Few artists have made me cry.

Edvard Munch holds the distinct honour of having brought me to an uncivilised sob in a public gallery. Most famously known for “The Scream” (1893), representing the anxiety-ridden alienation of modern life, the world knows Munch’s pain and his skill in communicating it.

Edvard Munch, The Scream 1893 — “Illness, insanity and death... kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”

- Edvard Munch, “The Scream” (1893)

But it’s Munch’s capacity to visually articulate anguish that is the most excruciating and no works move me more than “Separation” and “Separation II” (1896).

The works depict an expressionless young woman walking away from a man, visibly in agony, as he grasps his apparently bleeding heart, or in No.II, where her hair tears from his heart, drawing it out as she leaves, still intimately interconnected. While the woman wears ethereal white as she walks towards the horizon of the water, the man is dressed in black, the colour of mourning and despair.

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu” (1919)

Today we face a global pandemic. We have not faced a public health crisis of this magnitude for 100 years. Between 1918-20, the Spanish Influenza infected around 500 million people, about a quarter of the world’s population at the time, and the two-year pandemic had a death toll anywhere between 17 to 100 million. Munch himself was one of the many infected and painted “Self-Portrait With the Spanish Flu” (1919).

But significantly, the same year he also painted “Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu”. To me, this speaks to the legacy of the illness, but not just in the body. It speaks to the collective trauma of living through a global pandemic. Of living in fear, isolation and limited social intimacy for years. Of the anxiety of front-line healthcare providers and administrative decision-makers. Of the terror of infection of the immunocompromised and the ones that love them. Of the public distrust of governments and the endless questions that arise from an endless stream of contradictory, ever-changing statements and guidelines.

It is a portrait of trauma.

Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu” (1919-1920)

For most of us in Australia right now, the pandemic is more of a concept than a reality. It’s easy to get lost in the stats and curves, but it’s never been more important to remember the human stories behind the numbers.

Italy has been most profoundly impacted with the world’s highest death toll, currently standing at 9,134. (28 March 2020)

But what does that number mean?

Their hospitals are overflowing, unable to provide enough beds and treatment for the sick.

Medical and funeral workers are sick and quarantined, unable to provide care.

Emergency phone-lines are inundated, always busy.

The mortuary industry is overwhelmed, with a shortage of coffins while bodies in caskets pile up in churches.

As cemeteries become full, the army has been enlisted to move the dead in convoys of green camouflaged trucks that form startling processions down main streets.

The corpses of those who die at home are kept in sealed-off rooms for days awaiting a scarcely available coffin as funeral services struggle to cope, while those who die in hospital do so alone, visits banned.

The dead pass without ceremony or funerals, to limit infection in a desperate attempt to end the death.

"This pandemic kills twice," says Andrea Cerato, who works in a funeral home in Milan. "First, it isolates you from your loved ones right before you die. Then, it doesn't allow anyone to get closure."

In Italian Catholic culture, the bodies of the dead are treated with care and respect, dressed in their finest clothes with styled hair and makeup. Today out of necessity, they are buried in anonymous hospital gowns. Cerato says the small things are so important for the bereaved:

“Caressing their cheek one last time, holding their hand, and seeing them look dignified. Not being able to do that is so traumatic... You can’t even see them to say goodbye, this is the most devastating part.”

We see this pain in Munch’s works.

Our capacity for empathy allowed us to evolve in groups as a species. It pathed the way for the development of society. Facing a global pandemic, we’re charged with the individual responsibility for the collective good that comes with being a part of society. But, we’re not all at the point between personal panic and blind complacency that allows us to fully process our role in this or the personal reality of these tragedies. But incredibly, there are so few times that we hold such great power as individuals to prevent collective human suffering.

We owe it to everyone who has suffered, who is suffering, who will suffer, to acknowledge our role and stay home. The less people on the streets, the less the likelihood of infection, the lower the numbers of infection, the lower the death toll.

Stay home.

Just stay the hell home.