Amid pandemic, words help bear witness to mourning
We are all living together in a time of loss. We are cut off from our customary public rituals of mourning. By bearing public witness to that mourning, we can better process the losses we have suffered as a community.
As a former resident of the Capital Region, I attended many public rituals of mourning in
Albany. My grandfather was buried in Memory Gardens in Colonie, my father in Saint Agnes Cemetery in Menands. Their funerals were opportunities for personal grief and public remembrance to come together. My heart goes out to those who cannot gather in community to remember lost loved ones during this terrible time.
Public witnessing has always been integral to the process of living through catastrophe. However, writing is also a powerful form of witness. At this time, when it is difficult to gather and witness death as a community, our media, such as local newspapers, steps in to help us witness. They may do so by showing us a graph of fatalities in our state, providing us with information about overcrowded hospitals, or presenting us with footage of chaotic emergency rooms. An article might identify community members who have recently died of COVID -19 by their gender and age — “a man in his 50s” and “a woman in her 70s.” This information can help
us understand the loss in our communities in terms of demographics and statistics. But a graph cannot replace the importance of personal remembering and witnessing during a time of great public death and grieving. A graph cannot give a face and name to the death happening around us.
As a poet and writing teacher, I teach students that writing can be a tool that helps them understand and cope with lived experience. In the case of traumatic or painful experience, this is particularly true. Poets have special forms just for honoring the dead. Some of the greatest poems ever written are elegies, written in the time of mourning. Elegies were sometimes delivered at public rituals. They offered people a way of personalizing and humanizing the public experience of loss. They represented one way to bridge the divide between private grief and public memory.
You don’t have to be a great poet to use writing as a form of witnessing. When I was recently researching the history of the Spanish flu, I learned about a Vermonter named Dorman Kent who used his journal to record the names of the dead. He inscribed their names and the date and time of their passing. He also included some personal details explaining his connection to the person who had passed.
Kent’s small personal act is touching to consider as we endure our own epidemic a century later. The combined impacts of quarantine and an already-isolating media culture can leave us feeling personally and publicly detached from the human loss around us. We can move against this detachment by finding our own ways of using personal writing to remember.
We should also continue to be creative in finding ways to bridge personal grief and public memory. Memorial rituals can be reinvented for a time of contagion, and we can use writing to do it. For example, a public wall could be converted into a chalkboard and individuals could be invited to bring their own chalk and contribute lines about the people they ’ve lost.
The news media carries a great responsibility to bear witness for us during this time, and I am grateful. However, we should not expect others to be our witnesses.
We should become a community again by being witnesses to each other.