UNKNOWN SOLDIERS
Last March, as we locked down for the first time and, as a nation, began to acknowledge the dangers of this pandemic, a friend said to me, “this will be a world-changing event, just like 9/11. Nothing will ever be the same after this.” Indeed, life feels forever altered. Still, the comparison to 9/11 is interesting both in the ways that it works, and the ways that it doesn’t.
I moved to New York City to begin my masters degree at the Manhattan School of Music on August 28th, 2001. Just two weeks later, just under 3,000 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, 2,600 of them just a few miles from my brand new apartment. My new roommate and I spent much of the day on the roof of our apartment building, watching the fighter jets circle the city as we stared down at the giant towers of black smoke rising from the south end of Manhattan. Nothing was the same after that day. 20 years later we have largely ceded our right to privacy, embarked on endless wars that have claimed hundreds of thousands lives, and we still mourn those lost on that terrible day. As our communities are ravaged by Coronavirus in almost unconceivable ways, are we responding with the same gravity?
According the New York Times, 4,101 people died of complications due to the coronavirus on January 27th, 2021. That is in addition to the 4,098 people who died the day before and the 3,868 who died the day after. The 7-day average daily death rate that week hovered around 3,300 people per day. As of this writing, COVID-19 has claimed 446,561 American lives. Worldwide, it has claimed over 2.2 million lives. Yet despite all of these statistics, unlike 9/11, so many leaders, institutions, and everyday people seem unfazed and unwilling to recognize the weight of this appalling tragedy. We struggle to balance our focus on coronavirus with other issues, some worthy (Black Lives Matter) and some not (“stolen elections”). We debate the importance of wearing a mask (it’s important), we speculate when we will be able to get vaccinated (not soon enough), and we worry about those who refuse to get vaccinated (they should). What I don’t find myself doing nearly enough is mourning the dead.
The president and vice president and memorialize victims of the COVID-19 pandemic on January 19, 2021 | SOURCE: NPR
When I talk about the dead, it’s about which communities are being hardest hit by the virus (the poor and communities of color). The only stage of grief that seems to raise its head is that of anger. It was only within the last couple of weeks that we had any sort of national leadership pause for the first time to memorialize the nearly half million Americans who have been taken by this horrible disease. The one story of an individual dying of COVID I saw get highlighted towards the end of 2020 was that of a 52-year-old Black doctor who was ignored and mistreated by her doctors in an Indiana hospital. I found myself raging about the racism that unjustly carried this woman to death’s door. In these overwhelming times, I’m finding it so much easier to access anger than to sit with grief.
While I know that anger is a part of grief – one of its stages – I worry I’m not taking enough time to mourn. And maybe it’s because it’s simply too overwhelming. The numbers are just too big to comprehend. It also might be because one of the biggest challenges this virus poses is that it makes it impossible for us to gather as a community. Staring at our screens in isolation all day numbs us to these stories, reducing them to simple facts and figures, stripping them of their humanity. As much as our screens make it possible to connect during this time in which face-to-face contact is ill-advised, they also disconnect us, making the world around us seem increasingly like some sort of TV show or virtual reality.
In the spirit of mourning those who are lost, Myra and I offer this Benjamin Britten arrangement of a song by Charles Dibdin called Tom Bowling. It’s said that Dibdin fashioned the song after his brother, the Captain Tom Dibdin, who died at sea. Whatever the truth of the story behind the song, it’s a beautiful remembrance of a lost friend, colleague and family member who was clearly beloved by many. Thinking of the song in the context of today, there is something about it that feels like a sort of musical Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – a memorial to those who have died, but haven’t been identified. To those of you who have lost loved ones through all of this, I hope you will accept this as tiny memorial to those many souls who have left us because of this horrible pandemic.
arr. BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Tom Bowling with Myra Huang, piano