Entry 004: Nursing Home Lives Matter Twilight Vigil

On Saturday March 13th, 2021, Coler residents organized a vigil to honor lives lost and mourn the loss of freedom due to being confined insider their home for the better part of a year. Below is the exact copy from their press release and photos of the event.

Last month the New York Attorney General’s office released a report declaring that the state vastly undercounted nursing home deaths. It is unacceptable that these lives were erased and politicized, and once reported became statistics. March 12th will be one year since the state' lockdown on nursing homes began. Join us on Saturday, the 13th, at 6pm, outside of Coler Nursing Home and online, to mark this sobering milestone. From both sides of Coler’s fence, we will honor those we’ve lost, known and unknown, and mourn the loss of freedom and connection by those still confined inside Coler and other congregate facilities, cut off from their agency and loved ones. 

One Coler resident describes their experience of isolation this past spring, summer, fall, winter by saying, “This isn’t a life, this is an existence.” 

We will listen and bear witness to the ongoing human toll of the pandemic’s mismanagement. We will channel our grief into a call for more holistic policies and practices to protect nursing home residents because #IsolationKillsToo. 

We will read the names of lost friends, hold space for those who remain nameless, and memorialize this year of catastrophic loss through remembrances, protest, and poetry by Coler residents and remarks from local faith leaders and elected officials. We will close with an awe-inspiring temporal artwork that affirms #NursingHomeLivesMatter.

Nursing Home Lives Matter seeks to protect nursing home residents and workers who have been systematically disempowered and put in harm’s way by public officials and health care administrators.