By Caitlin Cacciatore

COVID Diaries: Second Place

“Unable are the loved to die; for love is immortality.” – Emily Dickinson

One day, this darkness will abate. We’ll put away our masks, dab on lipstick in their place, and congregate in large numbers in much the same way we used to take for granted. There will be dancing and revelry, and we’ll take the lessons we learned from COVID-19, pack them away in a safe, inside a box, and secret them in a little-used corner of the collective halls of memory, to be discovered by another generation, when they find themselves in the midst of the next pandemic. My dead; your dead; they will be names fleeing from memory, fleeting ghosts of a half-forgotten past. COVID-19 will be printed in a neat font in the back of a history book, alongside the number of our dead; like a date on a ledger. The arithmetic of compassion will fail us once more.

Zbigniew Herbert, at the end of his poem “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper,” in translation from the original Polish, introduced the idea of the arithmetic of compassion to the literary canon. “for 120 dead / you search on a map in vain // too great a distance / covers them like a jungle.” They are too many in number; “they don’t speak to the imagination.” Our dead, when they depart from us in large, unwieldy numbers, are rendered mere abstractions.

One cannot mourn for a world gone to ground; grief is too strong an emotion to project unto the number of people who have lost their lives during this global health crisis. Pity doesn’t do justice to those who are still battling for their lives in hospital wards and intensive care units, nor do platitudes assuage the pain of the father who has lost his daughter, or the grandson who misses his grandmother keenly. Words cannot do justice to our dead, or those who have lost loved ones. There will never be a memorial large enough, nor a poem beautiful enough, nor a song that lingers long enough to encompass the breadth and depth of the lost years; the moments that never were; the vacant seats at family tables.

Yet, we are human, so we try. We elegize our dead. We pin obituaries into our diaries alongside photographs that have faded with time. We keep the memories of those we loved and lost close at hand, and closer still to our hearts. We build a shrine in the cathedral of our minds, and we keep tiny gems of moments there, as offerings to our sacred dead.

But these shrines, those memories, cannot endure unaided. We must wrangle them onto the page, into audio files, onto video recordings and integrate them into the slipstream of our history, where so many voices echo fleetingly across the ages; some longer than others. It is only by writing about our dead and making art about them that we tell not only the world of today about them, but also keep their memories alive for future generations.

More than two million people have died from COVID-19 as of the time of this writing. Each of those individuals had a story. A history. A life, beyond their number amongst the rank-and-file dead. Most of them left loved ones behind; people who miss and mourn them. And all of them, no matter how old or how young, how feeble or how fortified, how powerful or how poor – all of them mattered and continue to matter.

One day, this darkness will abate; there will be dancing and revelry, but we must still remember those who we lost, those who are missing, those whose seat at the table is vacant; we must hold that ember of our grief inside of us and cradle it in our hands, even if it burns our fragile flesh. It is only by remembering this time of mourning that we might overcome the obstacle Herbert spoke of in his poem.

Our inability to compute the “arithmetic of compassion” and the failings of our collective imagination cannot be permitted to eclipse the ultimate truth of our shared humanity, nor can they be allowed to erase the stories of those we have lost over the course of the pandemic. Yes, we must move on, and yes, we will dance and drink and be merry, but we shall do so only after pouring a libation to our dearly departed; and when we dance and sing out for all the world to hear, it shall be in their names.