By Sarah Wagner
Date posted: August 8, 2025
***
Years ago, I was driving with Hajra Ćatić, my mentor and friend, along a back road in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, not far from the city of Bratunac. I don’t recall the exact purpose of the trip, but I can still envision the scene—a late summer day, open fields to the left and right, a row of beech trees that shaded our route. Probably we were visiting a member of Hajra’s association, Žene Srebrenice (Women of Srebrenica), who had decided to return to her prewar home in the years after the 1992-1995 war that decimated much of the country. Likely, she was a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995 that claimed the lives of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. We must have been unsure of the address because at Hajra’s direction I slowed the car and drew alongside a woman walking on the gravel shoulder. I remember Hajra rolling down her window and hailing the woman. They spoke briefly, and then the woman’s expression changed. Tilting her head, narrowing her eyes, she asked where she knew Hajra from. Almost as soon as she had uttered the words, she remembered. “I’ve seen you on television.” She thanked Hajra profusely for her work on behalf of the Srebrenica families. (Hajra Ćatić was the president of the Women of Srebrenica from 1996 until her death in 2021. She was a quiet warrior, an incredibly determined leader who sought accountability, “truth and justice” (instina i pravda) for the surviving kin of the Srebrenica missing. She lost her husband and her younger son, Nino, to the genocide. She died before she could bury Nino; his remains have yet to be recovered and identified.)
What I remember very distinctly from that afternoon was Hajra’s response. In a gentle but firm voice she said, “I wish you didn’t know me.” She wished that all the things that had thrust her into the limelight—on television, in newspapers and magazines, into her position as the head of her organization—would never have happened. She would have given anything to not be recognizable. To remain obscure. For Hajra, obscurity would mean that she hadn’t lost her family, her home, and her former life in Srebrenica.
Historian Jay Winter writes about this idea of obscurity and remembrance. In describing how individuals and groups, “mostly obscure,” gathered together in the aftermath of World War I, he explains how they sought to craft “the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms,” so that it could be “told and retold.”[1] I understand obscurity here to intimate a groundedness in community and an intimacy with loss that propelled mourners to express their sorrow publicly. In his description, I recognize the choices and leadership of Hajra Ćatić as she moved from relative obscurity to celebrity—or at least recognizability among strangers who shared the bond of mourning the genocide’s victims and atrocities. I also see echoes of that transformation in the work of remembrance forged by “memory agents” like Rima Samman-Whitaker of Rami’s Heart COVID-19 Memorial, Jennifer Sullivan, creator and host of the podcast, “For Those We Lost,”[2] and someone I met earlier this summer, Lorelei King, one of the ten volunteers of the association, Friends of the Wall, the caretakers of the National COVID Memorial Wall in London, UK.
In this dispatch, prompted by Winter’s language, I explore the idea of obscurity and its corollary among relatives turned activists—prominence, exposure, even notoriety. That is, what happens when the bereaved are forced to live through their grief, the tangle of emotions that gathers with death, in unwantedly public terms.
nel mezzo del cammino
Let’s begin with the word itself:
ob·scure, a. [ME.; OFr. obscur; L. obscurus, dark, dusky, indistinct]
- dark; destitute of light; dim; gloomy.
- living in darkness; as, the obscure bird.
- not easily understood; not obviously intelligible; vague; ambiguous; as, an obscure passage in a writing.
- in an inconspicuous position; hidden; retired; remote from observation; as, an obscure retreat.
- not famous; unknown; humble; as, an obscure person.
- not clear or distinct; as, an obscure idea.
- not easily perceived or felt.
obscure rays; the nonluminous heat rays of the solar spectrum.
Syn.––dark, indistinct, abstruse, intricate, unknown, humble.
The term can describe the physical conditions of dimness and darkness, as well as something more figurative—an indistinct, imperceptible state, a lack of clarity and perhaps the uncertainty that accompanies it. This notion of obscure as hidden or remote from observation reminds me of an interview I did in October 2020 with a woman who had lost her brother to the pandemic. Her family was divided in their responses, and their disagreements about whether to name the virus ricocheted through her own grief. She resented how the politics—the threat of being mocked for talking about COVID, for acknowledging it as the cause of her brother’s death—took away the possibility of mourning in obscurity: “We can’t grieve privately right now because we’re competing with everybody knowing.” And so, she turned to online support groups where she could join others “grieving in [virtual] public.”
In thinking about the disorienting and confusing darkness of grief, and the tension around the obscurity/notoriety of surviving kin’s mourning, I’m reminded of a different text altogether—the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
[Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.][3]
Here, the metaphor of the selva oscura—the dark or shadowed forest—is meant to capture the sense of spiritual disorientation that Dante, the protagonist, faces at this “midway” point of his life. The poem is not about grief, per se. And yet that image of being enveloped in the darkness of loss, of trying to feel one’s way around its shadows, resonates with bereaved. Years ago, a friend of a friend, a young man in the prime of his life, died suddenly. I remember his mother describing how, in an instant, all the color of her world drained away. Nothing but the pall of grey remained.
If obscurity is in part about darkness—or the absence of light, clarity, and direction—then color might be its antidote or its refusal.[4] Perhaps it’s not surprising then that the National COVID Memorial Wall in London is a space flush with cherry-red hearts. I visited it for the first time in May 2025.
“There was a discussion around different colored hearts, … but, collectively, we thought, really, if we focus on the red heart as a symbol of love, that really gets to the, you know, the essence of what this memorial’s about.” – Wall of Grief and Love, The Podcast, Episode 1
***
“Half a kilometer of painted red hearts that runs from Westminster Bridge to Lambeth Bridge on the South Bank in London, commemorating those who have lost their lives to COVID in the UK.” – Wall of Grief and Love, The Podcast, Episode 1
From across the Westminster Bridge, the memorial is barely visible. It’s only as you approach that its colors and symbols take shape: 500 meters of red hearts stretch along the raised embankment of the River Thames. Begun on March 29, 20121, the National COVID Memorial Wall is arguably the most well-known and most photographed of the COVID memorials worldwide. Understandably so—it’s stunning to behold. At Rituals in the Making, we knew of it from our resident British research consultant, Dr. Ruth Toulson, an anthropologist at the Maryland Institute College of Art, who visited the site while in London during the summer of 2024.[5] We also knew of the memorial’s central role in the UK’s fifth anniversary events, “COVID-19 Day of Reflection,” held on March 9, 2025. Thus, when the opportunity arose, I reached out to the organization (covidmemorialwall@gmail.com) to see if anyone might be able to show me around the memorial and tell me its story. That’s how I met Lorelei King.
On Saturday morning, May 31, I walked to the memorial from my hotel near Regent’s Park to get a better feel for its location—smack in the center of British politics (right across the Thames from Parliament) and home to several popular tourist spots (e.g., Westminster Abbey and the London Tower are nearby attractions). En route, I listened to the first two podcasts produced by the collective that explored the memorial’s origins, how it developed, the cadre of volunteers who painted the hearts back in March 2021, and their continued work.
“It is a reminder to the politicians, not just to the Johnson government but to all the politicians who would later scrutinize how the government performed during the pandemic.” – Wall of Grief and Love, The Podcast, Episode 1
Lorelei had invited me to meet her at a bench in front of “panel 8.” There are 25 panels in total, and each panel, corresponding to a section demarcated by an architectural break/feature of the wall, contains hundreds of hearts of various sizes and differing hues. Designed around the simple ethos of one heart for each person who has died of COVID in the UK, the memorial contains over 249,000 hearts.[6] The color variation—from the predominant bright red to occasional faded pink hearts and sporadic white brushstrokes added to cover graffiti—tells the memorial’s story as a site of determined remembrance as well as alternately innocuous and intentional overwriting. Because the memorial sits in the heart of London, it’s open around the clock to visitors. Some come to remember (and for some, like Lorelei, that work of remembrance is both a calling and demanding commitment); some stumble upon it and get drawn in, their curiosity piqued; some don’t realized that it’s a COVID memorial and instead add names or initials to the hearts (like one might carve a lover’s name into a tree trunk); some use the space as a platform for unrelated messages of protest.
Among the hearts is one for Lorelei’s husband, Vincent Marzello. Both are Americans but lived and worked in the UK for years, as actors in movies, television, and radio. Vincent died in March 2020, having contracted COVID while in care home for dementia. As was the case for many of the bereaved we’ve spoken with in the United States, pandemic restrictions placed on long-term care homes meant that the only way Lorelei could see her husband was through FaceTime. At a June 2023 protest organized against the UK’s former health secretary, Matt Hancock, Lorelei explained, “Care homes became charnel houses because there was no testing, there was insufficient PPE, but most disastrously, it’s because they discharged people from hospitals without testing them.” Her selva oscura of grief and anger led her to the wall and to the comradery of her fellow mourners, the nine others who for the past four years have spent hundreds of hours adding and replacing hearts, educating the public, advocating for political recognition, and providing support to their fellow travelers in sorrow.[7]
***
We sat on the bench by the river for almost two hours, Lorelei explaining the memorial and her team’s work, the two of us comparing notes about our respective governments’ responses to the pandemic, the gradual forgetting we each have witnessed in the UK and the US. There, among the cool shade of the trees, I was struck by what a peaceful place the memorial is. A somber oasis from the crush of traffic and tourists. A vibrant, dynamic space of remembrance. At times, I was reminded of In America: Remember and the labors of geolocating, then cleaning and storing and transcribing the flags, or Rami’s Heart with its painted shells and handwritten names. Grief made public because private mourning was neither possible nor palatable.
And yet later, as we walked along the wall examining various examples of tributes and transgressions, I caught glimpses of a different kind of obscurity—a trace of the adjective’s meanings as “not easily understood; not obviously intelligible; vague; ambiguous” and “not easily perceived or felt.” I watched as a little boy ran his hand along the concrete wall, skimming over the hearts nonchalantly as he passed them by. Lorelei and I paused to take note of certain hearts—some with more elaborate decoration, others a collage of the recently refreshed and the gradually faded. Occasionally, I’d spot a heart with initials inscribed. VAL + NiC printed in bold blue. I took a photo, trying to capture in the same frame the more humble, obscure tributes: Nicky Arnold (upper left) and JLK My love 2021 (lower right).
A couple of times, Lorelei approached people who were about to write on a heart. Had they lost a loved one to COVID in the UK? The memorial is meant to recognize UK deaths, and she and the other Friends of the Wall volunteers navigate fine line between making space for grief and maintaining the site’s integrity. On Friday of each week, they return to the wall to touch up red hearts whose outlines and color have begun to fade. And they add new dedications, inscribing the names onto (already existing) hearts, as requests come in from the bereaved. People still find solace in public sites of observation and commemoration.
This memorial, like so many others, has to struggle against the erosion of time and attention. In repainting hearts and retracing names, over and over, Lorelei and the Friends of the Wall volunteers keep pushing for awareness, understanding, and empathy about a global pandemic that killed over 7 million people.
These days, pandemic memory work is not for the fainthearted.
[1] Winter, Jay. “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War.” Chapter. In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 40.
[2] Jennifer has recently published a book about her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and died of COVID, When the Window Closes: What I Learned Caring for My Mom while She Was Alive and Dying (2025).
[3] The English translation is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The full text of the Divine Comedy, along with translations and commentaries, can be found at Dartmouth College’s Dante Lab Reader: http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader?reader%5Bpanel_count%5D=4.
[4] Since this dispatch is full of free associations, when thinking of color and its absence, I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s image in her novel Beloved of Baby Sugg’s quilt that “made the absent shout” and of its two solitary strips of color: “In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild—like life in the raw.” Toni Morrison, Beloved, Vintage, 2004, p. 46.
[5] Ruth herself just published a book: The Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore(Washington University Press, 2025).
[6] As Lorelei explained to me, the official banner, which lists the number of UK deaths, is typically changed once every week or two, but they are currently awaiting a new one. When they last changed the banner, at the end of May, the total figure was 248,956 deaths. Sadly, it will soon be closing in on a quarter of a million, as people continue to die from the virus.
[7] The Friends of the Wall began restoring the memorial in August of 2021.