History suggests we may forget the pandemic sooner than we think
One day this will all be over. That’s hard to believe now, when even this month seems interminable, the January that refused to end. But one day, not soon perhaps, we will speak of the pandemic in the past tense. When that time comes, how will we remember the plague that visited death upon us?
So far, the act of remembering has been deferred or even forbidden. Second only to the deaths themselves, perhaps the greatest pain the coronavirus has inflicted has been its denial of the right to say goodbye. Quarantine rules have kept people from the bedsides of loved ones in their final hours, their parting words exchanged by phone or left unsaid. I’m still haunted by the story of an early victim of the virus, a 13-year-old boy whose family had to stay away from their child’s funeral. For many, that most intimate of rituals has come via a livestream: better than nothing, but remote in every sense. Even those able to bury their dead in person have had to keep their distance from one another, denied the consolation of touch.
I lost my much-loved cousin Ruth to Covid in April. A memorial service for her was scheduled for spring 2021, on the assumption that the crisis would surely have passed by then. Now it has been postponed indefinitely.
It’s a bit like that for society as a whole, delaying the moment of collective mourning until we can be certain it’s all over. This week the UK death toll passed 100,000, the highest rate in the world. That offered an opening for contemplation – with plenty of graphics to make sense of such an unimaginably large number – but it was not quite mourning. The signals from the top are that commemoration, like the learning of lessons, will have to wait.
In the US, public expressions of grief were suppressed until last week because Donald Trump could not bring himself to utter so much as a word of recognition of the dead, let alone consolation for the bereaved. Joe Biden sought to make amends with a modest ceremony – 400 lights and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – on the eve of his inauguration, but it released only a trickle of the sorrow that is pent up, waiting for the dam to break.
But even when the mortal danger has passed, will there be a process of collective remembering? Instinctively, you assume the answer has to be yes. After all, this has been an upending event on a global scale, one that has touched us all. Given that we still cherish ceremonies and monuments that recall the horrors of long-distant wars, including one fought a century ago, surely we will soon devise fresh rituals to channel this new collective sorrow.
History suggests we may not. Look around almost any British town or village and you will see a war memorial, usually first built to honour the fallen of 1914 to 1918. But scour this country and the rest of the world, and you will struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of the war’s end, took many more lives. The first world war killed some 17 million people, but the “Spanish” flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet – a total of 500 million – leaving between 50 million and 100 million dead. The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes, “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC” for any of them. The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.
Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of man as “the storytelling animal”. Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time. Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe. And the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918-20 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.
Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus. That matters because commemoration is necessarily a moral exercise. Think of the way we marked Holocaust Memorial Day this week, lighting candles and telling the stories of those who survived or resisted the Nazi menace. We cast the past as a moral test, judging who passed and who failed. Wars can be remembered proudly by those who won, and even by those who lost: witness the Confederate statues put up in the early 20th century to honour what white racist southerners believed was a noble if lost cause.
A mass illness does not invite that kind of remembering. The bereaved cannot console themselves that the dead made a sacrifice for some higher cause, or even that they were victims in an epic moral event, because they did