Kat Gale’s Reviews > Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 > Status Update

How does one cope when all the people who loved you best, one by one, disappear forever? Maybe you tell yourself a story.

In Chicago alone, Blacks account for 72 percent of virus-related fatalities. “Those numbers take your breath away, they really do,” says Mayor Lightfoot. Six hours away, in Minneapolis, a policeman will kneel on a Black man’s neck as he begs, #ICantBreathe.

The Navajo Nation registers the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 in the country, higher than New York. It’s the latest in five hundred years of “epidemiological invasions,” which, combined with colonial practices, wiped out 70 to 90 percent of Native populations by the early twentieth century.

Around the world, domestic battery rates soar as stay-at-home orders are implemented, layoffs increase, and women and children are trapped with men with histories of domestic violence.

Kwame: "Words and books show us that we’re all one, you know? Like, I can read Night by Elie Wiesel and know that I have no direct connection to having been in a concentration camp, yet I feel it. I understand its weight and heaviness, its evil and terror, the author’s fight and survival—I understand all that. Books, literature, and language allow us to understand that we are more similar than we are different."

Integrity is real. It is the only thing that I own. Nobody else owns it, my integrity, and there might be some days when it’s all I’ve got. I knew then that I could not surrender it or compromise it or give it up because it was my last stand against whatever would become of me without it. Integrity was and is the last little voice inside that tells you that you’re crossing a line.