More Than a Number

When veteran National Public Radio broadcaster Paul Ingles introduced A Sudden Loss, a two-part series to memorialize the thousands of people whose lives have been cut short by COVID-19, he told listeners that “there is too much attention to stats, and not enough to story.”

A Sudden Loss was meant to counter this. By focusing on the personalities and achievements of those who have died, Ingles intended to humanize the numbers and explicate the losses to families and communities in painfully real detail.

“We did not want to create a morbid list of the dead,” Parris explains, “we wanted to create a celebration of people’s lives, with stories about them, anecdotes about what made them special.”

Other sobering memorials have cropped up in a wide array of print and online publications—from The New York Times to the Star Tribune in Minnesota—and a host of internet-based tribute pages have been created by family members and friends of the deceased. Artists—including Robin Bell, previously known for projecting “Experts Agree: Trump is a Pig” onto the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.—have also found ways to pay homage.

In mid-April, Bell, along with artist Duncan Meisel, projected enormous photos of people who have died alongside short statements about the individuals depicted onto buildings in the nation’s capital. “We will remember,” the image told viewers. “He fought but it wasn’t enough. My brother just passed away,” read another portrait.

In New York City, once the epicenter of the pandemic, Missing Them was started as a crowd-sourced digital archive to honor the victims of the virus. Founded by The City, a New York-based daily online news source, Columbia University’s stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, and The City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, participating in Missing Them is easy: Family members and friends can text, email, or phone-in information for inclusion on the site.

“In normal times, less than five percent of people who die get written obituaries,” Terry Parris Jr., engagement director at The City tells The Progressive. “The percentage tends to be even lower for Black and Latinx people. Knowing this, we realized that many of the obituaries we were seeing skewed to older, white males from Manhattan, as opposed to people from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, where the majority of deaths were occurring.”

But this was not their only realization. Parris reports that he and his colleagues understood that the ways people were grieving had also changed, and former ways of mourning a loved one—an in-person wake, a funeral, sitting Shiva, or participating in other ceremonies—were no longer possible.

“We did not want to create a morbid list of the dead,” Parris explains, “we wanted to create a celebration of people’s lives, with stories about them, anecdotes about what made them special.” 

To be as inclusive as possible, Parris and a team of graduate students reached out to interfaith networks, individual congregations, local ethnic press outlets, tenant groups, and advocates for the homeless, among other community groups. By early July, they had written 1,263 obituaries, or 5.4 percent of the city’s total deaths from COVID-19.

Among them:

·        Edith Eaker, eighty-seven, of Queens. An immigrant from Hungary who fled Nazi persecution at age seven. She taught English as a Second Language for more than two decades and died nine days after her husband;

·        Abul Hossain, sixty-two, of Queens. An immigrant from Bangladesh who drove a taxi and spent his free time gardening and cooking. “He made fresh food for his daughter’s cat, Maco;”

·        Ann Kross, ninety-four, of the Bronx. She worked two jobs to make sure that her four daughters were able to attend college, something she was never able to do herself;

·        Frantz Utal, thirty-two, of Brooklyn. An immigrant from Haiti, he enjoyed dancing and joking with patients in the medical office in which he worked before succumbing to the virus.

“Writing about this is heavy stuff,” Parris says, which is why those composing obituaries for Missing Them—largely graduate students—are in frequent touch with others doing similar work throughout the country. “We’re looking at and discussing how memorial projects around the United States can come together and discuss best practices for staying sane and motivated.” 

“This is obviously a work in progress and it is something we’re doing on top of our other reporting,” he adds. “Working remotely, and not in a newsroom, makes this harder, but we encourage everyone involved in Missing Them to take breaks, talk to an editor if the emotional toll gets to be too much, and intersperse writing obituaries with other tasks. We’ve found that it’s essential to stay connected to each other and communicate how we’re feeling.”

This is especially true, because Missing Them is not going to be a short-term effort. 

“The reality,” Paris told me , “is that this is going to be an ongoing project since tens of thousands of New York City’s dead still remain unacknowledged in a public way. We expect that the more we reach out, the more people will connect with us to tell us about their loved ones.”

Parris notes that he is particularly heartened by the response to Missing Them, including requests from people hoping to lend a hand to the project. “We hope to bring people on as volunteers at the end of August,” he continues. “With a level of loss as large as what we’re seeing with COVID-19, we’re eager to launch a much larger memorial tribute that includes as many of the dead as possible.”

To contact The City with information about a lost loved one, text REMEMBER to 73224, email memorial@thecity.nyc, or call 646-494-1095.