Reading Their Names will air on WNYC from 10 a.m. to noon, Tuesday March 16.
COVID-19 has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people in our area, and we wanted to hold space for that loss, in the form of a ritual reading of their names. And we wanted to do that together with you. Our voices and yours. We asked listeners to record themselves reading a selection of names, and then stitched them together to create this community memorial.
All told, 445 participants read 4 names each for a total of 1,780 names read aloud. And still, that's just a drop in the bucket. Over 30,000 New Yorkers have died from the virus. This project is not a full accounting of the lives lost. It's a way to "gather" on the radio together, in a shared act of mourning, a means to acknowledge the pieces of our community that will still be missing when everything else is back to normal.
This project is based on MISSING THEM, an open data journalism project to document New Yorkers who have died due to COVID-19 by THECITY newsroom and its partners from Columbia Journalism School, Boston College, the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and volunteers. WNYC used the names, from MISSING THEM, which were gathered, confirmed and fact-checked by THE CITY and its partners. This memorial would not have been possible without their journalism.
Our grief is not all the same, but whether you’ve lost anyone personally or not, we all have reason to grieve. These are the names of your neighbors, your subway regulars, your deli clerk, your bus driver. They were threads that helped make up the fabric of the city we love, woven into everyday life. We didn’t have to know them for them to matter to us.
Community Loss In Conversation
After Reading Their Names has completed, Brian Lehrer hosts a conversation on grief, connection and community loss with Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village.
