorials of yesteryear were often singular individuals (actual or imagined) erected onto pedestals in honorific poses. “After the Civil War, it took about 20 to 30 years, and every New England town put up a statue of the common soldier,” Richard said. “They were understood to be heroic.”
Somewhere along the line that changed. “As we’ve lost our attachment to the common good—or the notion that we have a responsibility to the common good,” Richard continued, “we’ve lost the idea that those people who fight for the common good are somehow heroes. Instead, we are commemorating episodes of shared pain. That is a remarkable change.”
To further the point, Richard cited the American Merchant Mariner’s Memorial in Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan. A beautiful memorial, it commemorates the more than 8,300 mariners who were killed at sea during World War II and beyond. Conceived in 1976 and opened in 1991, today almost no one goes there, and barely anyone leaves flowers or objects as they do at the Vietnam Wall or in Oklahoma City. The Mariner Memorial is a call back to a prior form of memorialization that honors a select group of heroes through allegorical figures cast in valorous poses, a form that has fallen out of favor, replaced by modern modes of memorialization that encapsulate shared and collective victimhood.
“People want a voice now,” is how Suzanne Firstenberg put it to me in a Zoom call that she graciously agreed to for this article. “They expect it. In my art, it’s very often now a public participatory art, because people need to be seen and heard.”
Firstenberg attributed that change to social media, which surely has amplified it. But it pre-dates social media, which is what makes the Vietnam Wall that much more remarkable. Erected in the early 1980’s, the architect Maya Lin, in some ways, predicted the rise of the selfie and the participatory involvement in memorialization. “The genius of Maya Lin was to make the stone reflective,” Richard explained, “so the visitors would connect themselves to it. As you approach [the memorial], you become a bigger figure because you are coming to a mirroring surface. You become a larger part of the story as you get closer to it… It’s all very brilliantly done.”
Lin’s design also managed to diffuse the divisiveness that engulfed the Vietnam War, listing 58,000 names chronologically and eschewing physical representations of soldiers in heroic poses (though some were added later to appease veterans’ groups). The effect, according to the National Park Service (NPS), was to offer a site for healing and remembrance in a manner that resembles a “turning of a page.”[4] The wall “offers family members of the deceased and the general visitor a place to meet, remember and honor those who gave so much,” the NPS goes onto say.
The Covid-19 pandemic, similar to Vietnam, divided society politically as well as socio-economically. In that respect, any potential memorial to the victims of coronavirus could take inspiration from Lin’s designs to help heal a fractured nation and move it forward. After all, national memorials exist, at the end of the day, to further the cause of the nation-state. They are intended to demonstrate the state’s capacity to recover and endure. The memorials at Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center are as much about the continuance of the national project of the United States as they are about honoring particular individuals. It is, in fact, the embedding of individual loss into a broader survival narrative that gives the deaths their civic meaning.
Those who proactively choose to “make the ultimate sacrifice” on behalf of the nation, to use the language of war, are usually the ones for whom the state repays with memorialization. That illusion of choice—choosing to die in a national cause through service—is what is being commemorated. Something is presumed to have come from that sacrifice: honor, legacy, pride, the glory of the nation, etc.
At this moment, that is a challenge that bedevils any national attempt at a Covid-19 memorial. The victims of Covid-19 did not choose to make an ultimate sacrifice by enlisting in a war or performing a duty in a military uniform. They died reluctantly, or unexpectedly, often sheltered in their homes while a nation ripped itself apart. They did not run out of a foxhole or plant flags on a hill. Perhaps most sobering, nothing has come from their sacrifice that has bettered the nation. There has not been an improved public health infrastructure, a better investment in pandemic response, a commitment to global cooperation on disease, or an increase in vaccination rates. The nation-state has not recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic—and who knows if it ever will?
Memorials can be part of that recovery. Take, as an example, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, built to memorialize our national shame of more than 4,400 Black Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. The site has helped to advance racial healing in the U.S., but alone it does not have the capacity to repair our racial wounds entirely. Indeed, as recent backlash against DEI and “critical race theory” has shown, the “victims” in the story of American race relations have been perversely inverted to not be the generations of African Americans who suffered indignity, but rather the White Americans forced to learn about it.
A similar dynamic has unfolded in the case of Covid-19, where some of the living have made themselves into the greater victims than the deceased. The true victims, we’ve been preposterously led to believe, were the ones who were forced to wear masks, or get vaccinated, or stay home from school… not the people who actually died. These individuals would have you believe that their sacrifices were so mighty that they were the ones that should be memorialized.
For Richard Rabinowitz, this preoccupation with victimhood stems from a broader collapse of the collective in the United States. “In the 1950’s, there was much more energy in the word ‘collective,’” he recalled. “There were individual stories but a real sense of collectivity. We have lost that entirely in the United States, we just do not have that idea.”
Richard continued: “I can remember the Salk vaccine [against polio] being introduced and that was a civic event. You had to stand up in a classroom, went to a community health center, everybody lined up nicely… it was an amazing public event and there was no opposition. Jonas Salk was a genius. I don’t see that happening at all… As Robert Putnam would say, we’re being vaccinated alone.” [Putnam is the author of the acclaimed book Bowling Alone]. Our loneliness and disconnectedness fuel our cynicism and victimization, which is then exploited and weaponized by political actors.
The white flags on the National Mall have not been the only memorial to Covid-19’s victims. Over the past five years, several grassroots projects emerged to memorialize the fallen and lend support to survivors. Inspired by her mother working on the AIDS Quilt, a 13-year-old girl named Madeleine started a Covid Memorial Quilt project in 2020. Today, the panels are on display at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix. A website called WhoWeLost.org was launched by a woman in Kentucky, collecting stories of coronavirus victims from across the U.S. and beyond. There is a podcast devoted to Covid-19 fatalities and a Facebook page for Covid victims with 13,000 followers. There is even a National Covid Memorial augmented reality (AR) project that is attempting to collect all the stories of coronavirus victims and raise funds, as well as lobby Congress, for a permanent memorial that would “honor all 1.2+ million people lost in the U.S.—not as numbers, but as people.”
A public memorial to Covid-19’s victims—with its potential beauty, solemnity and civic architecture—could become a space for public reflection that takes the chaos and violence of the pandemic and turns it into a symbol of a nation repairing its collective civic culture. But that would require sealing ourselves off from Covid-19, a task that has proven difficult with the virus still a threat. Events such as 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, as horrific as they were, had finite endings. Covid-19, both the virus and the vitriol around it, have kept going, compounded by one global calamity after another: wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and new viruses. “The destruction is still ongoing; we cannot stanch the bleeding,” Richard said.
For her part, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg believes America must create a permanent memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic in Washington, D.C., for no other reason than to support the continued memory of it. Such a memorial, in her view, would not be one that “gets politicized or that tries to interpret the history.” Rather, she said, the purpose would be “simply creating a beautiful place—a glade—where people can bring their grief… A place where people can leave, in some way, in some form, a piece of themselves.”
By leaving a piece of themselves, the visitors would have a voice in the repair of the nation, and feel as though they are seen and heard, which is its own form of healing. At the same time, the 1.2 million Americans who died would finally have their anonymous data points personified into names, stories and voices. Public memorials speak, after all; they have a civic voice, an artistic voice and a popular voice. The Covid-19 dead have long been silent, more than one million Americans with far too little representation in the public sphere.
Will the nation that silenced them ever allow them to be heard?
Have a good week,
-JS
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Notes
[1] Edward T. Linenthal, “Oklahoma City, September 11, and the ‘Lessons’ of History,” History News, winter 2002, vol. 57, no. 1 (winter 2002), pp. 12-15.
[2] Linenthal, “Oklahoma City, September 11, and the ‘Lessons’ of History.”
[3] Katie Lange, “Remembering Vietnam: The Story Behind 'The Wall,'” U.S. Department of Defense, March 8, 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/FeatureStories/Story/Article/2979448/remembering-vietnam-the-story-behind-the-wall.
[4] “Introduction to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” National Park Service, November 16, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=F7122BC7-1DD8-B71C-07CC0CDC91E91CFA.
So much to think about in this article Jason. I especially appreciate the discussion of the way the collective has shaped memorialization in the past, but not so much today. Memorializing heroes versus victims is a dramatic shift in public consciousness. My favorite line from this article is this one: "Our loneliness and disconnectedness fuel our cynicism and victimization, which is then exploited and weaponized by political actors." So true.
Thank you for this article. I am the “woman in Kentucky” though writing this comment in DC (where I am working on pandemic remembrance). I’d be happy to speak with you further about The WhoWeLost Project, including our anthology “Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial. Worth noting that our website gathers stories written by the mourners, in a comment and judgment-free space. —Martha Greenwald