Yesterday in Vanity Fair, an essay written by author Jesmyn Ward was published in the September 2020 edition of the online magazine. Jesmyn Ward is, of course, an accomplished and critically acclaimed novelist. Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Where the Line Bleeds, among many other books, have earned her accolades and awards. She won the National Book Award for Fiction, she was a MacArthur fellow. Her accomplishments are too great to list here. The essay, just published yesterday, is no different. And it is also — amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the widespread, global protests against police violence and in affirmation of the Black Lives Matter movement, and general civic unrest — essential reading. The essay begins with Ward noting that her husband died in January. It’s unclear — or at least not explicitly confirmed — that her husband had contracted COVID-19. His official cause of death, after a week of what was an unconfirmed flu, was “acute respiratory distress syndrome.” Ward lost her husband, only 33 years old, months before people would understand COVID-19 or even begin to take it seriously. More than a meditation on Ward’s personal grief, the piece does the work of meditating on personal grief alongside the grief of the collective in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd nad protests that rocked first Minneapolis, and then the world, in the aftermath of his death. For Ward, the personal and collective grief swirl around one another. And how could they not?
