For the past 18 years, I have driven past the same abandoned farmhouse almost every day. Lace curtains deteriorated from year to year, their remnants hanging on like tattered flags left too long in the wind. Summer vines crept over the porch and up the sides of the house, while shutters gave up and dropped, one by one. Glass fell out of rotted window panes.

Someone once loved that house. It was white with dark green shutters, two stories high, and an attic. Maple and elm trees planted long ago lined the property. A couple of shed extensions and two tobacco barns in the back still had farm equipment in them, though the roofs sagged overhead. Despite the advancing decrepitude, the house and the outbuildings stood sturdy against the years and the elements.

Today I drove by and it was gone. Completely non-existent. A port-a-potty had been placed off to one side. A large truck parked parallel to where the house had been stood ready to haul off what was probably the only thing left – the wood that held the structure together. All that remains now is empty space.

I heard myself say aloud, “Oh!” I felt my heart lurch, put my hand there to calm it down, tried to figure out why that house mattered to me. Then I knew. What really mattered was its disappearance. “That,” I thought, “is what death is. One minute you are here. The next minute you are gone. Completely gone.”

What my heart felt is what all those who grieve a death feel: the abrupt, permanent disappearance of a life. The piercing hurt to have to go on without it. The empty space where once there was a vibrancy, a presence.

This year, 2020, has been a year of so much death. The dying has been like a plague of inequality, a separate disease on top of the virus that is taking hundreds of thousands of lives. The dying caused by prejudice and discrimination is as obvious and as brutal in this year as the sudden disappearance of whole cities.

Relatives and friends of over 220,000 Americans who have died from the CoVid-19 virus this year are grieving for their lost loved ones. The virus spread easily among people who had to keep working, people who live with overcrowding, people who had to take public transportation, people with less access to fewer health resources (Commonwealth Fund, 9.10.2020). The hospitalization and death rates from CoVid-19 are running up to twice as high among people of color (CDC, 8.18.2020) The failure to treat people as equals is resulting in the disproportionate loss of life among Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanic people, and poor people. Our neighbors. Abandoned by us. Just like that house.

Over 500 parents who were separated from their children at our southern border are now in lost. Permanently. The parents, wherever they are, are grieving for the children they lost. The children are grieving for the parents who cannot be found. Because this happened as part of an immigration procedure, the only way to understand it is through the lens of the attitudes and beliefs that shaped immigration policy. The cavalier abandonment of immigrant lives led to this unimaginable loss.

Over 1,000 families in our country lost someone this year due to police violence (Statista.com). Some people like to point to the fact that the police kill more white people than black people every year. But among the approximately 1,000 unarmed people killed by police last year, about one-third of them were Black (US News, 6.3.2020). Blacks comprise only about 13% of the population. That means that being Black nearly triples the risk of dying at the hands of the police.

Our failure to grapple with race hatred and race discrimination is a sickness that creeps like a vine over our political and social systems and leads to the death of Black people. Our failure to insist that police departments be trained to represent all of us equally, with equal temperance, has led to abandoning over 1,000 random lives a year.

If we keep on abandoning people, allowing so many to die as if they don’t matter, then democracy will ultimately die. We are all part of the structure that is America. As one piece after another falls off due to neglect and discrimination, the structure as a whole is rotting. Somebody better pay attention soon. To all of us.