Recent calls for a memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic bring to mind the fifty-year moratorium Pericles instituted in rebuilding the Athenian Acropolis in the wake of its destruction at the hands of the Persian army in 480 BCE. The ruin was to be a memorial of sorts, a reminder of impermanence that would speak to the healing work of time and confronting tragedy. That Athenians did not wait that long doesn’t spoil the idea. What to make of impatience in the midst of a pandemic? Few people would throatily reject the creation of a national pandemic memorial, even fewer more modest local ones. To memorialize the pandemic seems right, even necessary, to commemorate the collective trauma people have experienced since early 2020, when the Covid-19 virus turned so many American lives upside down. In fact, as a demonstrably global phenomenon, the pandemic has spurred calls for memorials all over the world. The history of memorials should give us pause and help us reflect on how to go about such a thing, or wonder if a memorial is the right medium at all.
First, one might think it unusual to plan a memorial before the event is decisively over. How can we possibly take the measure of the pandemic in a mature way before we know its end game? What if it never ends and becomes a permanent part of our lives? Indeed, most memorials are dedicated to events that are concluded or that people imagine to be. It turns out, however, that memorials are frequently planned before knowing the outcome of an event. During World War II, people on the American homefront debated the merits of different forms of commemoration. Advocates of so called “living memorials”—useful interventions such as civic buildings, parks, and highways—condemned those who favored conventional memorials such as columns, statues, and arches. At least since the Civil War, Americans have debated memorials long before conflicts were decided.
Such preemptive talk of memorials—and in some cases, preemptive intervention—does something other than memorialize in any strict sense. It is about understanding the event in real time by way of an anticipated or invented retrospection. For instance, in November, 2020, a year before Omicron altered the course of the pandemic, The Atlantic Monthly published a piece called “How Will the Future Remember Covid-19?” Such attempts to look at the past through the invented mirror of the future offer the comfort of imagining the world after the disaster. It expedites collective consideration of an event and welcomes the beginning of the grieving process.