Thu, Feb 04, 2021 page9

• History suggests that we might forget the COVID-19 pandemic sooner than we think

  Even the Spanish flu quickly faded from collective memory, and we must ensure that the same does not happen again

  • By Jonathan Freedland / The Guardian
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  One day, this will all be over. That is hard to believe now, when even last month seemed interminable, the January that refused to end.

  However, one day, not soon perhaps, we will speak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the past tense. When that time comes, how will we remember the plague that visited death upon us?

  So far, the act of remembering has been deferred or even forbidden. Second only to the deaths themselves, perhaps the greatest pain COVID-19 has inflicted has been its denial of the right to say goodbye.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  Quarantine rules have kept people from the bedsides of loved ones in their final hours, their parting words exchanged by telephone or left unsaid.

  I am still haunted by the story of an early victim of the virus, a 13-year-old boy whose family had to stay away from their child’s funeral.

  For many, that most intimate of rituals has come via livestream: better than nothing, but remote in every sense.

  Even those who are able to bury their dead in person have had to keep their distance from one another, denied the consolation of touch.

  I lost my much-loved cousin Ruth to COVID-19 in April last year. A memorial service for her was scheduled for the spring of this year, on the assumption that the crisis would surely have passed by then. Now it has been postponed indefinitely.

  It is a bit like that for society as a whole, delaying the moment of collective mourning until we can be certain that it is all over. Last week, the UK’s death toll passed 100,000, the highest rate in the world.

  That offered an opening for contemplation — with plenty of graphics to make sense of such an unimaginably large number — but it was not quite mourning. The signals from the top are that commemoration, like the learning of lessons, would have to wait.

  In the US, public expressions of grief were suppressed until last month because then-US president Donald Trump could not bring himself to utter so much as a word of recognition of the dead, let alone consolation for the bereaved. US President Joe Biden sought to make amends with a modest ceremony — 400 lights and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah — on the eve of his inauguration, but it released only a trickle of the sorrow that is pent up, waiting for the dam to break.

  Even when the mortal danger has passed, will there be a process of collective remembering? Instinctively, you assume that the answer has to be yes. After all, this has been an upending event on a global scale, one that has touched us all.

  Given that we still cherish ceremonies and monuments that recall the horrors of long-distant wars, including one fought a century ago, surely we would soon devise fresh rituals to channel this new collective sorrow.

  History suggests that we might not.

  Look around almost any British town or village and you would see a war memorial, usually first built to honor the fallen of 1914 to 1918. However scour the UK and the rest of the world, and you would struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of World War I’s end, took many more lives.

  The war killed some 17 million people, but the Spanish flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet — a total of 500 million — leaving 50 million to 100 million dead.

  The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes: “There is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington” for any of them.

  The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.

  Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of humans as “the storytelling animal.”

  Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders, and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time.

  Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe, and the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918 to 1920 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.

  Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive.

  COVID-19 is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphize it, an invisible and faceless virus.

  That matters because commemoration is necessarily a moral exercise. Think of the way we marked International Holocaust Memorial Day last week, lighting candles and telling the stories of those who survived or resisted the Nazi menace.

  We cast the past as a moral test, judging who passed and who failed. Wars can be remembered proudly by those who won, and even by those who lost: Witness the Confederate statues put up in the early 20th century to honor what white racists in the southern US believed was a noble if lost cause.

  A mass illness does not invite that kind of remembering. The bereaved cannot console themselves that the dead made a sacrifice for some higher cause, or even that they were victims in an epic moral event, because they did not and were not. To die of the Spanish flu or COVID-19 is to have had the most terrible bad luck.

  That is especially true when a virus is as indiscriminate as the Spanish flu was affecting everyone, everywhere.

  The global number killed by illnesses related to HIV/AIDS since 1981 is a staggering 35 million, most of them in Africa. That epidemic, too, has scarcely had the commemoration such a toll should command.

  However, as the absorbing British drama series It’s a Sin demonstrates, just as the drama Angels in America did before it, HIV/AIDS lends itself to storytelling precisely because that disease seemed to single out one group in particular. There is a moral story to be told about that first phase of the disease, a story of prejudice, bigotry and shame.

  In this sense, COVID-19 is more like the Spanish flu, which, as Mark Honigsbaum, a medical historian, writes, cut “across social, sexual and ethnic lines,” and so “did not become a vehicle for stigma or a motor for outrage.”

  Lacking those elements, the current pandemic could eventually be enveloped in the same cultural amnesia that surrounded the one that struck a century earlier.

  There is one last piece of common ground between these two events, one that might further encourage forgetting.

  Historians specializing in the Spanish flu speak of “contagion guilt,” as the living asked themselves whether they might have inadvertently infected and killed a mother, a daughter, a son.

  Relatives of those who die in battle might also be cursed by guilt, but it will rarely be so direct.

  We are practiced in the collective memory of war, but with pandemics, we do something different.

  “We remember them individually, not collectively,” Spinney said. “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”

  That is what the precedent of 1918 suggests we would likely do this time, and yet, I cannot help but hope that it is wrong.

  When this is over, I hope we take each other’s hands and remember this strange, dark period together — even if we spent so much of it apart, so much of it alone.
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