Outside the entrance to the Sunset Park disaster morgue, Brooklyn, NY. Photo credit: KIKI VALENTINE
“A Year of Vigil for the Pandemic Dead and Beyond” (Tricycle Magazine)
The one-year anniversary of our vigil has now come and gone. Our nation stumbles forward, grasping for daily life as we previously thought we knew it. The Medical Examiner’s office is proceeding with arrangements for transfer of more bodies to Hart Island, NYC’s municipal burial ground off the coast of the Bronx.
Yet the "Great Matter" of life and death has not changed — and will accompany us as we move on. (...) READ MORE
“NYC temporary morgue lingers, a reminder of pandemic’s pain” (Associated Press)
Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips — who has organized volunteers to keep at-home vigils for the dead around the world, especially the unclaimed and unnamed — ventures periodically to an unobtrusive spot near the temporary morgue. She goes to bear witness “to what is not seen, and those who are not named,” she says.
The pain surrounding the facility’s creation and continued use “highlights the difficulties of how we honor the dead,” she says. (...) READ MORE
“Keeping vigil for the bodies stored at Sunset Park” (Spectrum News NY1)
When she’s not holding vigil in person at the NYC disaster morgue, Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips honors the dead remotely at midnight. She’s been doing that every night since the beginning of the pandemic, not just for the bodies stored in the trucks along the Brooklyn waterfront, but for victims of coronavirus around the world....
This eventually blossomed into Share the Vigil, a network of 12 to 18 volunteers across the country who commit at least one hour a week to honor the deceased. The only requirement is time — vigil keepers may utilize that hour as they see fit. (...) READ MORE
Share the Vigil is a How to Mourn AND Organize initiative of WAYS OF PEACE.
