The Weight of a Million

One million. On a good day, it sounds rosy and abundant. Like one million dollars. A million dollar smile. You look like a million bucks. Or thanks a million. But not today.

Today, the word million lost any possible luster. It’s the number of people who have died of Covid in our country. Add to that, over five million more people worldwide who have been taken by this virus. 

Are there even words to describe this ravage? Tragic. Unthinkable. Perhaps the worst? Ongoing. Some call it the single most catastrophic event in our nation’s history. Yet this milestone of one million deaths happened as if it were just another day. No united mourning and recognition; no candles lit throughout the land.

“Cripes,” you might be thinking, “As if I need to read one more article about this pandemic.” I hear you and agree. After years of dashboards, forecasts, testing, and tracking, I too feel weary of it all. 

Weary, but not done. Because this virus is not done. I know we can’t be plugged into the pandemic all the time, that too is unhealthy. But, we also cannot turn away. In respect to the millions lost, shouldn’t we continue to take heed? Each of us doing what we can, when we can.

For us adults, there are easy ways to do so. Wearing a mask indoors in public spaces. We all have them now; it wouldn’t even cost anything. Masks are still required at doctor’s offices. These medical professionals are taking reasonable precautions, why can’t more of us? I ask because lately at supermarkets and big box stores, I’m often among the few wearing one. Maybe the accommodation can be to mask-up now and then, especially when there’s an uptick in cases.

I remember getting vaccinated as a kid. Lining up in the school gymnasium, rolling up my sleeve to get immunized against mumps and measles, never understanding the miracle of it all. At the Smithsonian, you can see quarantine signs used in the 1920s to prevent the spread of the same thing I was getting a shot for. Quarantine warnings that doctors rendered useless by creating vaccines for infectious diseases we no longer even talk about. Someday, may it be so for Covid.

It’s jaw-dropping and crushing to know that close to a third of the perished million could have been averted if all adults had been vaccinated. This according to Brown School of Public Health, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Microsoft AI for Health. Meanwhile, here we are, decades later, a country at odds with a vaccine that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, 319,000 to be exact.

It sounds callous when death is calculated in such large numbers. It doesn’t take into account the individual loss. The empty chair at the dinner table. The missing parent at a wedding. The phone call you can never make again. The bright-beautiful, messy, complex, and complicated life that would have continued to make a difference. Maybe to just one or to the world. But does it matter which? For, to each person, their person is the world.

We humans struggle with grief. It’s too much to swallow. How can I breathe, if who I love cannot? When confronted with the faceless loss of millions, sometimes all we can do is get up in the morning, go to work, and soldier on. After all, taking action is a tonic, a neutralizing agent per se, to such jumbled feelings of sadness and overwhelmingness. Do something. Anything. 

My personal ever-changing and growing to-do list includes getting boosters when available and appropriate. Wearing a mask indoors in public spaces. And when I feel overcome with this pandemic, I’ll remember there’s no room to feel “over it” until it is over. I’ll light a candle in honor of the millions who were taken by this virus. Never in a million years would I have guessed it’d come to this.