Covid flags no longer fly – but families’ grief remains
The monument to grief on the National Mall was never built to last.
The sea of white flags, one for each Covid victim, rustled in the wind and shimmered in the sunlight for a time, simply asking passersby to consider those who died too soon:
“Dante Montreal. He liked turtles.” “Will I ever stop thinking, ‘I want my mommy?’”
“Warner Lee Timmons. Beloved husband, father and grandfather who served his country but died unnecessarily when his country let him down.”
The ink on some tributes has faded, but the messages endure.
The urgency of remembering has only deepened for survivors as America moves further from the World Health Organisation’s declaration of a coronavirus pandemic, four years ago this month.
To artist and former hospice volunteer Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, who is archiving 20,000 flags from the memorial with anthropology professor Sarah E Wagner, the nation’s reckoning with loss is just beginning. Nearly 1.2 million people in America have perished, federal data shows. “We’re running from a burning building. We’re not ready to stop and look back at the largest slow-motion casualty event in US history,” Firstenberg said.
The flags were installed outside RFK Stadium in Washington from late October through November 2020 and on the Mall from September 17 to October 3 in 2021. The Washington Post talked to some of the people who dedicated flags about what the memorial, In America: Remember, meant to them.
The doctor’s widow
Margie Eyman Perez had to do something with her grief, so she volunteered to help others with theirs.
She was on the Mall when she met the couple who wanted to dedicate a flag to their doctor – a man known for his sense of humour and for taking his time with patients.
“What was his name?” she asked them. “Steven John Perez,” they said.
“I’m Dr Perez’s widow,” she said. They hugged. Later, she would learn that two other families had dedicated flags to her husband, a former military physician to presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush who went on to build a practice with 3000 patients.
He was devoted to them, she recalled, continuing to see elderly patients in person as the virus began to rage. Then, on April 20, 2020, he came home sick, too.
Within days, he was on a ventilator, and then in a medically induced coma. By May 7, it was time.
She played Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, placed her gloved hand over his gloved hand and “watched the heartbeat on the machine just click down slowly”, she recalled.
She took the Metro home from George Washington University Hospital to Chantilly, Virginia, sobbing the whole way.
The National Institutes of Health autopsied his body to study the effects of Covid. His ashes were interred at the National Memorial Cemetery at Quantico. At a drive-through funeral, family and friends spent two hours passing tents filled with some of his favourite things: a poster from the Washington Nationals 2019 World Series baseball win, golf clubs, a chair from the front porch where he loved to read.
Most of all, he put others first. So months later, when Margie Eyman Perez heard about the exhibit, she was all in – teaming up to re-plant thousands of flags from an earlier iteration of the installation even as a thunderstorm bore down.
“It was empowering. It wasn’t just my grief; it was a collective grief down there,” she said.
A sister grieves
Debbie Darling Norris, 65, took every pandemic precaution and followed every rule, finding comfort in what little she could control. Then, Covid came for her sister.
Wendy Darling-Minore, 60, entered a Florida hospital in the fall of 2020 and never left.
Social distancing rules would delay a memorial service, leaving Norris, of Germantown, Maryland, to shoulder the loss alone. A memorial of flags at RFK Stadium in Washington gave her a ritual; “a place to put my grief”, she said.
She returned often and helped break down the site, bonding with other helpers who would jokingly ask each other, “what are you in for?”.
When the exhibit moved to the Mall in September 2021, she transcribed digital messages onto flags with permanent marker for people who couldn’t be there.
The messages captured a range of emotions, from anger to bittersweet memories, Norris said.
“It’s an awful thing: not being able to grieve,” Norris said. “The wind and the way the flags fluttered – you could see the grief go.”
Without the peace she felt among the flags, Norris said, she might have fallen into despair. She and several other volunteers involved in the exhibit expressed support in interviews for a permanent memorial, a quiet place to remember lives lost to the pandemic.
For many, the jumble of emotions was complicated by others’ distrust for public health institutions.
“It was really hard in those days not to judge people for their beliefs because we were all so confused in the beginning,” Norris said. “And some people are still confused.”
A son’s memoir
When Nicholas Montemarano’s parents were diagnosed with Covid a few days before Christmas in 2020, he was more worried about his father, who had preexisting conditions.
The doctor gave Catherine Montemarano, 79, steroids and antibiotics and sent her home, but her fever rose and she was admitted to an Indiana hospital on New Year’s Eve.
But by January 6, 2021, the doctor summoned the family. Nicholas Montemarano drove 600 miles from his home, worrying about his mother as the insurrection unfolded at the US Capitol. For a while, her health seemed to improve, but soon doctors were recommending palliative care.
On January 15, doctors allowed Montemarano and his twin sister, a nurse, to blanket themselves in personal protective equipment and be there for the final day of their mother’s life.
“I just cannot imagine how much harder it would have been and would still be if we were not able to be with her,” he said.
The family held a Mass with 10 people, including his wife and son. A legal secretary, a Catholic and devoted grandmother of three, Catherine Montemarano supported foster children around the world, writing them letters and sending photos.
Months later, he learned of the flags project from a virtual support group and registered one online, writing, “We miss you, mom”, and drove to DC with his family.