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Lenten Art Installation remembers those lost to COVID-19
Lenten Art Installation remembers those lost to COVID-19
The Rev. Meredyth Ward, All Saints, Worcester
During July of 2014, my husband Matt and I went to China, courtesy of the generosity of some of his former graduate students. He was nearing the end of his life, and they wanted to thank him for his work and mentorship over the years. Matt was never a big fan of cities. We went to Beijing, mostly because he wanted to see the Great Wall near there, but he most wanted to see beautiful landscapes (and universities, of course!). We traveled to national parks, enjoyed lakeside beauty, and visited shrines and temples in the mountains.
At one of the temples, the monks supported themselves by selling strips of cloth that could be used to offer a prayer or intention. The strips were then tied to whatever the petitioner wanted—trees, railings, bushes. Jing (one of Matt’s students) and I both got strips of cloth and wrote hopes and prayers. There was a conversation between Jing and one of the monks about whether the prayers needed to be written in Chinese. After some consultation amongst the monks, it was decided that I could write mine in English—God would understand it anyway!
Six years later, the memories of those bits of hope and prayer fluttering in the breeze came back to me. I was having a conversation with my grandsons during early COVID-19 about the number of people who had died. Being kids (they were nine and ten at the time) they really didn’t understand how many people were affected. A thousand deaths didn’t seem that large a number to them, so I decided to show them in a tangible way.
Using my quilting supplies, I cut strips of cloth from various bits of leftover fabric and ribbons. I made each of them 19cm long, for COVID-19. We knotted them onto a cord, and they quickly realized that 1,000 was a lot of knots to tie, and a lot of people who had died. In fact, they lost interest in tying knots long before we finished.
I, however, was hooked. I realized that with each knot I was remembering a person, known or unknown, and I was affirming that we were all together in this—at a time when so many were feeling alone and disconnected. People were dying away from their families, whispering farewells into the cell phone of caregivers. The least I could do was try to represent how we were bound together.
I started keeping track of the numbers in Massachusetts. Remember how we saw lists of numbers every day for weeks? I decided to tie a strip of cloth on the line for every person who died of COVID-19 in our commonwealth. When the death toll in the US had reached 100,000, around June first of 2020, the number of deaths in Massachusetts had reached 6,547. The line was now over a hundred feet long, and had long since outgrown my living room.
At the time I was worshipping at Good Shepherd in Clinton, and the priest and vestry there were open to displaying what I was then calling COVID-19 flags. We put hooks on the side of the building, and I strung the flags across the space by the front door. Each week I added to the line, sometimes a few, sometimes a heartbreaking number. With each knot, I prayed, and affirmed that the person was in the hands of God.
It was a living meditation for me, and for those who walked by it each week. People would stop and ask where the flags from a certain month might be, and I knew when that was asked that someone they loved had died during that period. I would do my best to estimate where their loved one was commemorated, and they would often photograph that section of the line.
The colors were random, although some sections had one color or another predominate. As you may remember, it was sometimes hard to buy fabric, since lots of people were at home and making quilts or face masks, and supply chains were messy at best. The one section that was very intentional was a series of red, white, and blue flags placed for those who had died at the Veteran’s Home in Holyoke. While I did not place them side by side, their flags had stars or stripes in their honor.
Eventually, I realized that COVID-19 would never be “over,” but our lives were returning to something like a new normal. I stopped adding to the line in May 2021, when Massachusetts lifted our state of emergency. Eventually, we took down the flags, and had them as part of our All Saints day commemoration.
This year, we are five years out from the state of emergency. March 2020 was when we began to pay attention to this new disease that was sweeping the world. While we have reached a new normal, COVID-19 is still with us, and most of us still feel the resonance of our experiences with the pandemic.
I now worship at All Saints, Worcester, and when our staff began talking about how we might recognize and remember this anniversary, I decided to retrieve the COVID-19 flags. During Lent, which coincides with the anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, we will display the flags in the church. While the death toll has increased since them, the number of flags tied to the line is 17,384, a number both horrifying and humbling. But when we look at the line, we see not only a vast number, but a way of making our prayers visible.
As we move through Lent, many of us try to deepen our prayer life. Some of us try new methods of prayer, others spend more time in prayer. As we move through Lent, how might we make our prayer visible, if only to ourselves? ♦
