Despite nearly 1.3 million deaths and counting, there is still not a national memorial for the pandemic. Our informal memorial in the middle of the Mojave Desert is one small way to remember those we’ve lost so far.
I.
There were no surviving Joshua trees when we arrived at our assigned plot in the heart of California’s Mojave National Preserve. All thirteen charred Yucca brevifolia jaegeriana remained upright, their broken arms swinging in a brisk autumn wind. With towering tombstone-gray trunks, they marked their own deaths. 2020’s Dome Fire had burned hot and fast, spreading over 43,000 acres; it was as if a giant, out-of-control phoenix had soared over the mountainous landscape.
After lying down and resting beside a torched cholla, my partner Aaron and I began digging. He had carried six Joshua tree pups and gallons of water on his back across a half mile of the inland ghost forest from a remote dirt road. I had strapped lighter materials, like chicken wire, to my pack, all I could bear that day after Long COVID had disabled me at the start of the pandemic.
We participated in the National Park Service’s effort for three years, attempting to rehabilitate the burn scar by collectively planting nearly 2,000 eastern Joshua trees there. One year we even planted with the help of three brave camels who carried the trees aside their enormous humps, saving my tachycardic heart from overexertion. The effort was named Team Ground Sloth after the Joshua trees’ former seed distributor, the giant Shasta ground sloth that roamed the landscape over 10,000 years ago. I was comforted by the mascot, as I certainly moved as slowly as the extinct megafauna.
The area where the Dome Fire happened, known as Cima Dome, had been a refuge to me since I first moved to California a decade earlier. It held the densest forest of Joshua trees in the world, and over time, I’d rooted my spirit among them. I visited the volcanic landscape year-round before I got sick, from snowy New Year’s Days to sweltering summer afternoons when monsoons unleashed the sticky scent of creosote.
After a lightning bolt hit the forest in August 2020, igniting the fire, Cima Dome became forever bound to the COVID-19 pandemic for me. It was the year I lost both my health and my refuge. Things only got worse in 2023, when a second fire broke out in the preserve, burning nearly 100,000 acres and killing another 1 million Joshua trees. Where do you mourn when your sanctuary suddenly becomes a place to grieve?
Joshua trees are facing their own perils from climate change in their native habitat due to warming temperatures and fires fueled by invasive grasses, save for a few refugia, or higher-elevation locations, where they may still be able to survive. Cima Dome, at nearly 6,000 feet, is one of those refugia, which is why ecologists have prioritized its rehabilitation.
Over time, the annual ritual of planting the trees took on an even greater meaning as I realized the uncanny overlaps of the burn scar with the COVID-19 pandemic. The “official” death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 is nearly 1.3 million people (likely a significant undercount), the same as the number of Joshua trees scientists estimate were killed in the Dome Fire. Walking through the immense landscape of burnt trees became a way to understand the magnitude of loss from COVID-19 in a way that no World Health Organization dataset ever could.
It was haunting to witness at such a mammoth scale. Even our short treks across the burn scar were overwhelming — it takes many hours to traverse the 10-mile-wide scar by foot. Each mile exposes new views with many thousands of dead trees. As I saw the scores of burnt yuccas, I dedicated each to life lost from the pandemic. Instead of the sea of small white plastic flags onlookers towered over in In America: Remember, a 2021 Washington D.C. memorial coordinated with the National Park Service, the dead trees eclipsed me, the landscape spreading like a never-ending AIDS quilt.
In planting the yuccas, I have a way to address both my climate and COVID-19 grief. The massive burn scar, like many other climate-driven disasters around the world, is an unintentional memorial to climate change, made by the phenomenon itself. And by naming our saplings after people we’d lost to Long COVID and related diseases, the memorial became a living remembrance of our polycrisis. I hoped the yuccas would grow tall and wild-armed. Aaron and I dreamed about resting in their shade when we were old-timers.
Our shovels clinked! against the granite as we dug six deep holes that afternoon. We removed each pup, or baby Joshua tree, from their plastic containers and placed them in the cold earth, one at a time. We nurtured them with soil, then nailed rebar into the ground through chicken wire cages, protecting the saplings’ sharp leaves from hungry jackrabbits.
We named our trees after people who died with or of Long COVID: writer and advocate Tinu Abayomi-Paul, musician Sérgio Mendes, writer Shafiqah Hudson, and electrical engineer Brandon Gilles. For other saplings we planted, we blessed them in the memories of people recorded in anonymous databases of Long COVID–related deaths: a 25-year-old dental assistant from the Navajo Nation, a 63-year-old Black woman in a nursing home in Los Angeles. We still have inexcusably scarce data on how many people have died of Long COVID and related diseases, but we know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 figure of 5,000 deaths is a significant undercount. And years outdated.
Long COVID is a serious disease we’re beginning to understand, and we know it can be fatal. Current research suggests potential subtypes of the disease, driven by autoimmunity, viral persistence, immune dysregulation, endothelial dysfunction, and more. Like climate change, Long COVID is an inconvenient truth that deniers attempt to erase as one of the many reminders of the ongoing pandemic.
As we’d done with the many trees we planted the years before, we watered each sapling with jugs Aaron had carried, watching the puddles sink into the dry ground. We traced our path back across the burn scar to our car, following migrating mountain bluebirds as the late-day sun turned the invasive grasses below the dead Joshua trees gold.
II.
Six and half years since the start of the pandemic, there is still no plan for a national memorial for the 1.3 million Americans who died from COVID-19. And internationally, there is little acknowledgment of the 25–30 million global excess deaths, as estimated by The Economist in 2024. Like many counts, this figure is old, and likely a significant undercount — it’s overwhelming to think of each Joshua tree as not just one person, but standing for 25 to 30 lives.
There are only a small number of permanent memorials, many unofficial, scattered around the globe. Architects proposed the Global Memorial to the Pandemic, planning to humble visitors with an ocean-side concrete saucer in Uruguay, but never built it.
This scarcity of permanent remembrance follows a trend throughout history. Most memorials, like the profound Vietnam War Memorial, remember combat; few memorialize those who died from pandemics. “Men who perish on the battlefields of a great war must be mourned by the nation, but the sick, whose suffering has no grand purpose, are a reminder that we can’t always control our bodies — knowledge best pushed into the shadows,” historian Alicia Puglionesi wrote.
The collective trauma from the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed over 50 million people internationally, also led to a great denial and forgetfulness. Chronic illness from the disease was poorly tracked, though we know it was linked to a surge of infection-associated chronic conditions like encephalitis lethargica, that caused Parkinson’s-like symptoms.
Few memorials for that pandemic existed before its 100 year commemoration in 2018; there is a small bench in rural Vermont and a garden plaque in New Zealand.
The group Marked by COVID has toured an augmented-reality COVID-19 memorial around the country and compiled a list of memorials, vigils, and other commemorations for the pandemic. Few are permanent; one rare example is a state memorial outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, that broke ground in 2025.
Many of the temporary memorials for COVID-19 have been led by artists and advocates. Artist Heather Schulte stitched COVID-19 deaths onto textiles, while artist and poet Alec Finlay assembled I Remember, Scotland’s National COVID Memorial. I Remember uses supports to “hold up” oak trees, showing the power of community and care and human connection to the natural world.
In a society that prematurely declared the pandemic “over” despite biannual surges of COVID-19 and continued death and disability, there has been little effort by society to remember, or learn, anything from the pandemic. We’re set up to forget the next one, just as we forgot the Influenza pandemic. Memory loss, in an ironic twist, is one long-term symptom of many chronic diseases caused by pandemics. And scholars have pointed out that the mass death from pandemics, like influenza in 1918, have precipitated dark points in history, including the rise of Italian fascism.
“Memorials might be fraught creatures,” wrote Lauren Markham in Immemorial, an essay about memorials in the age of climate change. “But all the same, remembrance can be an act against the tyrannical directive to forget.”
Instead of actively trying to remember the pandemic with permanent memorials, our society has become crueler toward those disabled by the virus, as it has to those on the front lines of climate change.
The pandemic opened new possibilities for care and a more thoughtful life for all of us. We could have won universal healthcare, invested in cleaning the air, and significantly decreased global emissions. Instead we stripped healthcare from millions, continue to pretend COVID-19 isn’t airborne, and opened more land for drilling. Now we have a drought of empathy.
That drought hits hardest for the people still affected by COVID-19: people with Long COVID, the disabled community, and those aware of the toll of ongoing reinfections. If society is hell-bent on placing the pandemic in the past tense, why do they fail to acknowledge its impact? It’s a confused logic, reminiscent of Trump administration officials claiming that COVID-19 “is a bioweapon” but also “just a cold.” Which is it?
On Cima Dome, there are trees still living, half burned. Half alive. As a person with Long COVID, it isn’t hard to identify with them. They stand among the burn scar, with large branches of sharp leaves, parts of their trunk scorched and blackened. Survivors of the uncontrolled spread of flame.
They stand among the burn scar, with large branches of sharp leaves, parts of their trunk scorched and blackened. Survivors of the uncontrolled spread of flame.
III.
“My garden is a memorial,” the late artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman wrote in his diary in April 1989. “Each circular bed a dial and a true lover’s knot.”
Jarman moved into a small fisherman’s hut near Kent, England, in 1986, after he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. It became his “sanctuary” as a place to grieve and find peace at the end of his life. There, in contrast to the mass death that took many of his friends during the AIDS crisis, he established a small superbloom on the desolate, rocky beach, just a stone’s throw from a nuclear power plant. He planted lavender, saxifrage, and rue, and erected driftwood sculptures that reminded me of torched Joshua tree trunks. He chronicled his garden transformation in his diary, which was later published as Modern Nature.
In summer 2024, Aaron and I moved into a cabin in the burn scar of another wildfire that raged across the high desert twenty years ago. While the planting efforts of Team Ground Sloth ended in 2024, we have continued to memorialize the pandemic and those lost to Long COVID and related diseases in a different corner of the Mojave Desert.
Thousands of dead western Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), different from the eastern species on Cima Dome, still stand in the scar two decades later as a constant reminder of that fire, which burned over 60,000 acres.
Our high desert ecosystem is a little different from Jarman’s seaside shingle, but both are bound by extremes; hardy plants sprout from difficult ground. Jarman even called his shingle a “desert” itself, and planted California poppies that “shimmered in the sunlight.” Poppies, orange flowers native to the Mojave, arrived on our property this spring like a burning telegraph from the otherworld.
We’ve since planted a few western Joshua trees, though the trees are hard to come by in local nurseries. Some Joshua trees in our canyon bloomed early this year during bizarre weather driven by climate change. A few of our mature trees that survived the fire twenty years ago produced fruit that Aaron harvested, collecting their hockey-puck-shaped seeds in order to, very slowly, rehabilitate our land.
We also plant other natives lost in the fire, including piñón pines and catclaw acacias, as part of our small protest to climate change. We dedicate them to other people lost to Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Other existing plants, like our mature mesquite that brings us shade and shelters our California scrub jays is named after the late disability advocate Alice Wong.
This summer, one of the last people in an iron lung in the U.S., Martha Lillard, died from Long COVID–related complications. And it has been difficult to properly acknowledge the many deaths from ME; almost weekly, obituaries for people who die with and from the disease are posted. We remember them and so many others: Joey Mazzone, Luigi De Re, Liorah Noémie Ladebourg, Sam Schofield.
Because I lost my abilities to the pandemic and my sanctuary to climate change, this wild gardening has given me some control to confront two crises at once. I plant Joshua trees and leave out drinking water for our nonhuman neighbors; small offers of mutual aid for the environment. I name each yucca to oppose our society’s denial of the pandemic’s “incalculable” mass death and its continuing effects.
Each Joshua tree is a spiked fist rising from the ashes of indifference.
I imagine each Joshua tree as a spiked fist rising from the ashes of indifference.
Miles W. Griffis is the executive editor of The Sick Times and a columnist for High Country News.
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![Miles [12:23 PM] ID: A burnt, but surviving Joshua tree stands in the Dome Fire burn scar during sunset. A far away mountain glows in the late day light. Thousands of dead Joshua trees stand on the burnscar among invasive grasses that paint the landscape gold.](https://i0.wp.com/thesicktimes.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/TST-feature-images-4-1.png?fit=300%2C201&ssl=1)
