There Is No After

Shortly before Christmas last year, I sent a message to Jeff Sharlet, a writer I don’t know, thanking him for memorializing the dead. It was a Sunday night, past 2 a.m., and though I can’t remember the specific thing keeping me awake I know its basic contours. Most every feeling I’ve had this year is a shifting arrangement of terrible, grasping dread and raw disbelief. (And fury, of which I have oceans.) He got back to me shortly before 4 a.m.; he was on the “late shift,” he said, working on a story about what was at that time the comparatively paltry 317,816 Americans who had died of covid-19. Read Full Article »