Al-Maqrizi’s hometown of Cairo was the world’s largest city outside of China in 1340, with a population of around six hundred thousand. But at least a third of Cairo’s residents died in an eight-month period beginning in the summer of 1348. The famous world traveler Ibn Battuta reported that at the height of the pestilence in the city of Damascus, 2,400 people died every day.

To many, it felt like the end of humanity had arrived. The historian Ibn Khaldūn wrote that it felt “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion.” In Christian communities, the devastation was seen as more final and total than even the Great Flood. The chroniclers of Padua wrote that at least “in the days of Noah, God did not destroy all living souls and it was possible for the human race to recover.”

It’s hard even to fathom the scope of the loss. Cities from Paris to London to Hamburg saw most of their residents die from the plague and resulting systemic collapses. In Dubrovnik, the death was so unrelenting that the government ordered every citizen to fill out a will. In Florence, a city of more than one hundred thousand people, one recent estimate concluded that about 80 percent of the city’s population died in a four-month period. In Ireland, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn described life as “waiting amid death for death to come.”

Near the end of his plague journal, Clyn wrote, “So that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave [extra] parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Beneath that paragraph, a brief coda appears in different handwriting: “Here, it seems, the author died.”

In Florence, Giovanni Villani wrote of the pestilence, “Many lands and cities were made desolate. And the plague lasted until . . .” and then he left a blank space that was never filled in, because he died of the plague before the plague ended.

To read about the Black Death is to glimpse how it may end with our species—in longing and despair and panic and also ineradicable hope, the kind of hope that makes you leave sentences unfinished and extra parchment in your book, in case anyone should still be alive in the future. As William Faulkner once put it, “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” Faulkner went on to argue that humans will not merely endure but will prevail, which these days feels a bit ambitious to me. I, for one, would be delighted to merely endure.

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The historian Rosemary Horrox wrote of the Black Death, “The very enormity of the disaster drove chroniclers to take refuge in clichés. . . . The same comments appear in chronicle after chronicle,” and indeed, around the plague world, the stories become repetitive. We read, for instance, that corpses lay in the streets of Florence and overwhelmed the graveyards of France and choked the Nile River in Egypt. Chroniclers also focus on the suddenness of it all. One day, a single nun is sick; within a week, her whole community is dead. And the rituals around death must be changed. The bells are no longer tolled for the dead, because they would toll without ceasing. And as one writer put it, “the sick hated to hear them and it discouraged the healthy as well.”

But for me, the most gutting repetition in plague accounts is the abandonment of the ill, who were often left to die alone due to fear of contagion, especially in Europe. After the poet Joy Davidman died in 1960, her widower C. S. Lewis wrote, “Nobody ever told me grief felt so like fear.” But to grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear. “For fear of infection,” one writer noted, “no doctor will visit the sick, nor will the father visit the son, the mother the daughter, [or] the brother the brother. . . . And thus an unaccountable number of people died without any mark of affection, piety, or charity.” In the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, Demetrios Kydones wrote, “Fathers do not dare to bury their own sons.”

In fear of death and hope of survival, many left the sick to die alone. To do otherwise was to risk your own life, and the lives of whatever loved ones you had left. The Black Death was vastly, incalculably different from our current pandemic—it was orders of magnitude deadlier and far less understood. But infectious disease continues to separate us in our most vulnerable moments. Too many of us, sick and healthy, were forced into isolation. Too many died apart from those they love, saying goodbye over video chat or a telephone line. In the New England Journal of Medicine, one physician wrote of a wife watching her husband die over FaceTime.

I think maybe that is the reason I cannot stop reading about pandemics. I am haunted by this separation. When I was sixteen, a friend of mine died. They died alone, which I found very difficult. I couldn’t stop thinking about those last minutes, those lonely and helpless minutes. I still often have nightmares about this—where I can see this person and see the fear in their eyes, but I cannot get to them before they die.

I know that being with someone as they die doesn’t lessen the pain, and in some cases can amplify it, but still, my mind keeps circling, vulture-like, around the extensively precedented tragedy of not being able to hold the hand of your beloved and say goodbye.

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When I worked at the children’s hospital, I was just a kid myself—so skinny that in my powder-blue chaplain coat I looked like a boy wearing his dad’s suit jacket. Those months of chaplaincy are the axis around which my life spins. I loved the work but also found it impossible—too much suffering that I could do nothing to alleviate.

But now, looking back on it, I try not to judge that twenty-two-year-old for being a bad chaplain, and I realize I did sometimes help, if only by holding someone’s hand who otherwise would’ve been alone. That work left me permanently grateful to all those who do what they can to make sure the dying are accompanied for as long as possible on that last journey we’re sure of.

During the Black Death, there were many such people—monks and nuns and physicians and nurses who stayed, offering prayers and comfort to the sick even though they knew such work was beyond dangerous. The same was true of cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century: According to Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years, in 1832, “at New York’s Greenwich Hospital, fourteen of sixteen nurses died of cholera contracted while caring for patients.” Then, as now, healthcare workers were often lauded for their heroism, but expected to perform their work with inadequate support, including a lack of clean gowns and gloves.

Most of the names of these accompaniers are lost to history, but among them was the physician Guy de Chauliac, who stayed in Avignon as the plague raged and continued to treat patients despite being, as he later wrote, “in continual fear.” It is true that our current horrors are precedented. But so is our capacity for care.

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The eighteenth-century historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr once wrote, “Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.” In Europe during the Black Death, the pestilence was widely blamed on Jewish people. Wild conspiracy theories emerged that Jewish people were poisoning wells or rivers, and after confessions were drawn out through torture, many thousands of Jews were murdered. Entire communities were burned to death, and the emotionless, matter-of-fact accounts of these murders are chilling. Heinrich Truchsess wrote, “First Jews were killed or burnt in Solden in November, then in Zofingen they were seized and some put on the wheel, then in Stuttgart they were all burnt. The same thing happened during November in Lansberg . . .”

It goes on like that, for paragraphs.

Many (including Guy de Chauliac) recognized that it was utterly impossible for a vast Jewish conspiracy to have spread the plague via well-poisoning. But facts still don’t slow down conspiracy theories, and the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe predisposed people to believing in even the most absurd stories of poisoning. Pope Clement VI pointed out, “It cannot be true that the Jews . . . are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague . . . afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” Still, in many communities, the torture and murder continued, and anti-Semitic ideas about secret international conspiracies proliferated.

That is a human story. It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.

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