Remembering the victims of COVID-19: From personal to civic to reparative memory

Abstract

In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic had exploded in New York City, across the country, and around the world. At its height, thousands of people were dying every day in quarantined intensive care units and Covid wards, their families forbidden from attending their loved ones’ last living moments, even to say good-bye. The victims were dying in isolation, consigned to make-shift morgues, and buried or cremated—without ceremony, without grieving loved ones present. To commemorate the victims of Covid communally in real time would also be to turn the mourners themselves into new Covid victims. Commemorative and collective grieving processes would have to be deferred until it was safe to gather together again. But memory deferred is also memory transformed with new and devastating meaning. In this short reflection on how the meanings engendered by memory of those lost to Covid-19 morph over time, I explore the differences between the memory of personal loss, civic memory, and reparative memory.