As the United States nears 1 million deaths from Covid-19, a movement is growing to memorialize the astronomical loss of life and preserve their legacies.

Marked By Covid—a San Francisco-based nonprofit cofounded by Kristin Urquiza, who lost her 65-year-old father to Covid in June 2020—is campaigning to establish a federally recognized national holiday to memorialize victims of the pandemic. The grassroots organization is also working with cities nationwide to create physical monuments, as well as an augmented reality component dedicated to those who have been lost.

Marked By Covid’s proposal calls for local communities to install scalable monuments that can be customized to fit a community’s budget and available land. Urquiza—who famously addressed the 2020 Democratic National Convention and declared that her father’s “only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump”—believes the pandemic has created a need to “democratize grief” and acknowledge what the country has been through. By comparison, the 1918 Spanish flu claimed an estimated 675,000 American lives (at a time when the U.S. population was 105 million), but given that it coincided with World War I, few memorials commemorate the dead.

“We cannot forget this tragedy,” says the 40-year-old Urquiza. “We owe it to the million people who lost their lives to remember and pass down to future generations the hard truth of our lived experience to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.”

The Marked By Covid monument prototype consists of a small plinth with four accessible ramps that can be customized depending on its location. Based on the renderings, the base can be used as a place to lay flowers, photographs and candles to remember loved ones. The prototype was co-created with artist Marcos Lutyens and founder Brad Wolfe, whose nonprofit Reimagine helps people confront death and grief.