A long, dark year: How should we deal with the loss COVID-19 has wrought?

This month marks a full year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been a year of daily death tolls, infection rates, job losses, and business closures. It’s been a year of widening income inequality and unequal disease burdens for people of color and frontline workers. And it’s been a year of widespread depression, anxiety and drug and alcohol abuse.

Vaccines are, of course, our one bright anniversary gift of hope, but even here we find anxiety, inequality, and uncertainty about who gets them, and how long they must wait. And to add just one more thing to worry about, now we are in a race between vaccination and the proliferation of new variants of the virus.

Many of us are exhausted by it all, and emotionally and spiritually paralyzed by the scale of death and suffering.

In response, Interfaith Works, a non-profit alliance of diverse local faith communities, is holding a “week of recognition and healing.” It is inviting people to post their own COVID-related stories for a series called “Our Shared Journey” on the IFW Facebook page. On Saturday, they held a gathering at Percival Landing, and throughout the coming week faith communities will host mostly online commemorations designed to reach out to people both inside and outside their own traditions.

IFW leaders think it’s time to move from just coping to taking time for deeper reflection. They suggest we need to make time for grief, for mourning, and for finding ways to heal together. We agree.

How do we even fathom the loss of 450,000 Americans and counting? How do we incorporate the 2.2 million deaths worldwide into our understanding of the scale of suffering? These questions are being asked across the country and around the world. But distance and big numbers create a kind of remoteness and abstraction, especially when we compare what’s happening in Los Angeles or South Africa with what we experience here at home.

We are fortunate to live in a state that is among those with the lowest fatality rates. And thanks in part to a predominantly pro-masking population, Thurston County has held its deaths to 63 so far. We can comprehend and empathize with the sadness of 63 lost lives and bereaved families and friends.

Many of us remain untouched by the virus, but our numbers are shrinking as the months wear on. Over time, more of us have come to know someone who’s been sick, or someone who has died. More of us have had close calls with exposure.

In all of this, there is a subterranean sense of guilt and shame. In every pandemic death, there is the potential for blame — blame for everyone who has exposed another. There is also a shadow of guilt over those of us who benefit from privileges and safety that others lack. Survivors’ guilt lurks everywhere. In the briefest encounter with a store clerk, we know that when we go home, that clerk still faces a long shift of interactions with scores of potentially infectious strangers.

Last March, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times about the power of guilt and shame following the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, during which many people refused to care for the sick even in their own families. The piece was titled “Pandemics kill compassion too.”

“When it was over,” Brooks writes, “people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed.” The one exception to shame, he writes, was the heroism of health care workers.

Today, our burden of regret is not about neglect of the sick; it’s about the inequities and injustices the pandemic has laid bare, the issues surrounding exposure of others, and our natural resistance to fully experiencing the grief this pandemic warrants.

That’s why Interfaith Works’ focus on helping people search for comfort, release and healing is so vital.

Part of that conversation will be about how, when this is over, our community can memorialize the pandemic, and the lives lost to it. Should there be yet another monument on the Capitol Campus? A sculpture at Percival Landing? Can our arts community, or anyone else, generate more innovative ideas?

We need — for our own moral health — to remember this pandemic, and to recognize it as an important part of our community’s, our country’s, and humanity’s history. For a very long time to come, we will need to reflect on how it changed us, what it taught us about ourselves, and how we can correct the conditions that made it so rampant, and its burdens so unequally borne.