We Need Our National Day Of Mourning
COVID-19 is a brutal evaluator, and the painful grips of racism and division are not absent from its reach.
We are in pain. We are angry. We are hurt. We are scared.
But we can overcome.
In all of our most hopeless moments: those we love died alone, no hopes of hugging, distant funerals on a screen, friends no longer seen in school; the next day that never comes;
Dances remain un-danced, practice in months’-long pauses, and our frontline workers are our soldiers.
In death’s struggle, we know no rank. Only lost love is what we know. The cashier, the manager wiping the carts, the doctor holding the phone for loved ones, and the one delivering pizza to your home are all one. An unknown researcher is now a potential MVP at the Super Bowl.
Though our veins are blue or hearts are red.
Great nations stand as one when tested to the brink.
Let’s have that national day of mourning, 100,000 deaths in three months.
I ask our governors to take up this cause, star by star and stripe by stripe because as a wise Navy Seal once said, in the darkest moments we must remain calm.
This year, let us have a parade, full of beautiful floats, that show all we’ve lost.
Let the empty spaces be the places that commemorate where they would stand.
Let your family make a standing image of each one of so many lost, so that they can come to life for us.
Let us grieve; let us cry, even the protested and protestors.
Because it is in the darkest moments that a new birth comes.
We are never alone if we chose not to be.
Let this day be a transition from grief to eventual hope.
True love provides us with the unbearable company of loss, while grief provides a pathway toward hope, and hope brings new beginnings and a new capacity to love those we would have never loved.
Instead of dying for breathing, we can thrive with hugging.
The eternity of life is in all life; it is in breathing … freedom from all that suppresses and oppresses us, whether it’s COVID-19 or in being forgotten and unseen.
Earl Yarington (LMSW) is a social worker and school bus driver. He taught literature and writing for nearly 20 years and spent 3 years working in forensic social work internships with offending populations, including work at Delaware Correctional facilities and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He has a PhD in literature and criticism (feminism/women writers) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Master of Social Work from Louisiana State University, and an interdisciplinary Master of Liberal Arts from Arizona State University, where he studied the impact of visual image and girlhood in media/social media. He also has an MA and BS in English from SUNY College at Brockport. The opinions and analyses that Earl writes are his own and are not necessarily the positions or views of his employers, the agencies he supports, or that of his colleagues. Reach out with comments or questions.