Brian Lehrer: Well, there you have it. Thank you for staying with that. Those of you who have for as long, however long as you have this morning, Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We have just been listening to readings mostly by you, Brian Lehrer show listeners, of 1,780 names of people from New York city who have died from COVID-19. It's our small memorial as we mark the occasion over these last few days of one year since the pandemic came to town and transformed our lives. Plunged so many people into grief and, of course, upended the lifestyles of almost everyone.

It was only 1,780 names when close to 30,000 people from the city have died. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I thought as a sign of respect, a gesture of respect to everyone else in our area who's been lost to COVID, I would give you the exact count per the New York Times COVID tracker as of eight o'clock this morning, which is the last time they updated it. In New York state, 48,537 people, in the state of New Jersey, 23,925 people and in the state of Connecticut, 7,788, people have died of COVID in roughly this last year. The reason we just read those names was that there is no official list of the local people who have died.

Our colleagues at the nonprofit news organization The City crowdsourced names as part of a project called Missing Them and that was the list they were able to develop and confirm. Who were the voices? Well, many of them were you, as some of you will recognize as you listened. Remember that here at the Brian Lehrer show, a while back, we invited you to be the ones reading those names. 445 of you signed up and read four names each, those voices were largely your fellow Brian Lehrer show listeners. Just to give credit more fully, Missing Them as an open data journalism project that's ongoing to document New Yorkers who have died due to COVID-19 done by The City, that news organization, and its partners from the Columbia university journalism school, Boston college, the Craig Newmark school of journalism at CUNY and volunteers.

You can see more of their remarkable website, just Google "Missing Them," and it will come up. You can also still submit names. You can search for individual names on the list and they also sorted it by job description. As one way you can look at it, healthcare workers, transit workers, educators, and others. Google "Missing them," and you'll see the link to the project, wonderful and admirable work by the news organization The City. I'm glad we were able to contribute some audio to that project. Let's process what we just heard. In a minute we'll open up the phones in a couple of ways for you to participate.

To help us do this, back with us for the third time during the pandemic, is Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister at Middle Collegiate Church on Second Avenue, between sixth and seventh streets in the East village. Reverend Dr. Lewis was here last year for two very special occasions. The virtual Easter observance that we had on the show on April 9th last spring, when people couldn't go to services in person, and as the lead guest on our virtual holiday party on December 17th on the show, to give us a spiritual kickoff before we all drank our virtual eggnog and play games and things like that.

I probably don't need to say this, but Reverend Dr. Lewis isn't here as a Christian thing today, per se. She's interested in and can cross denominational lines to discuss human rituals around personal grief and community grief. Whether you are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, completely secular or whatever you are, we hope we are holding this space for all of us. Reverend Dr. Lewis, we always appreciate when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Brian, I'm so grateful to join you and I'm always glad to hear your show. You do such a beautiful, catching in my throat, such a beautiful show all the time, and today was just poignant and wonderful. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that. Listeners, you can participate in several ways for this last half hour or so of the show. You can just react to the experience of listening to some of the names. Just now we heard the catch in Reverend Dr. Lewis, his voice. That was obviously from that. How much of it did you listen to, folks, and what was that like for you? (646) 435-7280. Maybe some of you can answer this question. What grief or remembrance ritual from your family or religion or culture have you leaned on to get you through your personal loss this year?

Even some kind of greater social grief or community grief, that we're going to talk about with Reverend Dr. Lewis, for the enormity and disproportionality of the losses. One thing that struck me was the incredible diversity of the names that we heard, but also the concentration of names that were Spanish names our WNYC in Gothamist New Jersey reporter Karen Ye just did a story, many of you heard it, around the fact that Latino men under 50 in New Jersey have died of COVID at twice the rate of similar age black men, and seven times the rate of similar age white men.

We certainly heard reflections of that in the reading of the names that we just did. Listeners, what kinds of personal or community rituals are helpful to you or any reaction to listening to the names mostly if people you don't know? (646) 435-7280, you're invited. Reverend Dr. Lewis to help us put what we just heard into some kind of context, in the case of mass casualty events, which is really what we're talking about, there's the practice of naming individual names that well predates what we just heard. They read the names at the World Trade Center every year. They continue to do that on September 11th.

The Vietnam war Memorial in DC, I assume you've been there as I have, 458,000 plus Americans. There's a long wall of all those individual names and grave. Can you reflect on the process and usefulness of naming strangers' names in the face of mass casualty losses?

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Brian, it's so important. It's so important to turn the numbers of casualties, the statistics of casualties, into real people in our consciousness and our hearts, in our morning. Our name is as personal as our fingerprints. Think about the rituals of babies being born in indigenous cultures, or in my own African cultures. The baby is lifted up and names publicly. In Jewish customs, babies being brought to synagogue and having a breath and named. In the Catholic church, when children are confirmed, they're named. This naming is a personal acknowledgement of the particularity of another.

My favorite definition, Brian, of love comes from an old professor Jim Loder, who says love is the unconditional regard for the unique particularity of the other. The unconditional regard for the unique particularity of the other, and nothing is more important than naming. "How do I pronounce your name?" Not calling him Jose Joe. How do I call Brian Lehrer? How do we name each other? It proof techs our existence. I've been to that Vietnam war Memorial. I've been to the EJI museum where the names of African-Americans and some Jews that were lynched in the South are on these wooden posts. We named them, we honor their existence.

What you did today was such a thing to do, especially, Brian, because we don't get to look at each other very closely right now and hold each other while we grieve.

Brian Lehrer: To go from the individual to the community, I'm sure you and members of your congregation have lost people to COVID. I read that on Sunday, your service at middle collegiate church acknowledging one year of the pandemic explicitly addressed the topic of collective grief. Is that right? If so, how did you approach it?

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Yes. That is right. Middle Collegiate church is part of a five-ministry collegium. Everyone doesn't know that, but Marble Collegiate Church is our sister, Fort Washington Collegiate Church, Western Collegiate Church, and intersections is a international NGO. We all are one church on five campuses. The five clergy got together and put this worship together. It had different personalities, if you will, in each of our churches. The idea was to say, these 530,000 people now lost to our nation. Brian, the people around the globe, all of these people belong to all of us. The deaths of these people are all of our losses.

It's something about also the loss of how we've been a people, the loss of how we've been a community, the loss of connectedness and relationality because of this virus and how it's separated us from each other. We talked about the 500 bodies that haven't been claimed and haven't been buried and how that is just a, let's just say a wound on the collective soul of America. I don't want to be too political Brian, but you know I'm political. I would say we also are mourning the way this disease shows the underbelly of America, shows our unfinished work around race and ethnicity and class.

That a whole generation of Hispanic, Latin X men are dying, Brian, that's cause for a communal mourning, not just the parent or the sister or the wife of Enrique. It's all of us mourning that we live in a nation where the pre-existing conditions of poverty and racism and low wages and lack of healthcare has led to this catastrophic loss. We mourn that as well.

Brian: We're on the same wavelength with that, for sure. I was just going to say, and you got there before me, in public health, I went to public health school long time ago. We talk about the social determinants of health and I'm sure you know this in your work, how much wealth or poverty, more access or less access to medical care, to education, other factors that had given us such disparities to begin with before COVID in life expectancy and disease, and then COVID thrust it in everybody's faces. The more comfortable among us couldn't look away as easily from the marginalized who've been getting sick and dying in the pandemic at so much higher rates.

There's something that differentiates personal grief from community grief or names it, or deals with it in different kinds of rituals when a community is hit so hard with death. Then there's that layer of injustice, not just bad luck, all over when we lose an individual in the more natural cycle of life, right?

Reverend Dr. Lewis: That's right. I heard the story that you referenced earlier by your colleague and this idea of I'm just thinking of the one gentleman that talked about doing the memorial every half hour and having to turn away another 100 people. What's missing in this moment, Brian, for the nation, for the globe is the importance of having the casket in the room,, having the ashes in the room, having a chance to break bread together, having a chance to sit Shivah. To be brought low in our mourning in a public way and having people hold that with us.

I think this kind of grief, both the personal and the communal, is complicated by the space and the distance, Brian, by the inability to hold onto someone. The inability to mark the death in the normal ritual ways that we would. I think that's been extremely hard for the people in my community,, and I'm sure in yours as well.

Brian: Let's take a few phone calls. So many people are calling in our lines are jammed. Let's see what some people have to say. Myat in New York city. Regular caller Myat, I'm moving up to the front of the line. I want to hear you today. Thank you for calling in.

Myat: Thank you for taking my call. I tell you, this was really moving and really helps us connect to the why this pandemic is so important in terms of the loss of life. I thought two things. I thought of the fact that in the line of astrologists and numerologists, there's a new branch and I'm going to be reaching out to stay connected to those names of people who actually analyze names in terms of character, destiny and even maybe an early death. The other part of it is, it's so connecting in that at some point, and I heard toward the end, someone who is not related, but I think many of us heard our last names at some point. Thank you so much for this. This was a really, really important program at some intervals I hope you will continue this so we stay connected to such loss.

Brian: Myat, thank you for staying connected to us. Brittany in Manhattan you're on WNYC. Hi Brittany. Thank you for calling in.

Brittany: Hello, Brian, thank you for today. I'm sitting currently in Harlem with my two dachshunds. I listened to the whole show and I lit a candle as my ritual when we began. I heard my name, I heard my husband's name and then at the end I heard Dr. Julie Butler. Dr. Julie Butler is my veterinarian and she passed away last April and I had no idea. It was incredibly powerful because I just thought, "What is that name?" Then I Googled it and I broke down in my kitchen. I realized that behind every single one of these names is a whole life. I really thank you for honoring their existence. It's profound,, poignant. Dr. Julie was a huge member of the community and it really struck home. It was a huge moment for me. Thank you.

Brian: Brittany. Thank you. I can imagine the shock of hearing that someone you knew personally died, hearing it on the radio for the first time, getting it that way. I'm sorry for that.

Brittany: Thank you.

Brian: Brittany. Thank you very much, John in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi John.

John: Hi. I just like to say with all respect, like always, thank you for respecting all New Yorkers in this way. I'm sitting next to an empty chair that belonged to my mother. She passed away on March 30th, 2020. We're a big family, but when this happened, we couldn't do anything, but just ourselves. Our immediate family. It felt so wrong because she was a soldier for our family. She loved us all. She kept us together. She bought us here. I'm second generation. My mom's brought us here before and did everything she had to do. She was a true New Yorker. She listened to your program.

She loved to go around the city on rides with me and I would ask her, "Where would you want to go?" She always wanted to stay within the five boroughs. Always wanted to see what was new. Always wanted to see what was going on. She was 82 years old. She had Parkinson's and for 15 years I took care of her. It was a pleasure. It was a privilege to do so and now with this pandemic, it took her away. None of us could joined together. This is March 30th it's the first time we're going to gather together, all of us in the church, to salute my mother for being a soldier, for being a wonderful mother, a wonderful person, a wonderful New Yorker, making us all proud.

That chair will be empty forever. No one will ever sit there ever again. Like the president said, we all have some person missing at our dining room table, and it's so true. Every day when we look, when we have dinner, we salute her and we respect her and we say, "Thank you, mom. Thank you for everything you did, rest in peace." This isn't the way she was supposed to go. We had plans. She even said to me, "You know that the day I go, this is the way I want to." It just couldn't happen that way because of the pandemic, because of the virus. It took her away before she had to go.

We wish her and we pray for her and we wish for all New Yorkers, for everyone that has passed away because of this virus and because of taking them sooner than we expected, for some of us that had elderly ones at home. I just want to make sure that we tell everyone, 'We love you," as a New Yorker.

Brian: I'm glad you called him to do that and I'm sure it took courage, as upsetting as this obviously is for you to relive it like this. Do you want to say your mom's name out loud on the air?

John: Please Louise Maria Perez Una Lata. She was born 11th '37 and passed away March 30th, 2020 because of the virus. She had a loving family that took care of her. She was 82 years old and she loved life.

Brian: John, thank you so much.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Thank you John.

Brian: Call in again. Reverend Dr. Lewis, what John just did for his mother, I wish we could do that for all of the 1,780 names that we read, leading up to this but we can't. You want to reflect on that first set of callers?

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Yes. Just tears are falling out of my eyes thinking about John's loss, the particularity of that loss, Louise Maria, and all of the ones who called in, the woman who found out about the death of doctor on the call. The grief is so personal and what's beautiful, Brian, and you know this, this is why you did this. When we open the door for people to say the names, a few days ago people were saying the names of Breonna Taylor, who's death remains at a one-year mark. I'm going to say justice is not served, and now that complicates the mourning. It's beautiful, Brian.

I'm celebrating that we were able to hear voices, to put texture and tone around the life of some of the folks and the experiences of the folks. I was at our worship celebration that we put together for last Sunday at the one-year mark. In our church we'll sing Broadway all day, and we sang, How do you measure Life from Rent. Just those words, 525,600 minutes, moments so dear, measuring life and daylight and sunsets and midnight, and cups of coffee, in inches, in miles, in laughter and strife. There's something ubiquitous about that. That's not about a particular religion. It's about the reality of the taste, the texture, the tone, the smell, the memories, the experiences of our loved one.

Maybe, Brian on the way into our holy days, is a way to think about life immortal or a way to think about everlasting life. Christians might say resurrection. The memory of Louise Maria, with her son John, keeps her alive in his tears, in his laughter, in the empty chair. The sense of her presence is such a powerful experience to comfort us, even as we cry.

Brian: Chris, who is a nurse in Astoria. Chris, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Chris: Hi, Brian. I just wanted to say, I'm a nurse. I work at Elmhurst Hospital. I've called in a few times over the year. I just want to say I listened to the whole segment, I didn't expect you to be doing this today. It was just really tough. I was listening and I was coming in and out of consciousness. The names just kept coming and coming and it was just really, echoing another one of the callers said, is that you hear the names and you realize there's a whole life and there's friends and family and all these moments. You have no idea the ages of these people.

It was just very humbling, just to hear the names and to hear that they kept going on. You come back into realizing that there's another name and another name and another person and another life that was lost. It's just very powerful radio so I appreciate it, Brian. You usually do powerful radio.

Brian: Thank you for staying with it.

Chris: Thank you so much.

Brian: It took emotional fortitude, I think, for anybody who stayed with a lot of it, so thank you. JD in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, JD.

JD: Hi, Brian. This was a really great, moving radio piece you did. I listened to the whole thing. I heard my father's name, who I lost in April in the pandemic. You were asking about rituals that we've been leaning on since. In these times, it's been really hard to grieve and mourn normally like we used to. One thing I've been doing is rewatching all of my dad's favorite movies and movies I saw with him as a little kid,, as a way to spend time and process and remember his life.

Brian: Thank you very much. I am sorry for your loss. I'm glad. I don't know if I'm more glad or more sorry that you got to hear your father's name on the air in this segment but thank you for being there. Arturo in Bergen County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Arturo.

Arturo: Hi, Brian. Good morning. Good morning, Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis, my professor, and friend.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Hi, good morning.

Brian: You're a student?

Arturo: I am a current student of Dr. Lewis's right now. She's teaching me and my cohort, along with some others, how to be public theologians. My goodness, do we need all that we can learn during this season of the pandemic. I'm a community faith leader in Ridgewood and this pandemic and the deaths of those in our community have been tremendously impactful. Listening to the names, I've heard my name numerous times, Arturo, a name I don't hear very often. Then I hear Dr. Lewis on another name. My last name is Lewis, and just trying to help people, as Dr. Lewis has stated, to navigate during this challenging time, has been quite profound.

Hearing our names gives value and meaning to our lives as it reminds us that we are affirmed, we are valued, we are loved. Dr. Lewis reminds us of that so often with her movement that she's leading, The Revolutionary Love Movement. I just want to say thank you for this opportunity that you gave to all of us in this space this morning. Thank you for having Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis here also, to help contextualize this even more. Thank you both.

Brian Lehrer: Arturo, thank you so much.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Thank you, Arturo.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I want to give a little credit to the music that we came back with into the segment, which was not our usual theme music. It was Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variation Number Nine. There's one of your students, obviously loves you, Reverend Lewis.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: He's great. I love him too. Thank you, Arturo.

Brian Lehrer: We just have a few minutes left. I do want to acknowledge that, as some of our listeners may remember your church, Middle Collegiate Church in The Village, was in the news in December for a fire that started in an adjacent building and then heavily damaged the church. I saw this from just last week on the NBC News website about you. It said, "The church burned down in December, devastated but undaunted. She, you, partnered with a local synagogue as a site for Coronavirus testing and later rolled it into a site for COVID-19 inoculations. Members of her congregation have enthusiastically participated in the efforts."

How's the church and how's the congregation? Then I'm going to invite you to mention the benefit concert that's coming up next week.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Thank you, Brian. Talk about saying names. I want to say the names of my colleagues, Amanda Ashcraft and Darrell Hamilton, they serve with me and our team at Middle Church. We've been building a relationship, I'm saying another name, with Rabbi Josh Stanton up at Easton Temple. He and Amanda plotted, we've done lots of things together but to be able to do this together, Brian, has been so important. Amanda's care work has included helping our seniors find inoculations.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry to rush you but we have 30 seconds left so get it all in.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: There we go. That is happening, and we're really proud of that. On March 25th, March to Rise is a benefit concert at seven o'clock PM. People can find tickets at middlechurch.org. It's Titus Burgess. It's Norah Jones. It's going to be so beautiful music and some inspirational talks by people who love us around the world. If you go to middlechurch.org, 7:00 PM, March 25, you can get your tickets now.

Brian: middlechurch.org. Reverend Lewis, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I couldn't think of a better person to be on with us for this special show.

Reverend Dr. Lewis: Thank you, Brian, for asking me. It's my honor. Thank you so much, be well.

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