More than 170,000 Americans (officially; likely more) have died of COVID, rates are still skyrocketing, schools are opening.

Why haven't we been able to grasp the enormity of this?
To process how massive these numbers are?

I have a theory. It's about ritual.

1/x Thread.

One of the biggest national tragedies that many of us lived through was 9/11.

About 3000 people died, then.

We mourned all together somehow, wept together, people came together to help look for people, there were places where people put photos and flowers and etc.

(It also began a massive wave of the government and civilians targeting Muslims and a couple of terrible wars, I am not talking about that).

But because 9/11 was a discrete event, there was a possibility of national mourning--it started, it ended, people tried to take care of each other in the aftermath, there was a process of sifting through feelings of loss and vulnerability and bewilderment and everything else.

When someone dies as part of regular life, in most cultures there are rituals around burial or cremation or etc, there are certain kinds of spaces that get held afterwards for the people who are in mourning, and there is the moving on.

In Judaism, after someone is buried, mourners sit shiva--stay home for seven days and receive the community, who comes to comfort us. On the last day of shiva, we take a ritual walk around the block, symbolizing our return to the world. Then there's another mourning period +

after that, which ends at either 30 days or 11 mos, depending on the mourner's relationship to the deceased. During that time, the mourner is going to synagogue to say the mourner's kaddish (a prayer) in community. Then it ends, and we do stuff to mark the end of that time, too.

We set aside a time for mourning, & then we mark the reintegrations, on various levels, back into regular life. We say, OK, shiva is over, I'll go back to work but I won't, say, go to certain kinds of celebrations. Then we say, OK, even that period is over, back to regular life.

It's not like you're done with grief after you're done formally mourning, but we have time dedicated to certain parts of the process. We make choices to set aside time, to mark this death in specific ways. To make space for the feelings, to say: this isn't regular time now.

It helps. It really does. At least in my experience.

We mark important things, we say: this is real, it happened, and it mattered.

And when 9/11 happened, people marked that as well, spontaneously, intuitively. They created ritual space, in a way.

Now? Now we can't even go to the funerals of our own close friends and family. Instead of going to someone's house with kugel or cookies to pay a shiva call, we have shiva over Zoom. We are all alone in our own spaces, things feel distant, disembodied.

Something powerful happens when you go to a shiva house and give your friend a hug. Something powerful happened when people showed up to Ground Zero with photos and flowers. And hugs.

We don't have access to that now.

Think about the AIDS quilt, and the impact it had. Embodying, viscerally, so much loss, so much devastation.

Now we are in our homes, overwhelmed, numb, doomscrolling, with too many stories to make sense of, with stories of death next to fascism and funny tweets or whatever.

We as a country have not made space to hold the enormity of this loss. Of more than one hundred seventy thousand precious, irreplaceable lives.

And part of the reason also is that it's not over. This thing is still happening. And we're all still very much at risk.

When going to the grocery store can be the thing that causes your death, you know--the danger is still here, now, ongoing, for months and months, with no known end in sight.

Ritual has a beginning, a middle, & an end. This tragedy doesn't even yet have a known beginning, middle and end.

We maybe know when it began--most people in the US would probably say early- /mid-March. But we don't know where the end is, how far we are in the middle, or where we fit into this story.

We don't yet know if we will have survived.

So it's hard to figure out what the ritual space is for something that is simultaneously fear and mourning, grief and unknown, loss and trying to figure out what to do about the first day of school. It's hard to mark one thing when there are so many things.

But I believe that part of why we haven't been able to process all this loss--and to understand what this loss means (and to let that matter, and maybe even impact our behavior) is because the ways we might normally do that aren't as clear.

(It is clearly not the only reason. Even leaving aside the profound leadership failures that have happened this year, we are a country that has endured mass shooting after mass shooting without meaningful gun reform. Denial and exceptionalism have long been a problem.)

(As has racism--the country's tenor around lockdown changed the moment statistics started to indicate that people of color, especially Black people, were dying disproportionately, for reasons that have already been well articulated elsewhere.)

But still but still but still.

I believe that if we had--if we could find a way--to mark these deaths, to give ourselves as a country time and space to mark the enormity of this loss, it would be good for us. In so many ways.

To feel and grieve, to give that space.

Here’s a powerful talk by @drkoach that talks about how to make space for lament, how to lament. Even now, even in the midst of this ongoing tragedy, this ever-evolving, unfinished pandemic. Even now.

Sometimes people ask me to share if I put a thread on the Zuckerplatform, so, here you go: https://www.facebook.com/1445492582387113/posts/2696421670627525/?d=n