I am haunted by a ghost from a pandemic past. His name was Vincent Marino. He contracted tuberculosis when he was in high school. He was the uncle I never knew, my mother’s brother. He died seven years before I was born, in 1941. In my now long life, he was never more to me than the vague memory of a single formal photo on the wall of my grandparents’ apartment.

I grew up in a New York Italian-Jewish family that talked a lot about everything, but not so much about death. They would name their babies after the dead, but not speak of them. I knew the arc of Vincent’s story, but only the vaguest outline, like a Polaroid image before it is fully developed.