A thought on the numbers of the dying we're seeing right now, and the people we know and we admired who may have passed:

Death has a finality we're not prepared for. In numbers, it is even harder to fathom. It hurts.

And we can't stop people from dying - we truly cannot.

One of the hardest things about death is giving it dignity. A good response to death is to make sure that person's life mattered: That they are memorialized, that they are remembered in love, or, if we didn't know them, that their death was not in vain.

Right now people are dying anonymously. We see only numbers, not faces. There is a place for the media to address this with group obits: I've written threads about that, as have @froomkin and @hhavrilesky.

Art has a role too. We will see paintings, songs, shows about this.

Dying anonymously lacks dignity. Unmarked deaths create fear. This is a way we can wrap our minds around death, to see the life within it:

That they were seen and that we pay tribute, that we remember they walked this earth, that we respect the effort and beauty of their lives

We can pay tribute to the individual life or we can also work to make sure that the conditions that led to someone's death don't happen again. For thousands of the coronavirus dead, that's all we can do.

How we pay tribute to those lives varies. We can donate to GoFundMes, we can tweet with respect and love about those lost. There is no one way to grieve and appreciate lives; all ways are valid, both public and private.

We can also ask more of our elected representatives. Faced with a crisis, Congress called a recess. Trump was mocked for saying he has total power, but he's right, in a way: Right now, he rules alone. Congress has abdicated responsibility.

One way of showing that deaths from coronavirus do matter is to reach out to your elected representatives however you can, and let them know they need to work. We need them active in communities. We need them to have plans to help advocacy, whatever constituents need.