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has died of COVID, accompanied by a memorial wall with each person’s name. The architecture firm Gómez Platero has unveiled a design for a “World Memorial to the Pandemic” to be built on the coast of Uruguay, which would aim to be a universal site of mourning and reflection. WaterFire’s Beacon of Hope was a spontaneous solution to the question of how to mourn the growing number of virus-related deaths in Rhode Island. “We felt at the time that it was critically important that we created a way for people to grieve or celebrate life lost because you couldn’t go to funeral homes, you couldn’t go to memorial services,” Peter Mello, managing director and co-CEO of WaterFire, told the College Hill Independent. Initially, one could not visit the Beacon of Hope in person either. Footage of the installation was live streamed 24/7, allowing for home viewing. Only later, as state restrictions changed, did WaterFire open the physical site to visitors. Barnaby Evans, WaterFire’s founder and executive artistic director, led the nightly lighting ceremonies. Evans, sometimes accompanied by others, would bring out a new set of luminaria, light their internal candles, and place them amidst the other lanterns, which were already lit and arranged in neat rows on the floor of the Arts Center’s main hall. As expansive as the display became, its project of memorializing each life lost to COVID in Rhode Island remains forever incomplete: the number of virus-related deaths in the state has more than doubled since the installation’s removal. Watching recordings of the Beacon now is sobering not only because of the hundreds of deaths that it sought to represent, but also for the hundreds more that it never got to.
Memorials function visually, inviting specific comprehensions of tragedy through the particular visual experiences that they create for viewers. What the Beacon of Hope foregrounds about the pandemic is predicated on its visuality, which works primarily in two interlocking ways: there is the dense, vast spread of lanterns, which registers the profound scale of loss resulting from COVID in Rhode Island, coupled with the image of each lantern as a discrete symbol for each individual life. With this latter aspect of its design, the Beacon of Hope reflects a desire, accompanying many pandemic memorial projects, to counteract the perceived impersonality of daily death statistics. As America’s death toll from COVID neared 100,000 last May, the New York Times published a front page filled entirely with names and brief descriptions of victims, with a headline declaring the loss “incalculable.” Like WaterFire’s Beacon, this display attempted to clearly articulate that people lie at the heart of each newly reported number, people whose lives were cut needlessly short. Perhaps these reckonings with statistics in part represent an effort to compensate for the self-interestedness with which we often read the numbers; the way we register COVID death counts in terms of what they mean for our own lives—are things going to get better for me? worse?—rather than for the dead and their survivors. With a candle for each Rhode Islander lost to the virus, the Beacon of Hope implies the grievability of every death and calls for mourning for each. As governments continue to make pandemic policy decisions that jeopardize lives—particularly lives that were already vulnerable—capacious grief for those who have died of COVID is vital. Memorials like the Beacon may help build grief into local and national narratives of the Coronavirus, guiding us toward responses to the pandemic that privilege the preservation of life. Still, like a statistic, a memorial places its own abstractions on tragedy. Seeking to encapsulate complex moments, memorials condense varying lived experiences into a single site or image, and so they can give the impression that they reflect a society’s shared memory of the memorialized event. Rarely does a large-scale event itself produce collective memory; it is memorials, along with other forms of history-making, that do so. Situated in and as common space, a memorial may seem as if it simply represents a common past rather than creates one, and in this way, it can obscure certain real memories that do not appear in its projected narrative. Attention must be given to this risk and to the question of which narratives are given power as we continue to memorialize the pandemic because there never has been one collective experience of COVID. Marginalized communities have suffered a disproportionate share of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, a product of both state mismanagement and existing structures of disadvantage. As is often the case with memorials, the Beacon of Hope represented one institution speaking for a broad range of experiences. While the Beacon was simple enough to avoid obscuring any particular experience of the pandemic, there are ways that memorials can attend to the specificity of the losses they represent. Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, in which each panel is woven by survivors of the dead, memorial projects can invite public participation. The closest that the Beacon came to such a feature was a transactional one: those who donated to WaterFire could write a message to be displayed on the Beacon’s webpage and get a star for a loved one hung above the installation. As the Beacon was an early response to the pandemic created under the constrictions of lockdown, generosity is due to it and other first attempts at reconciling with this disaster. A task for future COVID memorials—on the level of country, state, or town—will be acknowledging the pandemic as the fractured, disjointed tragedy that it is. As these memorials become part of public space, potentially informing the way we and our descendents will understand the pandemic, attention must be given to ensuring that these sites do not crystallize singular narratives suiting individuals in power under whose purview public memorialization often falls. WaterFire is currently planning to create a permanent memorial for COVID victims. Mello told the Indy that the organization is considering planting a tree on its grounds. This permanent marker for the pandemic would add to a geography of memorials spread across Providence, particularly concentrated around the downtown section of the Providence River. At the bottom of College Street, Memorial Park houses several monuments to 20th century tragedies—the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the Korean War—and nearly just across the river are memorials for Rhode Islanders killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and for the victims of Ireland’s Great Famine. During the festival for which WaterFire is best known, Memorial Park becomes occupied by the nighttime revelries. When I first attended WaterFire, I stumbled among the monuments in the park without recognizing what they were, distracted as I was by costumed statue imitators and all the glitzy lights that the festival deposits upon Providence’s waters and streets. The hope embedded in permanent memorials like those of Memorial Park—the hope that, long after the people who knew the deceased have passed, these objects can help preserve the memory of tragedies—is a tenuous one. Even after we discover their meaning, memorials can settle into the scenery of our daily lives, becoming mute and forgettable. Naturally, memorials to the COVID pandemic have just as uncertain of a fate. Yet, this does not have to be a reason to abandon the project of memorialization altogether. In the wake of trauma, communities need places to gather and mourn. When designed thoughtfully with an eye toward stories most at risk of obfuscation, memorials can bear meaningfully upon the future. They can help make grief a precondition for confronting both tragedies of the past and those to come.
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ALEX VALENTI B’22.5 takes a moment of pause as he walks along the Providence River.
THE INVISIBLE BURDEN Gender parity and the pandemic +++ disproportionately represented: in December alone, Yet, economic disparities only begin to cover 154,000 Black women (uncounted in the 156,000 the extent to which women’s work is undervalwho became unemployed) left the job market for ued. The home hides a second and third unpaid In December of 2020, the American economy lost a good. This exodus has largely been attributed to and gendered workload pushing women out of the net number of 140,000 jobs. The National Women’s increased house- and carework demands during the waged labor market. When mothers stay home to Law Center reports that American men gained a pandemic. With child care centers closing and ed- meet the pandemic’s increased house- and carework net amount of 16,000 jobs, but women lost 156,000. ucation largely shifting to remote schooling, a huge demands, they are picking up work which they That means, in net, all of the jobs lost that month part of the ways in which children were previously already perform more than men, even if they are were women’s. The NWLC estimates that almost educated, supervised, and fed has suddenly become also employed. According to the Harvard Kennedy 40 percent of the 156,000 women who lost their the responsibility of parents. Professional babysitters, School, while almost 60 percent of women in 2010 jobs in December have been unemployed for at least cleaners, and other help in the home have become were in the workforce, they continued to be the prisix months. After such a long break, they will most a Covid risk, contributing to a larger workload at mary caretakers of children, ill, and disabled family likely re-enter the job market with decreased sala- home and fewer possibilities to outsource it. For members. Close to two-thirds of family caregivers ries. According to the New York Times, these blanket those working remotely, especially single parents, are also employed outside the home. On average, figures mask unsavory details, like higher unemploy- straddling a full day of work and the care and digital mothers spend just as much time with their children ment rates for women of color while white women schooling of young children is stressful at best and as they did in the 1960s, despite employment rates actually experienced a small net gain of jobs. Black impossible at worst. For essential workers, many of for mothers increasing from 45 to 78 percent in that women are also more than twice as likely as white whom are in low-income service professions and time. The Organization for Economic Cooperation women to be the breadwinners in their families, who have to leave home for the workday, this can and Development reports that, in every one of its making their unemployment especially consequen- become a caregiving crisis. Whether outsourced member countries, including the US, “men have tial. childcare has become too great of a health-risk or more leisure time each day while women spend more These numbers reveal the unequal nature of the simply financially unsustainable, the alternative is time doing unpaid housework.” country’s economic struggles in the pandemic, both often irreconcilable with full-time employment. In a In 1998, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined in terms of gender and race, but they are only the tip New York Magazine piece detailing what this tran- the term “the second shift,” now commonly referred of the iceberg. The past year has exposed catastroph- sition has looked like for her, author and journalist to in the context of gender inequality. Referring to ic failures in the United States healthcare system and Angela Garbes emphasizes: “It’s not a choice to care the “first shift” of employment outside the home, the governance to prepare for and meet the challenges of for your children when schools are closed and child second shift articulates how the work of caring for coronavirus. Similarly, our economic system, which care costs as much as your take-home pay. Experts a home and family awaits parents at the end of the has always rested on the exploitation of women and call that kind of rock-and-a-hard-place calculus paid workday. Though all workers experience the all those who perform what is traditionally wom- ‘constrained choice’ even as they acknowledge that second shift, notes the Institute for Social Research en’s work, has been fertile soil for the present crisis. the term is inadequate.” at the University of Michigan, women often take Gender inequality on the labor market is inextrica- According to the 2020 Census collected in the the brunt of this responsibility. Yet there might be ble from inequality in the home. The physical and spring and summer during the pandemic, a third something like a “third shift,” argues feminist carmental labors performed there are the site of equally of unemployed women between the ages of 25 and toon artist EmmaClit, made up of what she calls “the devastating gender inequity, and both employment 44 cited child care demands as the reason for their mental load.” In her comic titled “You Should’ve and home life in the time of Covid expose pre-ex- unemployment. Among men in the same age group, Asked,” a young couple start to argue because the isting systems of oppression. Like the 550,000 lives only 12 percent said the same. Economist Misty mother, simultaneously cooking and trying to feed lost, women’s vulnerability to lockdown-induced Heggeness of the Census Bureau writes that, while her toddlers, accidentally spills dinner for her hushardship is also a consequence of the society in the likelihood that a mother takes unpaid leave from band, herself, and their guests onto the kitchen floor. which it takes place. her job increases rapidly the longer her state stays “You should’ve asked! I would’ve helped!” exclaims in lockdown, fathers (and people without school her partner. Emma explains: when men expect their +++ age children) remain unaffected. As women become partners to ask them to do things, they are positionfinancially dependent on their working partners and ing them as the managers of household chores. The The vast gender disparities in the pandemic’s families lose what is sometimes their only income, problem is that planning and organizing is already a economic cost can be explained, in part, by wom- downward mobility and gender inequality at home job in and of itself. Hence, she points out, the work en’s overrepresentation in the industries and jobs and on the labor market increase. “I have essentially place distinction between managers and people who most affected by shutdowns. The Economic Policy dropped out of the workforce and been absorbed into execute work. Even when women share household Institute, a think tank advocating for low- and mid- housework and caring for my children, where there and childcare duties equally with their partner, if dle-income workers’ interests, calculates that women are no wages, no protections, no upward path, just a they take on all of the management of this work, they represent 53.3 percent of employees in leisure and repetitive circle,” writes Garbes. end up doing far more than their fair share. hospitality but 56.9 percent of March 2020 job In the pandemic, American parents have been In a paper titled “Mothers and Mental Labor,” losses in that sector. More drastically, 77.4 percent forced to take on the work of caring for their fami- four psychologists of Biola University write that this of education and health service workers are women, lies largely without the formal and informal support mental labor “is an under-researched and long-invisbut they account for 113.2 percent of the job losses systems—not all of which were ever adequate in the ible component of family work.” They describe the that month. These numbers make sense when it’s first place—they otherwise rely on. When public mental load of “managing” a family and household understood that jobs held by men actually increased schools, soccer practice, and babysitting grand- as including a range of activities including time and in March 2020, while those held by women fell by mothers are no longer available, full time employ- finance management, learning and remembering 86,000. Many women-held jobs, like food service ment becomes incompatible with raising young information and skills, and self-regulating one’s own and day care, just can’t go remote. Instead, they have children, and mothers have been paying the price. mental and emotional state. In practice, this transsimply disappeared. In part, the gender-pay-gap explains why women lates to knowing when to pay the gardener, planning Recent unemployment statistics do not count are often the ones quitting their jobs in order to a child’s vaccinations, teaching another how to fold the 2.3 million women, as reported by the New York meet increased childcare and housework demands. the laundry, thinking about what meals can be made Times, who have left the labor force entirely—ei- If a family’s homelife requires one of two working with the food left in the fridge, and remembering ther after being laid off or by quitting—and are no parents to stay home, it makes sense to sacrifice the when everyone last had their bed sheets changed. longer looking for employment. Women of color are lower income. This work is vital, constant, and exhausting. As the