The pandemic did not just take lives; it took time from us, accelerating the sense that there was little to life besides work and exhausted doomscrolling. It took so many of the dreams we might have had; it squashed things we were excited for, postponed weddings and parties, concerts, graduations, and holidays, as well as funerals. It took so much of what makes life worth living. It exacerbated already existing heartbreak, loneliness, frustration, and disappointment, accelerating decline already begun in so many parts of America. Philip J. Deloria, in a piece recalling musician Jerry Jeff Walker, asks, “If life and dreams fit seamlessly together, each sustaining the other, then death’s junior partner might be the broken dream—the busting up of futures, loves, lives, the planet itself.” Are the griefs, he asks, for the dead and for our dreams “of a piece, a question not of essence but of scale?”
In our isolation, could we really understand what other people were going through? Perhaps more importantly, can we truly process what we have lost if we have to do it alone?
American history is littered with unmarked, unvisited graves, alongside its more spectacular moments of violence. History does not unroll easily or gradually. It happens in leaps and spurts and—if the overturning of Roe v. Wade taught us nothing else—reversals and retreats too. The spread of capitalism across the world brought fabulous wealth for a few, while spreading disease and violence for far more, its concern for the dead mostly limited to whether there were enough able bodies to carry on production for profit. The diseases brought by European settlers to what is now the United States killed millions of Native people, and while the settlers continued to kill and expropriate Native nations, they also began to kidnap and enslave people from Africa—a journey on which millions more died, as enslavers preferred simply capturing more people than they needed and disposing of bodies to taking even a modicum of care of their captives. No grief was permitted for these dead, and those ungrieved deaths haunt the country still.
The Vaccine Act of 1813, Barnes and Merritt write, was the first time the federal government endorsed a medical practice of any sort, or got involved in the distribution of medication, in this case the smallpox vaccine. But the vaccine was never intended for everyone—as Mary Kathryn Nagle writes, Lewis and Clark traveled through multiple tribal nations bearing the smallpox vaccine but did not share it with the people whose land they were traversing, who continued to be devastated by the disease. (Now, in 2022, the smallpox vaccine is being revived for use against monkeypox.)