| NEWS | Marked By Covid hosted an event honoring Arizonans who died during the pandemic. Katya Schwenk COVID’s Fallen Here’s how you can remember Arizona’s 28,000 pandemic dead. BY KATYA SCHWENK I n August 2020, Mark Urquiza, a father who lived in the West Valley, died of COVID-19. He was 65 years old and left behind a wife and a daughter, Kristin. In an obituary that was at once beautiful and blistering, Kristin Urquiza blamed her father’s death on the failure of Arizona’s top brass in government. “His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership,” she wrote. Her Twitter bio still reads: “Doug Ducey killed my Dad.” Over the past year, Mark Urquiza’s death has sparked a national movement. The organization his daughter co-founded, Marked By Covid, has become a leading voice pushing to memorialize those who have passed, and fight for people still strug- gling to survive as the pandemic lingers. The work of memorializing more than 28,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in the state of Arizona — along- side nearly 1 million who have died nation- wide — is not an easy one. But this is what Marked By Covid has set out to do. The organization, still led by Urquiza, now has branches in more than a dozen states. It is fighting for a nationwide COVID-19 memorial day, and its efforts have made headlines around the country. “The amount of life lost is just not normal,” Urquiza told Phoenix New Times. Her organization’s work she said, was “fundamental not only to honor their memory and protect their legacy, but is essentially to prevent this normalization of mass death.” On Monday afternoon last week, dozens gathered at the Arizona Heritage Center in Tempe to attend one of Marked By Covid’s regular memorials. A heart woven of flowers sat in the center of the courtyard. Kristin Urquiza, who grew up in Arizona but lives now in San Francisco, was not in attendance. But her mother, Brenda, was there, watching quietly. She told New Times that she never misses the events. Memorial events are at the heart of Marked By Covid’s work, organizers say. “The traditional ways in which we mourn or grieve or come together were taken away from most of us because of the nature of the virus,” Kristin Urquiza said. “Bringing people to have memorials like this doesn’t fix the problem, but it does help people to publicly witness their pain and their loss.” The leader of Arizona’s Marked By Covid branch is Tara Krebbs, a lifelong Phoenix resident. She lost her father, like Urquiza, in summer 2020. Her parents lived in Glendale at the time. Like many who lost loved ones early on in the pandemic, the experience was lonely and painful, Krebbs said. Her mother wasn’t able to visit her husband in the hospital to say goodbye. The family could not gather their relatives and friends for a proper funeral. “It’s just devastating on so many sides, you know,” Krebbs said. “There are people whose family members >> p 23 21 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES MARCH 17TH– MARCH 23RD, 2022
