A century from now, will the grief and pain of the coronavirus pandemic be remembered by descendants of the dead? Epidemic deaths can cause long-lasting trauma for future generations.
Reminiscing about her relatives a few years ago, tears fell down my mother’s face as she told me about two little girls who had died in a diphtheria epidemic. My mom wept for children who had died over 100 years earlier — two generations before her.
I was startled. I am a historian; I know well that history lives on in the present, affecting the way we think and feel. I was seeing in real time how history haunts.
This is as true for nations as for families. The toppling of Confederate monuments over the past year, for instance, shows us that the racist past continues to deeply wound in the present. Yet, as much as racist and demeaning monuments need to be removed from their places of honor, we also need memorials that recognize the suffering endured and mourn all of the lives lost in this tragic — and unequal — pandemic.
The more than 560,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. and nearly 3 million worldwide will haunt their descendants too. The people heartsick now, whose descendants will most remember the catastrophe of COVID-19, are disproportionately brown and Black, working-class and poor. Due to historical inequities in health care and discrimination in jobs and housing, they lived closer together and held front-line jobs. “Essential” workers, a new category in 2020, includes meatpackers, restaurant servers, grocery store cashiers and cleaners of streets, hospitals, dishes and buildings. They are people in low-paid jobs, usually without sick leave or health insurance. Workers who, before the pandemic, had not been regarded as significant or labeled “essential,” even though they always have been.
In the future, the story told about the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to end with the development of vaccines. But vaccine success can neither erase what happened during the time of COVID-19 nor resolve the inequity in mortality in the U.S. and globally.
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Science and vaccines cannot solve the political dynamics that made the United States the worst country for the number of infections or deaths per capita in 2020. The Trump administration’s seeming indifference to disease and death and its dedication to undermining the government — on top of an already inadequately supported public health system, millions without health insurance and structural racism — guaranteed that the pain of COVID-19 would fall most heavily on the poorest and on communities of color.
These truths should be remembered for generations because it did not have to be this way.
Because the COVID-19 pandemic is so painful, some might think it better to forget. But we don’t forget wars or the terrorist attack of 9/11. Forgetting, or choosing to remain silent, about harrowing past events is a common personal response to emotionally devastating experiences. It may be required for survival.
Too often silence has been necessary to avoid shame or violence. Holocaust survivors and Japanese Americans held in internment camps often said nothing about their experiences to their children in their desire to provide a happier life rather than traumatize their children. Such forgetting by individuals is an understandable form of self-preservation and is entirely different from forgetting as a tool of white supremacy that perpetuates unequal power throughout society.
It is as important to remember the pain of disease and the deaths it causes as it is to remember bombings and wars. Not only by the people who loved the people we lost, but by all of us.
Those who died because of COVID-19 deserve to be honored for their lives. Many died as they served others — as teachers and farmworkers, as EMTs, nurses and janitors. They served in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and to save lives. Their work, their lives and their deaths should be remembered.
The U.S. has memorials honoring its war dead. In many ways, those memorials also remind the country to prepare for enemies and to publicly fund the nation’s defense. Perhaps the memorial we now need is one that honors the dead and reminds us to prepare for future epidemics by funding public health — with public dollars.
Honoring those who gave their lives for others, preserving historical memory and maintaining the public’s health are the infrastructure of a humane and just society. All of it should be written into President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Leslie J. Reagan is a historian of medicine, war and memory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of “Dangerous Pregnancies” about the 1960s German measles pandemic and a Public Voices Op-Ed Project Fellow.
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