President Biden confronted grief and loss at the beginning of his first primetime address to Americans tonight, on the one-year anniversary of the first Covid-19 shutdowns in the US.
“As of now,” Biden said in the East Room of the White House, “total deaths in America, 527,726, is more deaths than in World War One World War Two, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 combined.”
“They’re husbands, wives, sons and daughters, grandparents, friends, neighbors, young and old,” he remarked. “They leave behind loved ones unable to truly grieve or to heal even to have a funeral.”
The President said he was thinking of everyone who died in the past year, not just Covid victims, who also died alone and left behind “loved ones who are hurting badly.” He said over the course of the pandemic, people had lost jobs, “lost control,” and “maybe worst of all, the loss of hope.” He talked about the children’s “loss of learning.”
“The details of life that matter most,” he continued, “and we missed those details. The big details on the small moments, weddings, birthdays, graduations, all the things that needed to happen. First dates, family reunions, Sunday night rituals. It’s all as exact a terrible cost on the psyche of so many of us.”
Biden said Americans were “fundamentally a people who wants to be with others, to talk. To laugh. To hug.”
“The things we used to do that always filled us with joy, have become things, we couldn’t do broke our hearts,” he lamented.
Hear Biden speak: