Grappling With a Terrible Milestone: One Hundred Thousand Dead
To mourn in a moment of collective trauma is to experience not one but multiple layers of loss.
Two years ago, after becoming sick with a virus that led to pneumonia, my 71-year-old father died unexpectedly of a blood clot at NYU’s hospital. My brothers and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and on the day of my father’s death in March—one of those balmy days when the pivot from winter to spring sings along your skin—I found myself mourning not just his death, but the fact that he had been alone when he died, without ceremony, without goodbyes, without family or friends or his beloved book collection around him. He died without any of the bulwarks against meaninglessness that we spend our lives carefully knitting into being.
Recently, I’ve heard from many people about how hard it is
