Almost two years later, as colleagues and I were preparing for the day when the United States hit the grim milestone of one million Covid-19 deaths, it occurred to me: My family was almost certainly not alone in carrying around these strange artifacts of a terrible time. Perhaps readers would submit their own final text messages from loved ones lost to Covid? They did, by the dozens; we’ve selected 13 to present here.

These text exchanges are difficult to read: deeply moving, devastating in their intimacy, profoundly human. What makes them so effective, I think, in bringing home the reality of one million dead from Covid is not that the texts make each person more vivid to us, although they do. It’s that they make their deaths more vivid.

We asked readers who submitted these final messages why they decided to share. Most said they hoped they could serve to memorialize the person, often in a way that they weren’t able to at the time of death. But many said they also hoped their messages could make the pandemic feel real, in what seems like its waning days, for those who hadn’t experienced its toll up close, and in some cases, for whom one million deaths still wasn’t enough to make them believe.