ever told me grief felt so like fear.” But to grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear. “For fear of infection,” one writer noted, “no doctor will visit the sick, nor will the father visit the son, the mother the daughter, [or] the brother the brother. . . . And thus an unaccountable number of people died without any mark of affection, piety, or charity.” In the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, Demetrios Kydones wrote, “Fathers do not dare to bury their own sons.”
In fear of death and hope of survival, many left the sick to die alone. To do otherwise was to risk your own life, and the lives of whatever loved ones you had left. The Black Death was vastly, incalculably different from our current pandemic—it was orders of magnitude deadlier and far less understood. But infectious disease continues to separate us in our most vulnerable moments. Too many of us, sick and healthy, were forced into isolation. Too many died apart from those they love, saying goodbye over video chat or a telephone line. In the New England Journal of Medicine, one physician wrote of a wife watching her husband die over FaceTime.
I think maybe that is the reason I cannot stop reading about pandemics. I am haunted by this separation. When I was sixteen, a friend of mine died. They died alone, which I found very difficult. I couldn’t stop thinking about those last minutes, those lonely and helpless minutes. I still often have nightmares about this—where I can see this person and see the fear in their eyes, but I cannot get to them before they die.
I know that being with someone as they die doesn’t lessen the pain, and in some cases can amplify it, but still, my mind keeps circling, vulture-like, around the extensively precedented tragedy of not being able to hold the hand of your beloved and say goodbye.
* * *
When I worked at the children’s hospital, I was just a kid myself—so skinny that in my powder-blue chaplain coat I looked like a boy wearing his dad’s suit jacket. Those months of chaplaincy are the axis around which my life spins. I loved the work but also found it impossible—too much suffering that I could do nothing to alleviate.
But now, looking back on it, I try not to judge that twenty-two-year-old for being a bad chaplain, and I realize I did sometimes help, if only by holding someone’s hand who otherwise would’ve been alone. That work left me permanently grateful to all those who do what they can to make sure the dying are accompanied for as long as possible on that last journey we’re sure of.
During the Black Death, there were many such people—monks and nuns and physicians and nurses who stayed, offering prayers and comfort to the sick even though they knew such work was beyond dangerous. The same was true of cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century: According to Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years, in 1832, “at New York’s Greenwich Hospital, fourteen of sixteen nurses died of cholera contracted while caring for patients.” Then, as now, healthcare workers were often lauded for their heroism, but expected to perform their work with inadequate support, including a lack of clean gowns and gloves.
Most of the names of these accompaniers are lost to history, but among them was the physician Guy de Chauliac, who stayed in Avignon as the plague raged and continued to treat patients despite being, as he later wrote, “in continual fear.” It is true that our current horrors are precedented. But so is our capacity for care.
* * *
The eighteenth-century historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr once wrote, “Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.” In Europe during the Black Death, the pestilence was widely blamed on Jewish people. Wild conspiracy theories emerged that Jewish people were poisoning wells or rivers, and after confessions were drawn out through torture, many thousands of Jews were murdered. Entire communities were burned to death, and the emotionless, matter-of-fact accounts of these murders are chilling. Heinrich Truchsess wrote, “First Jews were killed or burnt in Solden in November, then in Zofingen they were seized and some put on the wheel, then in Stuttgart they were all burnt. The same thing happened during November in Lansberg . . .”
It goes on like that, for paragraphs.
Many (including Guy de Chauliac) recognized that it was utterly impossible for a vast Jewish