What We Owe the Dead

GEORGE:
The Bills of Mortality—weekly printed tallies—turned death into public information, something people watched like weather. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

WILL:
And once death is printed, it becomes “real” in a new way.
But it also becomes… manageable.
A column of numbers fits neatly on a page.
A grave does not.

GEORGE:
That’s the paradox: a bill can keep the dead visible—
and it can also teach the city to normalize loss.

WILL:
Yes.
A repeated tragedy becomes background noise unless the heart fights it.

GEORGE:
And then there’s the other “memorial space” in your era: the theatre itself.

After major plague closures, theatres reopened—like after the 1603 outbreak, with reopening in April 1604.

WILL:
And the crowd that returned was not innocent.
They returned carrying private funerals.

GEORGE:
So the playhouse becomes a communal ritual of memory—without calling itself a memorial.

Transcript

“What We Owe the Dead: Memory, Memorial, and the Politics of Forgetting”

“Once the crisis ends, memorials are unnecessary; it’s better to move on.”

GEORGE (quiet, intimate):
After an epidemic, the dead face a second danger.

Not the virus.
Not the fever.
Not the breathlessness.

The second danger is… disappearance.

Because the world gets tired.
The world wants relief.
The world wants the story to end.

And the dead—who can’t protest—
risk being turned into a statistic and then into silence.

When I say “owe,” I don’t mean we’re personally guilty for history.

I mean this:
A society owes the dead recognition.
It owes them witness.
It owes them truth.
And it owes the living a way to carry grief without becoming numb or cruel.

WILL:
Yes.
A memorial is not only for the dead.
It is for the living—so they do not become less human.

GEORGE:
Let’s go back. Plague-time London.
The city didn’t have the kind of national monuments we imagine now.
But it did have something that functioned like a public ritual: counting.

WILL:
Yes.
The city read death aloud.

GEORGE:
The Bills of Mortality—weekly printed tallies—turned death into public information, something people watched like weather. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

WILL:
And once death is printed, it becomes “real” in a new way.
But it also becomes… manageable.
A column of numbers fits neatly on a page.
A grave does not.

GEORGE:
That’s the paradox: a bill can keep the dead visible—
and it can also teach the city to normalize loss.

WILL:
Yes.
A repeated tragedy becomes background noise unless the heart fights it.

GEORGE:
And then there’s the other “memorial space” in your era: the theatre itself.

After major plague closures, theatres reopened—like after the 1603 outbreak, with reopening in April 1604.


WILL:
And the crowd that returned was not innocent.
They returned carrying private funerals.

GEORGE:
So the playhouse becomes a communal ritual of memory—without calling itself a memorial.

WILL:
Yes.
A city that cannot mourn cleanly
will mourn sideways—in story, in laughter, in tragedy.

George
Imagine
A household receives the bill, and the dead hover at the edge of daily life.

GEORGE (reading, narrative tone):
“The paper arrives and the room changes.

Not because the paper is loud—
but because everyone knows what it contains.

A man reads the totals as if reading the weather.
A woman pretends to keep working while her hands slow.

Someone asks, ‘Is it worse?’

No one answers right away, because the answer is not a number.
The answer is a name.

The names are not printed.
But the names appear anyway—
in the mind, in the body, in the empty chair that no one mentions.

The bill is folded.
The bill is put away.
The day continues.

And the household learns the plague’s strangest lesson:
you can return to routine
while grief sits at the table like a quiet guest.”

WILL (soft):
Yes.
And the danger is not grief.
The danger is forgetting you are grieving.

22:00–29:00 NOW: COVID — “moving on” vs “marking”
GEORGE:
Now our century. COVID created enormous loss, and also a strange social problem:
a lot of grief happened without shared ritual—hospitals, isolation, restricted funerals, delayed memorials.
And we’ve seen evidence that disrupted mourning rituals can intensify grief outcomes. (frontiersin.org)

WILL:
Because grief needs witnesses.

GEORGE:
Which is why memorials emerged—sometimes officially, sometimes from the bereaved themselves.
For example, in London, the National Covid Memorial Wall began in March 2021 with thousands of red hearts painted by volunteers to represent lives lost, maintained by bereaved volunteers. 
And very recently the UK government pledged to preserve it. 

WILL:
A wall of hearts is a public refusal to let the dead vanish.

GEORGE:
In the U.S., we also saw striking public memorial gestures—like In America: Remember, a temporary installation on the National Mall in 2021 with one white flag for each American who died at that time. 

WILL:
Flags. Hearts. Names.
Different languages, same need.

GEORGE:
And there have been formal proposals too—like the COVID-19 National Memorial Act introduced in Congress. 
And advocacy groups have pushed for a National COVID memorial and memorial day initiatives. 

WILL:
Because the living are trying to answer the question:
“How do we carry this without becoming stone?”

GEORGE:
In movies and TV, memorials are often treated like a quick emotional scene:
music swells, one tear, a speech, fade out.

But real memorials are messy—political, contested, unfinished.

Will, what do screens miss?

WILL:
They miss the argument.

A memorial is not merely art.
It is a decision about whose death matters, how much, and in what language.

GEORGE:
And epidemics especially create conflict about meaning—because not everyone agrees on the story.

WILL:
Yes.
When society is divided, memory becomes a battlefield.

GEORGE:
So the screen’s tidy memorial scene is comforting—
but it’s often dishonest.

33:30–46:00 SCHOLAR’S CORNER
Modern claim: “Once the crisis ends, memorials are unnecessary; it’s better to move on.”

GEORGE:
Here’s today’s modern claim:
“Once the crisis ends, memorials are unnecessary; it’s better to move on.”
Meaning: memorials keep wounds open; practical people focus on the future.
Will—your reaction?

WILL (calm, firm):
The claim confuses two different things:
Living in the past, and
refusing erasure.
A memorial is not a chain to the past.
It is a refusal to lie about the past.

GEORGE:
So memorials aren’t about being stuck; they’re about being honest.

WILL:
Yes.
“Moving on” can be healthy—
or it can be a mask for avoidance.

GEORGE:
And we have good reason to worry about avoidance.
Even huge events can fade from collective memory: the 1918 flu is a famous example of how a pandemic can be widely “forgotten” culturally, even though it was massive. 

WILL:
Because forgetting is convenient.

GEORGE:
And there’s another layer: memorials can be part of public health, indirectly, because they keep lessons emotionally available—not just intellectually available.
Also, grief research during COVID suggests that restricting mourning rituals can worsen grief outcomes. 
So building spaces for remembrance can function as communal care—not only history.

WILL:
Yes.
A memorial is a place where grief can speak without apologizing.

GEORGE:
Let’s bring in the politics.
Because you said it perfectly: memory is a battlefield.
The National Covid Memorial Wall in London began without official permission and became a grassroots site of public mourning; disputes and negotiations over its status show how memorials can become political. 

WILL:
Of course.
The powerful often prefer grief to be private—
because private grief does not ask public questions.

GEORGE:
And public questions include:
What failed? Who was protected? Who paid? Who was ignored?

WILL:
Yes.
A memorial is an accusation only if a society has something to hide.

GEORGE:
That line will get your listeners’ attention.
So what’s the healthier, corrected claim?

WILL:
That memorials are necessary—but they must be humane.
A memorial should not become a weapon.
It should become a witness.

GEORGE:
And it should make room for different kinds of grief, because people lost people in different ways.

WILL:
Yes.
The memorial does not need one story—
it needs honest space.

GEORGE:
Let’s make this concrete. What do we owe the dead?
I’m going to propose four “memorial functions”—simple, practical:

1) Names and specificity
Not only “X million,” but “this person existed.”

WILL:
A number is abstract.
A name is a wound and a blessing.

2) A place to gather
A physical place, or even a shared digital ritual—somewhere grief can be communal.
GEORGE:
Like the wall of hearts. 

3) A permission structure
A memorial gives people permission to feel—without being told to “move on.”
WILL:
A society that rushes the grieving
creates a quieter kind of damage.




4) A bridge to responsibility
Without turning into a witch hunt, memorials can keep accountability alive.

GEORGE:
And this is where “politics of forgetting” matters: if we rush past remembrance, we may also rush past repair.

WILL:
Yes.
Memory is the first step of justice.

GEORGE:
A person at a memorial—any memorial—trying to turn numbers back into humans.

GEORGE (reading):
“I thought I could handle the numbers.
I thought I was ‘fine.’
Then I stood in front of a wall of hearts—
or a field of white flags—
and my mind did something it had refused to do for years:
It pictured faces.
It pictured hands.
It pictured ordinary mornings that ended.
And I realized the memorial wasn’t making me sad—
I was already sad.

The memorial was doing something else:
it was giving my sadness a place to stand
so it didn’t have to ambush me in the grocery store.”

WILL (soft):
Yes.
That is what we owe the dead:
a place in the living world.

GEORGE:
Next episode: “Mercy on Stage: Eight Shakespearean Mercy Moments.”
We’ll take those examples we talked about—practical, dramatic, undeniable—and treat them as survival language for an audience trained by epidemics.

WILL:
Ah.
A good subject.
Mercy is the one art that keeps a society from eating itself.

GEORGE:
See you next time.

(Music out.)