We need a national monument for the victims of the virus

Towards the end of her life, my mother attended so many funerals they became her primary form of entertainment. As her generation of neighbours and friends fell away, her weeks were dominated by the rituals of church, catering and liturgy. She never claimed to enjoy the experience, but as I often said to her: which would you rather? You going to people’s funerals, or people coming to yours?

The last funeral she attended was her own. People came. A village church, a few inappropriate remarks from her only son, sandwiches of a luxuriousness of which she would surely have disapproved, and the chance to say goodbye.

This cruel virus is cheating thousands of us the chance to say goodbye. COVID-19 is robbing the dying the comfort of a loving hand to hold or a familiar face as the darkness descends. Families are watching their loved ones enter hospitals, fighting for each breath, and then never coming out. The rites and rituals of funerals are being perverted by the need to socially exclude. No eulogies or hymns. No solemn ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. No sandwiches.

Funerals, rituals, commemorations: these things matter. They help us make sense of our loss. They form a punctuation mark to our lives with someone, and our lives without them. For some, there is a deeper religious significance. One of the major points of the debate during the speedy passage of the Coronavirus Bill through parliament was whether Jewish and Muslim religious rites would be observed as the death rate increased, and in particular, the avoidance of cremation.

This method of disposal of mortal remains was also opposed by the Church of England when it first became available legally in the 1880s. The first person to be cremated was the painter Jeanette Pickersgill at Woking, and it became fashionable amongst bohemians, atheists and radicals. Amongst the first Britons to be cremated were Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx. But even cremation allows for a service and place of permanent commemoration.

During the First World War, the huge scale of losses made it clear to the authorities that repatriation of dead bodies and private funerals and memorials would be impossible. The Imperial War Graves Commission (later the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) established the laudable principle that as the soldiers had served, fought and died together, as comrades, they should be buried alongside each other close to where they died, without regard to social status and rank. Hence the serried ranks of white crosses (and other religious symbols) across Belgium, France, and all the battlefields from Tanzania to the Falklands.

But the problem remained — what about the tens of thousands without a marking place? The report establishing the egalitarian principles of the war graves gave prominence to these ‘lost, the unknown, but not forgotten dead.’ The solution was the Cenotaph and the tomb of the unknown soldier at Westminster Abbey as a focal point for the nation’s grief and commemoration, for the families without a grave to tend.

The collective trauma of the current crisis will not be as deep as that felt by the war-time generations, but the individual trauma is. The families this week losing their parents, spouses, sons and daughters face not only the pain of loss, but also the absence of a familiar, ordered process of saying goodbye. Perhaps too the guilt that they died surrounded by strangers, hooked up to machines under harsh hospitals lights.

When the virus is beaten, as surely it will be, we need to think about how to commemorate the thousands it will have claimed. I am sure we need a national monument for the NHS doctors and nurses who have died. But we need something more — a focal point for all those grieving, similar to the memorial to the victims of the Bali bombing in St James, or the national police memorial at the corner of Horse Guards Parade. When all this is over, we must end social isolation by the precise opposite: social association. We need to hold hands, hug strangers, pull our children close. A national monument the victims of COVID-19 would allow collective commemoration, private mourning, and a place to say goodbye.

Paul Richards is a writer and former government adviser.