568- Don't Forget to Remember

SPEAKER_15: 99% Invisible is brought to you by the Lexus GX and Sirius XM. As a 99PI listener, we know that you delight in exploring regional architecture wherever you go. If you're looking for an adventure SUV that promises both luxury and capability, the new Lexus GX is just the vehicle you've been looking for. Enabled with Sirius XM, the 2024 GX comes equipped with a rich array of content you can enjoy on your next road trip. In true 99PI fashion, get in a GX today and experience how great design marries form and function. To learn more about the GX and Sirius XM and Lexus vehicles, visit Lexus.com slash GX and Sirius XM dot com slash Lexus trial. The all new Lexus GX. Live up to it. SPEAKER_10: Hey Keurig coffee drinkers. Did you know that the bold, smooth taste of Dunkin' cold coffee can be brewed in your Keurig coffee maker and enjoyed at home? Dunkin's cold cake up pods were crafted to be brewed hot and enjoyed cold. And of course, they're packed with the Dunkin' flavor you crave. Brew over ice and sip in seconds because the home with Dunkin' is where you want to be. SPEAKER_11: At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than just a car. It's the two door coupe that was there for your first drive. The hatchback that took you cross country and back. And the minivan that tackles the weekly carpool. For the cars you couldn't live without, trust Amica Auto Insurance. Amica. Empathy is our best policy. SPEAKER_15: This is 99% Invisible. I am Roman Mars. 91! Mom! It's a Saturday afternoon in Golden Gate Park and a handful of kids are taking turns sending a little white stomp rocket into the gray San Francisco sky. It arcs up then sails back down to this small meadow at the northern edge of the park bounded by shaggy evergreens. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, so the rocket lands, the kids go apeshit, then they proceed to tear off after it, fully oblivious to the tall, thin man watching from atop a nearby boulder. SPEAKER_15: That's producer Chris Collin. SPEAKER_13: The man is made of bronze and this obscure little corner of the park is named for him. The Doughboy statue was unveiled here in the Doughboy Meadow in 1930. He's a handsome young guy gazing out resolutely at the patch of earth that has borne his name for almost a century. I was just curious about one thing. So I walked up to a couple sitting near the stomp rocket kids. Hey, can I ask you guys a question? SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Who is that guy? I actually don't know. Do you know who that is? Who is what? That statue right behind you. Doughboy? SPEAKER_13: Do you know who, what a Doughboy is? SPEAKER_05: I just knew this was Doughboy Meadows deductive reasoning. Lucky guess. SPEAKER_13: I present this high level exchange because it illustrates something about our world, specifically the bronze and granite corner of our world where we memorialize the losses most important to us as a civilization. The Doughboy Meadow commemorates 39 San Franciscans who were killed in World War I. Sixteen more were killed in World War II and their names were added to the plaque under the statue. SPEAKER_15: Doughboys are what they used to call infantrymen back in the day. A fact that nobody Chris interviewed on the meadow that morning seemed to know or care about, which, you know, fine. SPEAKER_13: But it raises questions in your mind about the purpose of memorials. Or at least it does if, like me, you've spent the last year walking up to every memorial you see and wondering what they say about us and wondering what they even do. So that's partly why I wandered over to the Doughboy Meadow that Saturday. But I have to admit something to you, which is that this story is not about Doughboys. In fact, this whole scene in the Doughboy Meadow has allowed me to put off mentioning something that I fear will make you yank out your earbuds the moment I bring it up. But here goes. This is actually a story about COVID. And more specifically, it's about a group of people fighting to create a memorial for a devastating disease that many of us just don't want to talk about or think about anymore. SPEAKER_16: He was tall and handsome. He was a very handsome guy. I don't know why that made me sad. SPEAKER_13: That's Kristin Urquiza talking about her dad. Lately, she's been having this recurring dream about him. SPEAKER_16: He's wearing his quintessential early 90s gear, which includes aviators, you know, off-brand Ray-Bans, a polo shirt, and these like tiny little McGregor shorts that are like made out of vinyl or something really interesting. And he's got like the knee-high socks. So he's just in this gazebo sort of like beckoning me to come and be with him. SPEAKER_13: Kristin grew up with her dad and mom in Phoenix. They lived in a neighborhood called Maryville, a working-class community that's largely immigrant and mostly Latino. SPEAKER_15: And that's where Kristin's parents were still living in 2020, when the world first heard the word coronavirus. At first, the family was on the same page about this mysterious new disease. SPEAKER_13: And that page was basically, this is terrifying. Jesus Christ, stay home. SPEAKER_16: And then Trump decided to visit Arizona on May 5th. And I think that was a political move to go and declare that we were on the right path. And then the governor of Arizona went on a PR spree across the state saying that it was safe to go about normal. And that's when my relationship, when my conversations, when everything with my dad started to change. SPEAKER_13: A couple things about her dad, Mark Urquiza. One, he was a Fox News-watching America-loving guy. If the guys he elected said COVID was under control for healthy people, he believed it. Two, dude loved a party. He was happy and sweet and exuberant with this big voice. And if anyone was at the edge of the room, he made sure they felt part of things. SPEAKER_16: So-and-so's birthday or an important NASCAR race or any occasion in which to celebrate. Like my dad was such a booster for experiencing joy. SPEAKER_15: So Mark didn't hesitate when a friend threw a birthday karaoke party not long after Arizona's stay-at-home orders were lifted. SPEAKER_13: Within a few weeks, Mark Urquiza was in the hospital. And though he was otherwise healthy, his condition worsened. He got moved to the ICU, and then, all alone, he was put on a ventilator. Kristin was driving to Phoenix from her home in San Francisco on June 30th when she learned he was slipping away. At a gas station on the side of the highway, she spoke to her father as a nurse at the hospital held up a phone to his ear. He died soon after that. The nurse held his hand. SPEAKER_16: Mark was a high school 400-meter dash state champion and cross-country runner. Mark was known for his infectious energy, strong will, and yes, stubbornness. SPEAKER_15: This is the obituary Kristin wrote for her father. It's lovely and heartbreaking. And then it takes a turn. SPEAKER_16: Mark, like so many others, should not have died from COVID-19. His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis, and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk. SPEAKER_13: Kristin wasn't just beside herself with grief. She was furious. And the obituary did something kind of remarkable. It invited anyone with loved ones suffering from COVID or having died from COVID to join an altar she was creating outside the Arizona State Capitol. SPEAKER_15: In July of 2020, nobody had really articulated this kind of sadness and anger yet. The obit exploded across the internet. Soon the governor was being asked about Mark's death. By August, Kristin was speaking by Zoom at the Democratic National Convention. SPEAKER_16: My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump. And for that, he paid with his life. SPEAKER_13: Okay, this sounds like it's winding up into an anti-Trump harangue. For a minute, Kristin's life was basically an anti-Trump harangue. But as that was going on, something else was happening in the background. Ordinary people started reaching out to Kristin. In this plain-spoken 39-year-old nonprofit worker, they saw someone who grasped what was really happening in this country. Dozens and then hundreds and eventually thousands of strangers began to share their grief with her. SPEAKER_16: I don't think there's anybody in the entire world who's talked to as many folks who've lost a loved one to COVID than me. SPEAKER_13: That's something I've heard from a number of people about Kristin, incidentally. And the more people she heard from, the more her view began to evolve. COVID was dominating the headlines at the time. It was all anyone talked about. And yet, we still weren't really reckoning with the amount of sheer, horrific loss it was grinding into the world. All this death was obviously central to our fears about COVID. But paradoxically, we hadn't created a space or a place to honor the actual people who were dying. SPEAKER_15: Kristin felt like, until we did, the country was never really going to heal. Which also meant it wasn't going to learn to do better the next time. Kristin was lost in sadness. But one thing felt suddenly clear. SPEAKER_13: Someone needed to mark this catastrophe for generations to come. SPEAKER_15: Countless smaller and more local memorials have sprung up, of course, many of them phenomenal. But Kristin wanted something national and historic in scope. A permanent COVID memorial for the whole country. It needed to be as big as the pandemic itself. And flexible enough to accommodate a still unfolding disease. And critical enough to recognize how it exacerbated other societal crises in the country. And sophisticated enough to somehow reflect all of the wildly different feelings we'd eventually have about the pandemic. SPEAKER_13: So, she decided to call the United States Department of Memorialization. And they got right to work creating a permanent and very thoughtful national memorial to the COVID pandemic. SPEAKER_15: Except there is no Department of Memorialization. When say, a highway gets made, there's a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, it's always different. Sometimes a handful of concerned citizens get together and make it happen. Sometimes a nonprofit pushes for it or a foundation. There's usually a lot of activism and a lot of fraught conversations about design, location, the story it should tell about what happened, and who it affected. SPEAKER_13: And ideally, there's a whole other set of conversations about whose perspectives are being reflected and whose are being distorted and what unspoken agendas are embedding themselves in the project. SPEAKER_01: When you discuss a memorial or when you conceive a memorial, sometimes the most productive part of it is the discussion itself. SPEAKER_13: This is Marianne Hirsch, a Columbia professor who does a lot of work in memory studies and how we remember cultural trauma. SPEAKER_01: Because that is where we try to figure out as a community or as a set of communities what happened and how we want to remember it, but also how we want to remember it for the future. SPEAKER_15: There are more than 48,000 monuments and memorials in this country. And as we've all learned in recent years, that can very well mean 48,000 arguments about what they should and shouldn't be commemorating. Well, it's an interesting time to discuss this question because we're in the midst of SPEAKER_01: memory wars in this country, right? Our monuments and memorials have become sites of contestation, and some of them are being dismantled even as we speak. SPEAKER_13: How to remember, what to remember, how to grieve, how to grieve accurately. If at this point you're still struck that Kristin Urquiza, a regular person working out of her apartment in San Francisco, must wade through all these massive historic considerations, yeah, take a number. Because as Kristin began asking around, she realized that she was it. There was no one else at the government or individual level working on a COVID memorial of the magnitude she imagined. SPEAKER_16: There is no concentrated public commitment to commemorating the tragedy of the deadliest disease that's hit the U.S. Like, I can't even wrap my head around that. SPEAKER_13: But she also did wrap her head around it. And by July of 2020, just four months after the country shut down, Kristin and her partner Kristine Keeves had launched a national nonprofit. It was called Marked by COVID. Soon there was a Facebook page and a website and outreach to public officials and organizing efforts with everyone they could find. SPEAKER_15: At their kitchen table, they corresponded with hundreds and then thousands of bereaved people. They helped them write obituaries and helped them place those obituaries and raise money to pay for those obituaries. They called mayors and talked with reporters all over the world. And when there was a free moment, they looked even further down the road. SPEAKER_13: Two big ideas bubbled up. One, to create a federally recognized COVID Memorial Day, the first Monday in March. And two, to establish a permanent national COVID memorial. Soon they were drafting a policy statement and meeting with Congress members. But a weird dynamic emerged. Marked by COVID was becoming the biggest, most organized memorialization effort in the country. But at the same time, they were also the underdog in this project. As Kristin explained to me over tea one day, a grassroots operation like theirs is at a structural disadvantage in the world of memorialization. SPEAKER_16: So for example, the Mellon Foundation, they have an incredible monuments program. They are by invitation only. So who are the folks that are in positions to be able to be by invitation only to a really elite institution like the Mellon Foundation? It's going to be folks who are academics. It's going to be people who have already received funding or people within their extended networks. SPEAKER_13: This kind of thing, it irked Kristin, but it didn't discourage her. Partly that's just not on her dropdown menu of options as a person, but it's also something bigger. Marked by COVID's vision for this memorial was growing. It was becoming so huge that any obstacle seemed tiny by comparison. The idea wasn't just to offer solace in the face of this unimaginably vast catastrophe. They wanted to take the reins of how society collectively remembers the pandemic altogether. SPEAKER_15: We have memorials to commemorate a huge variety of shared experiences. We memorialize wars, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, famines, and riots. SPEAKER_13: There are memorials to lost fishermen, lost astronauts, even lost members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. There isn't a civil war skirmish that hasn't been carved into marble somewhere. SPEAKER_15: But if you're setting out to make one of those memorials, what should it say and how should it say it? That was the central issue facing Marked by COVID as they set out on their quest. SPEAKER_13: As it happened, Kristin had an old friend from college, Sarah Sink, who'd become a literature professor with a focus on memory and trauma. This is a person who makes a living thinking about how people remember and make sense of big, horrible events. She also shared Kristin's conviction that this horrible event needed a new approach altogether. So when Kristin realized she was going to be the Department of Memorialization, she asked Sarah to pitch in. Go around the block. SPEAKER_05: You saw it? Yeah. I can see one of the beams. SPEAKER_13: On a nippy Wednesday morning, I drive up to Napa, California with Sarah to check out a more recent memorial. I want to see firsthand how her plaque-reading brain works. We get out of the car and walk past a Starbucks to a small park-like area just off Main Street. All right. What are we looking at here? SPEAKER_05: Well, we are looking at, let's see, from this angle, I see five different pieces of steel vertically aligned. It looks like there are four panes of glass. SPEAKER_13: Looming above us is what I suppose could pass for generic public art, except you just know instantly what those steel beams are, where they came from. We're standing in the Napa 9-11 Memorial Garden. SPEAKER_05: One thing I think is really interesting is the way they vertically align them. It puts you in a position of, like, craning your neck upwards to look. And a lot of the 9-11 memorials do this. They put you in the position of, like, a witness on the day. SPEAKER_13: For the next half hour or so, I get a crash course in commemoration. The way subtle aesthetic or wording decisions can tip the way you think about an event, which in turn can tip bigger things. How the country does or doesn't heal from that event, or how it goes on to respond to that event. At one point, Sarah comes across an inscription on the memorial. SPEAKER_05: And it's described as a place of reflection meant to inspire us to continue to express this courage, caring, and compassion our world experienced that day. That word, our world, really pops out to me because that's definitely not including the perpetuators of this attack or anyone who sympathizes with them. And so there's kind of a… SPEAKER_13: This is the close reading mind that you want if you're going to create a memorial of your own. Because grief, memory, commemoration, these are basic and straightforward concepts only until you give them even a moment's thought. Let's say you want to memorialize September 11th. Step one is deciding what exactly you want future generations to remember. The 2,977 people who were killed that day? Yes, of course. But then you have to decide what you want to remember about them exactly. And what about the broader significance of 9-11? Shouldn't that be part of what we reflect on? SPEAKER_15: And broader significance for whom? And how do you capture the horror of that day without, say, slipping into support for the foreign policy that grew out of it? SPEAKER_13: And by the way, how long are we supposed to remember things in the first place? Should we have memorials to the Babylonian revolt? Those were real people too, according to my research. Anyway, back in Napa, Sarah and I discussed the messaging coded into this and other 9-11 memorials. One message, of course, is never forget. SPEAKER_05: The irony of never forget is that what we were never forgetting was actually a carefully crafted narrative, unconsciously or consciously, right? But a narrative about being attacked by external forces and it was kind of a classic revenge narrative in a way. SPEAKER_13: Memorials tend to commemorate events that are clear and dramatic, maybe even a little cinematic. But with COVID, there was no heroic battle. No towers came down. No beach was stormed. The awfulness happened quietly in ICUs and in bedrooms where no cameras were rolling, where no searing collective visuals formed. In other words, on top of everything else, the pandemic has been narratively inconvenient. SPEAKER_15: Three years into COVID, we have no consensus around what kind of story we got routed through because really it's a story of many things, including resilience, fear, isolation, and lost jobs and time. SPEAKER_13: It's also a story about the fragility of our institutions and the way the pandemic and George Floyd braided together and about the long-term impact on our kids. Given all of that, I asked Sarah what she wants the COVID memorial central narrative to be. SPEAKER_05: I don't think it matters what I want it to be. I think the whole purpose of the project is to say that these narratives should not be shaped by people like me. They should be shaped by the people who are the most directly impacted. SPEAKER_13: From the beginning, this idea was central to the marked-by-COVID ethos. Kristin and everyone else involved wanted their remembrance project to be democratic, not top-down. They wanted it to include the voices most devastated by the disease, not just the most inconvenienced. Already you can sense a certain strain of pandemic memory gaining currency in certain circles. The ways we went kind of stir-crazy, how we missed seeing our friends, how we had to wash our groceries for a while. We were brainstorming about this and we were like, this cannot be committed to national SPEAKER_05: memory as the time that we all couldn't find f***ing yeast. SPEAKER_13: She told me later, this can't be a sourdough memorial. SPEAKER_15: After the break, Kristin and her team at Marked by COVID refined their vision for a COVID memorial and faced some huge obstacles in their journey to build it. And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com. 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The home with Dunkin' is where you want to be. SPEAKER_11: At Amika Insurance, we know it's more than just a car. It's the two door coupe that was there for your first drive. The hatchback that took you cross country and back. And the minivan that tackles the weekly carpool. For the cars you couldn't live without, trust Amika Auto Insurance. Amika. Empathy is our best policy. SPEAKER_03: At a store near you, Fresh Step is a registered trademark of the Clorox Pet Products Company. Certain trademarks used under license from the Procter and Gamble Company or its affiliates. SPEAKER_15: By the fall of 2021, the Marked by COVID community had grown into the thousands. They'd held countless focus groups to begin surfacing ideas for a memorial. SPEAKER_13: Initially people were excited about something like Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. But a government official calculated that given how many people had died of COVID, it would have to wrap around the National Mall 52 times. SPEAKER_15: So that was out. Names somberly carved into stone weren't going to cut it. But from other conversations, a number of things had become clear. For one, Marked by COVID wanted to create a memorial that actually centered the voices of the grieving. SPEAKER_16: What we've learned is that that validation of loss is such an essential piece of keeping people going, myself included. That matters. And if you look at other crises, there is always a moment that we come together to reflect. SPEAKER_13: It's been estimated that for every person lost to COVID, nine or 10 severely bereaved individuals are left in their wake. SPEAKER_15: So many of the people suffering that loss never got to attend a funeral or even say SPEAKER_15: a proper goodbye to their fathers, mothers, spouses, or children. So one of the top requests from the community was that this memorial be a place that everyone could visit in person. SPEAKER_13: And there needed to be faces and personalized language about those loved ones. SPEAKER_15: But even within this self-selected group, it wasn't easy to find something that worked for everyone to say nothing of the larger country. I don't have a problem doing a COVID memorial. SPEAKER_07: You want to do a COVID memorial, fine. SPEAKER_13: That's Jay Block, Republican gubernatorial candidate for New Mexico in 2022, and now Sandoval County commissioner. SPEAKER_07: But why aren't we talking about all the memorials to the different issues going on here with, you know, high crime, people getting killed in the streets here and our young people dying of drugs. SPEAKER_13: And actually Block did have a problem doing a COVID memorial. In late 2022, some marked by COVID members in New Mexico began working with local officials to create a state-level version of their memorial on land near Albuquerque. When the project went up for a vote, Block voted against it. He didn't like its message. So I asked what he thinks a COVID memorial should say. SPEAKER_07: I'm sorry that I forced you to get a vaccine that didn't protect you from COVID and didn't prevent you from spreading COVID or you lost your job. I'm sorry the vaccine caused heart issues in you. I'm sorry I shut your schools down and caused your children so many issues as well. That's what I would like. SPEAKER_13: It's going to take a lot of chiseling. SPEAKER_07: It's going to be a lot of chiseling. SPEAKER_13: For every Jay Block, there are 80 million other Jay Blocks. As recently as August, a third of all Americans believe the screamingly untrue claim that the COVID vaccines caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people. SPEAKER_15: And this is where things get even more complex. Because if Mark by COVID hopes to memorialize what the pandemic meant for us, one very central aspect of it can't be overlooked. How COVID plunged us into a total inability to agree on basic facts. SPEAKER_13: Which also happens to be a problem for a memorial. Because a national memorial ultimately boils down to a national agreement about the meaning of an event. On the day in March that Mark by COVID hopes will become a national COVID Memorial Day, I take myself to the mall, the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco. I spend the day asking regular people what they think about this holiday. Which turns into just generally asking about COVID since nobody has even heard of this holiday. SPEAKER_06: We have done our best to move on. So I don't believe it warrants a memorial day. I'm kind of over it, you know? Like I hope like we can like find a solution to like no longer have to wear a mask because I know it's definitely like affecting people's like self-esteem and everything. SPEAKER_09: It was prophesied in the Bible that this is going to happen because it mentions pestilences and that's what COVID was. SPEAKER_13: What civilizational memory of the COVID-19 pandemic is supposed to cohere from all that? On days like this, I find myself doubting that coherence is even a possibility. SPEAKER_15: And in the meantime, all the divisiveness and vitriol around COVID, it doesn't just stymie conversations about the memorial itself. It amounts to a corrosive F-you from millions of bereaved people. SPEAKER_13: Kristen herself had to read countless messages telling her her father's death by COVID was essentially not real. Scholars call this disenfranchised grief. It's when you're mourning something that more and more people are saying is not really a thing. In Kristen's case, she's got enough fight in her to press on. But many of the people she needs to organize are tired of fighting. SPEAKER_16: It is very demoralizing to constantly have to be defending why your loved one died and why it matters. And that, you know, helps to take the wind out of the sails. SPEAKER_13: In other words, that gaslighting isn't just awful. It saps people's willingness to share their stories. But Kristen is quick to point out, Democrats have thwarted the project too, albeit in a different key. SPEAKER_15: Back in 2021, she flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with a special advisor to President Biden. She and a bunch of other bereaved people were sitting around a table with him, and she talked about how the government needed to do more to acknowledge and commemorate the lives that had been lost. SPEAKER_16: He was, I will never forget him, sort of getting a little bit like, I wouldn't say indignant, but kind of like pulling in his breath a bit and just saying we cannot fight a war on COVID and remember the war at the same time. When the war is over, we can come out back and do that. SPEAKER_15: Kristen hears that one a lot from ostensible allies. It's too early. She keeps a tally of every time Biden meets with families from a building collapse or a fire or other disaster. Never, she says, has he had this kind of dedicated meeting with the COVID bereaved. SPEAKER_13: While reporting this piece, I periodically had to wait for my own waves of sputtering outrage to pass. Having to fight to remember the biggest loss of life we've ever experienced? What? But if I'm honest, I couldn't help wondering how much wind was in my own sails at times. More and more, I found myself doing a funny kind of COVID code switching. One minute I'd be appalled by politicians proclaiming the evil of mask mandates. The next minute, I couldn't remember the last time I wore one myself. Talking to the marked by COVID folks, I realized their biggest hurdle isn't so much the deniers and the anti-vaxxers and whatnot. It's the rest of us who increasingly don't want to think about it at all. SPEAKER_16: After I spoke at the DNC, I was everybody's best friend. And since August of 2020 or November of 2020, it's been this slow decline of people supporting what I have to say. And because people want to move on. SPEAKER_15: This desire to move on from world-shaking diseases isn't totally unique to COVID. For whatever reason, pandemics sit at the very top of our willful amnesia pyramid. When was the last time you saw a memorial to the Spanish flu of 1918? It killed 50 million people. For this, we get a small granite bench in Barry, Vermont, installed by husband and wife restaurant owners in 2018. SPEAKER_01: So we remember wars, we remember earthquakes, we remember bombings, we remember revolutions, right? We do not remember massive loss due to health questions and pandemics. SPEAKER_13: That's Mary and Hirsch again. SPEAKER_01: So that was one concern was this level of forgetting that we saw before. But also the urge always to normalize, to move on, the tremendous failures of our institutions that were being revealed and how we thought they would want to cover them over and not really address why it got to be so bad because it didn't actually have to be so bad. SPEAKER_15: For more than two years, the Marked by COVID team had been battling DC bureaucrats, the J blocks of the world, and the general public's fatigue and inertia. They had considered and discarded various memorial designs, but finally they'd settled on one that satisfied everything they wanted the memorial to do. It admitted many voices. It invited participation. SPEAKER_13: And it involved a partnership with Snapchat. Way back in the midst of all those design discussions, a classmate of Kristin's had introduced Marked by COVID to folks at the tech company. When I heard they eventually hammered out a partnership, I'm not going to lie, my heart sank a bit. A slick tech company seemed a million miles away from the homespun insurgent vibe that Kristin and Christine and Sarah and the others had created. And mostly, my heart was happy they'd gotten this far. I booked myself a ticket to LA because I was finally going to see this memorial for myself. I'm standing outside the entrance to this massive old LA cemetery. Under some palm trees, there's a patch of fake grass that the Marked by COVID folks have claimed right next to a very noisy Santa Monica Boulevard. I'm here for the unveiling of a prototype. A memorial focused on people who died from COVID here in LA. It's the kind of memorial that Marked by COVID wants to build all around the country, and a smaller version of the kind it ultimately wants to sit on the National Mall. Over the next hour, the area fills with volunteers from the organization, curious onlookers, and mostly people who've lost someone to COVID. SPEAKER_04: My husband and I used to read the newspaper in the morning together, and he was the only guy I knew that actually would laugh out loud at the comics. He won! He was a great guy. SPEAKER_13: That was Lucy Esparza Casares. And this is Jennifer Torres Kowalski. SPEAKER_02: My daughter was Guinevere Julianne Artemis Kowalski. She was born June 6, 2005. SPEAKER_13: Guinevere played the clarinet and the viola and the French horn. She taught herself to crochet and would give away her creations to siblings and her friends. She was just deeply sweet. Her mom used to jokingly remind her that if a stranger pulled up in a van, she was not to get in. She was that trusting. One day, they thought she was having an asthma flare-up from smoke from nearby fires. It was COVID. Weeks later, she was in a hospital bed, aged 16. SPEAKER_02: Luckily, because she was a child, we all got to be with her when we let her go. So I got to crawl into bed with her for a final time, and my deafest son and daughter, younger and older. And they got to hold her hands, and we all got to be with her as she went. And it was just... It was... It was really quick. SPEAKER_13: We milled around like this for a while, and then everyone took seats in folding chairs arranged on the fake grass. Kristin Urquiza stepped up to a podium. SPEAKER_16: I'm so excited to be here with you all today, to be able to share with you a project that we've been working on since that day. The National COVID Memorial. SPEAKER_13: Not the whole National COVID Memorial, to be clear, but a prototype featuring some of those lost just in the LA area. Like Fiona, who lost her mom early on in it and found Kristin on Facebook. She sent her a message saying, I don't know what is going on, but what you are doing is the only thing that makes sense. SPEAKER_16: So after Fiona, there was then Carly. And then there was Caitlin, and Caitlin was Tara. And then Jeffrey and Lucy and countless other people who came forward to say, we cannot forget. SPEAKER_15: Behind Kristin sat a round plinth designed by the LA artist Marcos Lechins. Nothing was on it. Just a big empty circle, shin high and maybe 20 feet across. After she and others gave remarks, Chris and the other attendees started milling around again and pointing their phones at that plinth. SPEAKER_13: To experience the memorial, I have to finally download Snapchat for the first time in my life. SPEAKER_14: No, can't have my contacts. Can't send me notifications. SPEAKER_13: I find a special lens within the app marked by COVID. There it is. And then point my phone at the plinth. Okay, I'm holding. Oh, Jesus. I'm seeing hundreds of little tiny photographs swirling clockwise and upwards like a DNA helix. And there's all these little rectangular photos, just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of SPEAKER_14: them swirling up into the sky. And I can touch one. Oh my God. And it brings a photo, an individual photo forward to me. SPEAKER_13: Lord, I will never ever doubt Snapchat again. Using augmented reality, that's the same technology that paints the yellow first down line on a televised football game, marked by COVID has created an infinitely expandable, shockingly human take on memorialization. SPEAKER_14: Oh, Jesus. Dr. Gay, Griffin, Snyder, we miss you. Hope you're keeping an eye on us and seeing these boys grow. SPEAKER_13: It's hard to convey how beautiful this vortex of photos and obituaries is. I grew up in the Washington, DC area, surrounded by noble statues and somber slabs. So often the actual humanity and the complexity and the heartbreak behind those memorials felt distant, bloodless, history bookish. The marked by COVID memorial is the opposite of that. SPEAKER_14: Bo Yazzie, Bo was willing to help anyone in need. Loved his son very, very much. SPEAKER_13: Using your phone to experience these remembrances isn't alienating as I'd feared. It's powerfully fitting given how these devices were often the last point of contact for those who were losing someone. For so many, Kristin included, these impersonal gadgets, they were a lifeline when the hospital kept you out. They were how you held hands. They were your desperate kiss goodbye. So it's weirdly touching that they're central to this memorial. And then you switch off the app and the whole thing vanishes. For the next hour, I watch people take in this prototype, absorb what it could mean on a national level. It is profound. At the same time, we are a relatively small group of random people near a carwash and an auto zone and a plumbing supply store gathered for something that most people just aren't thinking about. SPEAKER_15: As they have from the beginning, the Marked by COVID folks zoom every week with those in grief. They maintain an archive of any other COVID memorial they hear about, no matter how small or makeshift. And they're pitching states across the country, trying to get them interested in local memorials like the one Chris just saw in LA. SPEAKER_13: But that permanent national COVID memorial remains their biggest challenge, not least because of all the stories of loss they still need to collect. SPEAKER_16: We are on a quest to find everyone. SPEAKER_13: Where it will live, when it will be done, nobody knows. But they press on because they have to, because no one else anywhere understands the angles better or deeper. Over the year I spent with Marked by COVID, something became very clear to me. Whether they're commemorating doughboys or pandemics, the makers of memorials possess a dark and penetrating wisdom. Maybe more than any of us, they understand the awful truth that no matter how colossally world-shaking some tragedy is, no matter how unforgettable, we will absolutely forget it. If something or someone doesn't stop us. SPEAKER_15: Part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. If you haven't already done so, you should pick up a copy of The Power Broker by Robert Caro and join our year-long Power Broker book club. New episodes of the 99% invisible breakdown of The Power Broker hosted by me and Elliott Kaelin will drop monthly right here in this feed. It is so much fun. I hope you can join us. You can find us on all the usual social media and we just started up a 99PI Discord server. Come join me and the rest of the staff to talk about The Power Broker, what you've been reading, architecture, recommendations, books, podcasts you're listening to, anything as long as it's fun and nice. You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org. SPEAKER_10: Hey, Keurig coffee drinkers. Need a cold coffee with a bold flavor? 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