This pandemic has turned our attention, individually and collectively, to death. The world stopped and everyone retreated home to wait and to wonder and to watch. Screens large and small became the contours of our lives. Infographics became the iconography of hope and despair. We started counting - days, cases, deaths, lives, supplies, jobs. Counting became our collective epicenter. Speculation filled the vacuum created when certainty could not be found…anywhere. And so, we began to count. Monday or Tuesday or Friday disappeared to become day one or ten or twenty or forty or eighty.

We added up the populations of countries and cities and counties and calculated the percentages of those who were sick, very sick, dead. We counted hospital beds, ambulances, protective equipment, ventilators, tests. But mostly we counted the dead. We counted the dead and were afraid. We counted and were stunned. We counted as if we had no idea that every day, every month, every week, all around us people have always been dying.

We turned the numbers into graphs and waited for the terrible curve to flatten. And it did. And then we counted the days until we could open up again. Open up to risk, to orchestrated getting together, to retail shopping and outside dining. Now we count steps away from one another and tally the number of people around us and time and masks worn and not worn. But the line isn’t holding, isn’t bending to our wishes, isn’t yielding to our yearning.

And the counting continues; expanded now to include those killed by a legacy of hate. We count those killed by police violence and for those, we try to say their names, we count numbers of protesters and demonstrators. We add up the states open for business, the number at rallies, with masks, without masks, the numbers on the beach, apart and together, the numbers at bars and the feet, or inches in between. And now we watch the line, breaking free and making a run for higher levels. And we are afraid, again.

The tally of death has always been kept but rarely shared. In this country, death comes for us, day in and day out. As the sun sets, 8,000 souls are lost, give or take. More than that if we count those dying from COVID. They all count, of course, especially to those they loved, and who loved them.

Before this counting of the dead became omnipresent, always in our line of sight, we lived our lives, most of us, unaware of all those for whom any given day would be their last. All those for whom everything changed forever, in an instant. We did not feel on each of those days before, a collective sadness for fellow citizens gone, people we would never know, stories we would never hear.

In this terrible season of the counting of our dead, many people have been moved beyond fear to great kindness and compassion. They have reached out for one another in ways they are able, from great and small distances. They have donated supplies and money and food, have wrapped virtual and real arms around family and friends and colleagues and acquaintances and strangers in ways not thought possible. While separated, people have found ways to join together - to console and to encourage, to lift up and to mourn with one another, friend to friend and stranger to stranger. A national empathy has spread across the miles. This is the best of us.

But we are becoming desperate now for this pandemic to be over. We want to go back to our old lives. We want the counting to stop. We want the fear to dissipate. We want opinions to be replaced with certainty. We want to be safe again. We want to be told that there is enough of everything for everybody so that we don’t have to be so full of anxiety. We want to believe that the pandemic is over. In our desperateness we tell ourselves the stories we want to believe. We want to go back to before and this wanting has started to burst the bubbles where we have been living in suspended animation while we counted. The bubbles, which have been the only things we know for sure can slow the awful tally of the sick and the dead.

Going backwards in life is impossible and so the counting will continue. We are changed by what we have already experienced, and we will be further changed by what we have left to endure. If we are brave enough, we might also learn from what we have experienced. If we have courage enough, we will come slowly back together, each one of us remembering that that the other’s life counts. Each of us aware that we hold in our hands not only whether we might be counted among the living or the sick or the dead, but how others might be counted. This is the gift and the terrible responsibility of democracy. We will all be counted in the Book of the Dead one day. How we behave in the days and months ahead may well decide how soon our number arrives.