What is a pixel? It's a spot of ink about the size of the dot at the end of this sentence . A printer uses these dots to produce a newspaper . One square inch equals = 9,216 pixels.

If you look at this front page of The New York Times, Feb. 21st edition, the large illustration that dominates the page used 500,000 pixels to print... 500,000 dots the size of this period . 

And each single dot in that 17" x4" graphic represents one man, one woman or child in the United States that died of Covid 19 since  Feb. 6th last year.

That number more is than all who died in World Wars I, World War II and Vietnam combined. And wars are for killing! (Wow! As I wrote that it felt just terrible... but sadly, true.)

Individual vignettes of those we have lost bleed out in virtually every newscast since then, and the only sad conclusion is that there are not enough newscasts to make this more real.

Did you lose a father, a mother, a child, a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, a spouse, a school crossing guard, a postal deliverer, a teacher and/or anyone else that you knew or shared a memory? Then that one death of those 500,000 who have died, magnified your loss exponentially. It was personal.

Years ago when Russia's strongman, Joseph Stalin, was listening to another Russian official sadly enumerating the millions of people dead and dying of famine in Ukraine, Stalin stopped him advising. "If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that's only a statistic."

Ours is never to forget, but to remember. Without  personal tangency, it is easy enough to lose the sense of each and every life lived and lost, but the grief of each of our fellow humans must be acknowledged with tribute. The news media try to give tragedy a face. 

When our covid death toll crested 100,000 less than 10 months ago, The New York Times tried to make it personal, running 1,000 clipped personal obituaries that covered its entire front page and several more inside. To read any, many or most of those was to deeply appreciate what the loss of those lives took from all of us. Television vividly chooses representative mini stories to create the personal sense of loss. 

President Biden and Vice President Harris once again memorialized the 500,000 and counting as we lower our flags in tribute. It's so very personal to so very many. 

In the end we have no choice but to look forward. The past cannot be altered, and then there is a pandemic to battle, global warming to attack, racism, secular prejudice and strife of one against another to repair.

There is this ultimate reality: We only have one life to live and no time to waste. We also know that those we care about that do live on must deal with what we have left for them. We can do better because we must. Even though there is work to be done, Martin Luther King Jr. made us believe: "We shall overcome." 

TO ALL OF THIS WORLD: We've no choice but to go forward together, or die (literally) trying!