Twenty-five years of hospice volunteering has taught me that the most important thing we can afford people is their dignity.
That lesson formed the backbone of “In America: Remember,” my art installation that for the past three weeks blanketed Washington’s National Mall with 700,000 fluttering white flags, each one representing an American lost to the coronavirus pandemic. The art is an effort to reclaim the dignity of 700,000 people who have become reduced to a single number, a number too large to fathom.
My project began with outrage. I was outraged we had elected officials who would devalue the lives of the elderly, the poor and people of color in their approach to managing the pandemic. I was outraged we had allowed the death toll here in the United States to become so large as to be incomprehensible.
But the deeper meaning came when I heard the stories. In person, they poured out. Many visitors used the Sharpies we offered them to write their own dedications directly onto the flags. With each of their stories, my anger gave way to their outcries of grief.
Jennie and Thomas from northern Mississippi came to commemorate a flag for the person who had given them covid-19. They survived. He died.
“I wasn’t allowed in, but my heart never left your side,” one mourner wrote on a flag.
“My husband passed on our 23rd anniversary,” wrote another. “He’s more than a statistic. He’s my best friend.”
A loved one begged Kitty to get the vaccine, but Kitty dismissed her: “God will protect me.” The flag dedicator noted, “The vaccine is from God, you passed the end of July.”
Ralph was a World War II veteran, a musician and 99 years old. “He refused a ventilator asking that it be saved for a younger person.”
“Calloused hands, soft heart, keeper of the dad jokes,” they wrote of Paul K.
Apryl was, by all accounts, a badass.
And Mikey, Mikey liked turtles.
I knew people would bring their grief, their own outrage, their anger. I did not realize what the art would give back, in its own way, providing loved ones solace or catharsis as it provided dignity to the virus’s victims. As one woman described it upon seeing the flag dedicated to her mother, “After months of mourning, I finally, finally feel the weight beginning to lift from my shoulders.”
Not only has this art helped individual people in their grief; it has also created community. So many of these deaths happened in isolation, and families mourned in isolation. But in the midst of 20 acres of flags, loved ones know they are no longer mourning on their own. One woman who lost her father said to me, “All this time, I thought I was grieving alone, but now I see that I was in the company of many.” Another said, “Knowing where his flag is is almost like having him back on earth.”
Now, just as these flags are about to disappear from the Mall, I want to thank the many families who brought this installation to life, with their stories and their emotions and their humanity, and the hundreds of volunteers who helped make this happen. The power of art is not in my hands as an artist. It is in the souls of those who experience it.
Art is not an elective; it is an imperative. When words fall on un-listening ears, it is time for art to fill the void. The last time a project of this scale cloaked the Mall was the exhibition of the AIDS Quilt, which made America look at last at the disease’s victims, and at how cruelly it had shunned them. That act of public, participatory art rocked the status quo. Will this one do the same?
Will it push us to ask what we have learned from this national tragedy? Experts beyond my field — doctors, public health researchers, politicians — will have to provide the answers to that question. For all its power, public art cannot on its own erase health inequities, or vaccinate the world, or heal the dying.
But what I have learned is that art can in equal measure tend to intimate, personal grief and send a message to our society as a whole. That message is this: Give people the dignity they deserve. Please don’t make me, or the next artist, do this again. I don’t want to plant any more flags.
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