Acknowledging Loss At The National Mall Covid-19 Memorial
Entrance to the memorial installation on October 3, 2021.
A few weeks ago, I went to view Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg’s installation, In America: Remember, that was located for seventeen days on the National Mall here in Washington, DC. The installation consisted of hundreds of thousands of white marking flags arranged in a grid around the northern grounds of the Washington Monument, with each flag symbolizing one life lost to Covid-19. There were 670,032 flags on the first day of the installation on September 17 and 700,975 when I visited on the installation’s last day. The field of flags waving with the wind was as beautiful as it was horrific.
Standing among the flags, this felt like one of the first spaces designated specifically for grief and closure. With so many funerals delayed or cancelled as a result of the public health crisis, we have collectively been holding in the pain of loss. A member of my family was one of the many who died as Covid-19 outbreaks tore through our nation’s nursing homes, and a funeral in the summer of 2020 was not possible. This piece of public land was the first physical commemoration of his death and I came to think of these few square inches of public land to be his resting place. In the days and weeks after my visit, I thought more about how the way we represent loss has changed throughout the pandemic and the role of memorials as a place to collectively grieve.
Lists of Names
Contemporary memorial design frequently uses the arrangement of names of the deceased within the memorial as a critical design element. The World Trade Center Memorial in New York City, by Michael Arad and PWP, arranged names among the bronze panels lining the two pools in the footprints of the original WTC buildings based on relationships between the 2,983 deceased. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC lists the names of the deceased chronologically by date of casualty, with the first and last casualties meeting together in the center of the memorial. The listing of 58,318 casualties in dark polished granite gives physical form to the feeling of deep and continued loss that stays with you long after a visit.
Sometimes direct acknowledgement of each individual death is harder to convey in a coherent way or it is too great in magnitude. Abstraction can be used to express larger themes of loss or death, like the concrete stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin by Peter Eisenman.
Evolution of Pandemic Memorials
It is difficult, bordering on impossible, to make legible connections among the dead or to even design a permanent memorial when we are still actively living in the pandemic. Our acknowledgement of loss evolved as the numbers of Covid-19 fatalities quickly rose. Memorials, both physical and in media, began as a way to humanize individual lives lost during a period of unprecedented physical and social separation and evolved into abstractions that represented the scale of the tremendous loss we were experiencing.
As the United States crossed the threshold of 100,000 dead in May 2020, the New York Times listed the names of 1,000 of those with a micro-obituary that spoke to the personality of those lost. There was an effort during this time to represent the individuals behind the deaths, as illustrated in the NYT subhed, “They Were Not Simply Names on a List. They Were Us.”
An August 2020 installation on Belle Isle in Detroit included placards commemorating the lives of 907 people who had died from Covid-19 staked along the vehicular route of the park. This memorial began from a frustration and lack of closure that came from restrictions on funerals and burials during the public health crisis. As the numbers of dead rose throughout the country, individual loss became more universal, and the sheer magnitude was attributed to poor leadership, rampant misinformation, and inequality.
To commemorate the 200,000th death from Covid-19 on Sept 21, 2020, the New York Times featured a photo of the yard of Shane Reilly, an artist in Austin, Texas who had planted a flag in his yard for each Covid-19 death in Texas. Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg’s first installation of white flags, In America: How Could This Happen…, ran from October through November 2020 near the DC Armory. As the United States approached its 500,000th death from Covid-19, the New York Times represented each individual as a dot in a timeline graphic on its front page in February 2021.
Memorial As Protest
A memorial serves to be a place of mourning and healing, a cultural touchstone that reinforces shared values, a place of remembrance, and a symbol of gratitude and recognition. When we are less far removed from the events and people we are memorializing, the memorial itself can be seen as protest or political expression. The location – on axis with the White House, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, and among the memorials to the dead and wounded from the United States’ wars – puts the sheer magnitude of the loss and those affected in the face of President Biden whenever he looks out the window. It can also serve as proof to those who have been misled into thinking the pandemic is a hoax or a striking visual that could convince one to get vaccinated.
The location also serves as a perfect metaphor for the way this country has addressed the pandemic. On a sunny, clear, October day, the Mall was packed with visitors touring the monumental core. The somber tone of the installation was broken by the sounds of tourists taking selfies among the flags of the dead, and the relentless music of an ice cream truck that had parked adjacent to the memorial to capitalize on the increase of visitors in that location. If commerce was prioritized above public health during the real pandemic, it was appropriate that it overshadowed the memorial to those who died as a result.