BEMIDJI, Minn. (AP) — The medicine man told her she should soon give her son back to the earth.
Rachel Taylor kissed her fingertips and pressed them to the crow sewn onto a leather bag nestled on the couch in the living room. "Oh, my baby," she whispered, and hugged the buckskin satchel filled with his ashes.
Nearly a year ago, she had opened his bedroom door and screamed so loud she woke the neighbor. Kyle Domrese was face down on his bed, one of more than 100,000 Americans lost in a year to overdoses as the COVID-19 pandemic fueled America's addiction disaster.
When he was 4, the medicine man had given him his Ojibwe name: Aandegoons — "little crow." She traced the outline of the black bird on the sack.
"Love you," Taylor said to the bag, as she does each time she leaves for work in this city surrounded by three Ojibwe reservations in remote northern Minnesota.
People are also reading…
As the pandemic ravaged the country, deaths from drug overdoses surged by nearly 30%, climbing to a record high. The drug crisis has also diversified from an overwhelmingly white affliction to killing people of color with staggering speed. The death rate last year was highest among Native Americans, for whom COVID-19 piled yet more despair on communities already confronting generations of trauma, poverty, unemployment and underfunded health systems.
It is no longer an opioid epidemic, but one in which people are dying from deadly cocktails of many drugs. Deaths involving methamphetamine have nearly tripled in recent years, with Native Americans 12 times more likely to die from it.
As Taylor began her shift at the Northwest Indian Community Development Center, a posterboard propped against the wall was pasted with 49 faces — a collage of their dead to drugs.
Taylor's tribe, the White Earth Nation, studied of the lives they've lost to addiction.
"Their death certificates say they died of an overdose, but that's not right," one member of their study group said.
These deaths were a culmination of far more than that: Despite their resilience, Native Americans carry in their blood 500 years worth of pain from being robbed of their land, their language, their culture, their children. In living people's memory, children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools with the motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man."
"What they died of is a broken heart," the study says.
For years, Taylor tried to break the cycle.
Her grandmother was sent to a Christian boarding school, where she was taught to be so ashamed of her Ojibwe language that she would only speak or sing it after drinking.
Taylor had her daughter when she was 19 and her son a few years later. She lost custody of them for a couple years as she battled her own addiction to opioids and cocaine. She told them she wished she could fix all the dysfunctional things that happened when she was using.
"Then I thought, well, then my mom would have to go back and fix things, and then my grandma would have to go back, it would have to go on like that for generations," she said.
Taylor had lived in more than 50 places before she turned 18 — foster homes, battered women's shelters, on the streets — and faced sexual, physical and mental abuse.
"The things I blame on generational trauma are not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy enough, not feeling loved," she said.
She prayed to her creator to spare her children, and she told her son every day that she loved him.
White Earth Nation too worked hard to save its people from addiction, and many years lost no one to overdoses on the reservation. But then the pandemic arrived and proved too painful for some.
And now in Taylor's shaking hands, she holds her son's picture — another face for the posterboard, lost January 11, 2021.
At first, she put his ashes in an urn, but it was sharp metal. A friend made the buckskin bag that she could hug. It's become the center of her world.
He'd always loved to laugh, so Taylor teases the bag of ashes.
"Keep an eye on the cat," she'll say when she leaves the house. Then she tells the cat to keep an eye on him.
***
The wind churned snow across the prairies, so Dr. Carson Gardner, the medical director of White Earth Nation's health department, told the tale of the Windigo as a metaphor for addiction.
This story of an evil spirit in Ojibwe folklore can only be spoken with snow on the ground as a layer of protection from the monster. The Windigo is a cannibal that sings a song, and anyone who hears it must cover their ears and run away, he said. Otherwise, they develop an insatiable hunger.
"You will first eat everything in your lodge, and when that's gone, you'll eat everything in your neighbors' lodges. When that's gone, you will eat your neighbors. You will finish off by eating yourself," said Gardner.
Their reservation spans more than 800,000 rugged acres of prairie and lakes, dotted with small villages, known for glorious summers and long unforgiving winters. But despite the vast terrain, it's sparsely populated, and they live the belief that all should be loved like family.
"Those who listen to the Windigo song aren't bad people," Gardner said. "They just didn't plug their ears and walk away. They didn't know how powerful the song was."
Rachel Taylor's son once wrote her a letter because he thought his addiction was killing him: "I can't control it. I hope you can forgive me. I'm sorry, I love you, I wanted to spend more time with you."
He'd started abusing pills as a teenager when he got a prescription after having surgery for an infected finger. Then, consumed by the madness of addiction, he would smoke anything — methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl — that might quiet his lifelong anxiety and depression.
But just before the pandemic bore down, his mother felt hopeful.
She and her son quarantined together at her home in Bemidji, a city of 15,000 people. Her son had gone to treatment, sober 168 days. His cheeks were full again, and he asked her to make his favorite peanut butter cookies.
"I'm glad I still have a chance to make my loving mom proud," he wrote in a journal.
But the months dragged on, and he told her it seemed like the pandemic would never end. He couldn't get a job. He was isolated. He said he felt like a bum.
"He just gave up," she said. He started using again, then dealing drugs to support his habit.
All around them, people were dying. On the White Earth reservation, ambulance calls for overdoses tripled, Gardner said. They posted big red signs in gas stations and tribal buildings: "overdose alert," they said. "Please look out for each other."
Joe Kleszyk, the commander of the region's drug task force, sounded the alarm, too: "An epidemic within a pandemic," he told the local newspaper in August 2020. The task force covers five counties and two reservations, including White Earth.
The number of overdoses it investigated skyrocketed from 20 in 2019 to 88 last year. Fifteen of those were fatal, triple the year before.
It's getting worse: This year, there's been 148 overdoses, and 24 of those victims died.
In Minnesota, as across the country, drug dealers now cut nearly every drug on the street with fentanyl, a cheap and deadly synthetic opioid so potent the equivalent of a sugar packet can make 40 doses, Kleszyk said. "It's a game of Russian roulette," he said.
At the same time, the pandemic pushed many toward addiction, called a "disease of despair."
Unemployment in Indian County surged to 26%. And with the federal government's disinvestment in Native communities, many were already living on the brink of poverty — sometimes just across the street from predominantly white gated communities and summer vacation resorts.
On top of that, the healing traditions many turn to in troubled times, like sweat lodges and talking circles, were suspended. Theirs is a communal culture, and people were suddenly isolated.
Of the 148 overdoses the task force investigated this year, 124 victims were Native.
"I'm sick of telling people that their kids are dead," Kleszyk said.
When officers on the White Earth reservation arrived on Aug. 5, 2020 to deliver the news to Betty Oppegard, her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the ground. Her daughter, Beth Renee Hill, a 32-year-old mother of three, died of an overdose involving methamphetamine.
Hill's Ojibwe name, Bebaanimadookwe, is the word for how snow sparkles in the sunshine.
"She was like that, she sparkled in people's lives, she was so beautiful," said Oppegard. "She could make a lot happen in a day."
Hill started taking methamphetamine a couple years ago and fell apart fast. She lost custody of her kids and despaired, so she did even more drugs.
Oppegard used to wake up each morning and run through the names of her eight children from oldest to youngest, imagining where they were and what they were doing. She forced herself to stop, because when she got to Hill, if felt too much to bear.
For months, Hill's father just held her picture and cried. Now he's buried next to her. He died in January, and Oppegard blames a broken heart.
***
Amid all this death and dying, one of the most urgent questions White Earth and other Native American communities are facing is how to spare the next generations from starting the cycle anew.
Indian health care has been underfunded for decades. When the American government forced Native Americans off their land, it signed treaties with tribes promising to provide for them necessities like health care. The dead from addiction is proof it's never kept its word, said Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith.
The national average for health care spending is just over $11,000 per person, but tribal health systems receive about a third of that and urban Indian groups even less, according to the National Council of Urban Indian Health. COVID-19 added another blow to this already stressed system.
Smith introduced a bill this summer that would usher $200 million in grants to Indian organizations to bolster their mental health and addiction treatment. The bill, still stalled in Congress, would empower Native organizations to address addiction their own way.
In the years before the pandemic, the White Earth tribe married western medical interventions with the traditional healing practices that helped their people survive as the government tried to erase them. They trained thousands how to use the overdose-reversal medication naloxone and estimate that's saved 1,000 lives, Gardner said. They saved just as many through the millennia of inherited wisdom: drum circles, tobacco ceremonies, the dark, humid honesty of praying in a sweat lodge to balance their bodies, souls and minds.
Their motto is unconditional love, Gardner said. People can recover if they're given hope and healing, so they don't give up on anybody, no matter how deep their addiction.
Georgianna Garbow-Warren's addiction to methamphetamine for years left her homeless — she and her husband lived in abandoned houses, in shelters, eventually under a bridge. She lost custody of her three children. She felt like she was living in circles: She'd use drugs, get her kids taken, clean up, get them back, start the cycle again.
She grew up on the White Earth reservation near Beth Hill. She can rattle off names of other neighbors they've lost to addiction.
Garbow-Warren had a fourth child in 2019, a son born premature at four pounds, seven ounces. They took him straight from the hospital.
She kept using meth: "I wanted to take all that pain away," she said.
Then she couldn't breathe, went back to the hospital and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure from the damage meth had done. She was in and out of emergency rooms. One day she was lying in bed there and thought: "Oh God, do I really hate myself this much?"
She turned herself into the police on an outstanding warrant, and told them she wanted treatment. It was February 2020, just as the pandemic began brutalizing so many battling addiction.
"This year there's been the most funerals I've been to in my whole life," she said. Her sister was hospitalized in March with liver and kidney infections from drinking and drug use.
She couldn't see when Garbow-Warren visited her. The doctors said she could hear them. They played her favorite song by Sir Mix-A-Lot and she wiggled like she was trying to dance. She died a couple days later.
"I'll never get the image out of my head," she said. One of her sisters is now in treatment, a brother still uses, and she waits for the phone call that he's dead.
Her husband found recovery, too. They got an apartment, a dog, a car, and slowly regained custody of their baby, who has cerebral palsy. He can't crawl, and scoots around on his back.
"I blamed myself. I felt a lot of guilt and shame, a lot of pain," she said, about her son's medical difficulties. Then a doctor told her there was no way to know if it was from her drug use or something else.
She doesn't know about her older children. Her son turned 18 this year, the others are 17 and 10. She sometimes imagines tracking them down, but then wonders if they're better off without her.
"I live with that everyday," she said, "wondering if they're OK."
***
In January, Rachel Taylor's heart began aching, like someone had reached into her chest and was squeezing it.
"It was like my heart knew before I did," she said. "My heart was broken four days before he even died."
She had an uneasy feeling the morning of Jan. 11. It was quiet in the house and her son's bedroom door was closed.
"Are you awake?" Taylor texted him at 9:21 a.m.
She never wanted to seem overbearing, and she knew it made him happy to think she trusted him. So she vacuumed the living room just outside his bedroom and hoped the commotion would wake him.
Eventually, she opened his door. At first she thought it must be a dream, like she was seeing from outside herself that his skin was purple.
She dialed 911, and the operator said to check his vitals. He was ice cold. She dropped the phone and screamed. "Come back, my baby, come back."
When he was born, the nurse put him on her chest, and he'd looked at her with such intensity. His eyes were always like that, like a cat's, she thinks.
He loved animals. In stacks of photos albums, he's often holding some little creature. She kept everything he ever made her — birthday cards, childhood pottery. "You're the best mom in the world," he'd write, and she loved it because she'd always felt like a bad one.
She knew the hell her son was living because she had lived it, too.
In December 2020, he punched holes in the walls until his fists bled and screamed he wanted to die. She called police, and when officers arrived she stepped in front of her bloody, hysterical son. "Please don't shoot him," she pleaded, "this isn't him."
They took him to a hospital, but he broke a camera, and the hospital kicked him out.
A month later, she watched as they covered him in blue plastic, and begged them to let her kiss his forehead.
The toxicology report said that he'd died of a combination of alprazolam, the drug in Xanax, and fentanyl.
For a time, she didn't want to live.
Then the medicine man took her to a sweat lodge on the reservation. When she came out, the chatter of two cranes on the wind sounded like a crow — a sign from her son. Now she feeds the crows so they'll keep coming to the yard.
She still smells him, she said. She swears she hears his particular way of knocking on the door.
The anniversary of his death is approaching on Jan. 11, and it is customary in her culture to return him to nature after a year of grieving, she said.
But every morning, she kisses his bag. Her daughter took her out for a buffet dinner, and the bag went too. She fixed him a plate of his favorite foods, prime rib, mashed potatoes, she buttered him a bun.
"The medicine man says I have to let him go back to the earth," she said. "But I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. He left me too soon."
***
2021, IN PHOTOS
A world ablaze: Top images captured by AP photographers in 2021

A couple kiss in front of a barricade set on fire by demonstrators during clashes with police following a protest condemning the imprisonment of rap singer Pablo Hasél in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 18, 2021. Hasél was convicted of insulting the Spanish monarchy and praising terrorist violence.

President-elect Joe Biden, left, and Vice President Mike Pence, right, watch as Lady Gaga steps off the stage after performing the national anthem during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2021.

Firefighters battle the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, in Doyle, Calif., on July 9, 2021.

Yemeni fighters backed by the Saudi-led coalition ride on the back of an armored vehicle as they leave the front lines of Marib, Yemen, on June 19, 2021.

People cry out as the body of their relative is recovered from the rubble of a building damaged by an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on Jan. 15, 2021.

Demonstrators attack a barricade protecting Mexico City's National Palace during a march to commemorate International Women's Day and protest against gender violence on March 8, 2021.

Yohaness, from Eritrea, prays with other migrants as they arrive at the coast of Italy aboard the Spanish vessel Open Arms on Jan. 4, 2021, after being rescued in the Mediterranean sea.

A penguin swims in an enclosure housing gentoo and chinstrap penguins at Mexico City's Inbursa Aquarium on Jan. 13, 2021.

A voodoo pilgrim bathes in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during an annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, on July 16, 2021.

A farmer smokes a bidi, or hand-rolled cigarette, during a tractor rally to protest new farm laws in Ghaziabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on Jan. 7, 2021.

A migrant is comforted by a member of the Spanish Red Cross at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta near the border of Morocco and Spain on May 18, 2021.

Honduran migrants clash with Guatemalan soldiers in Vado Hondo, Guatemala, on Jan. 17, 2021.

Shredded trees and the shells of homes lie half buried in mud near the Taal volcano almost a year after it erupted in Batangas province, a popular tourist destination just south of Manila, Philippines, on Jan. 10, 2021.

Tin Tin Win, center, weeps over the body of her son, Tin Htut Hein, at his funeral in Yangon, Myanmar, on Feb. 24, 2021. Tin Htut Hein was shot four days earlier while acting as a volunteer guard for a neighborhood watch group that was set up over fears that authorities were using criminals released from prison to spread fear and commit violence.

A woman holds a cutout of President Donald Trump's face at a rally in Washington in support of Trump called the "Save America Rally" on Jan. 6, 2021.

A health worker prepares Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute in Quezon City, Philippines, on Nov. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Mahavir Singh, 90, stands for a photograph as he participates in a protest against new farm laws at the border of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh states in India, on Jan. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

Nepalese supporters of the splinter group in the governing Nepal Communist Party celebrate in Kathmandu on Feb. 23, 2021, after the Supreme Court ordered the reinstatement of Parliament, which had been dissolved by the prime minister. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Police with guns drawn face off against rioters trying to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants, mostly from Haiti, as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

A man carries a mannequin dressed as Superman ahead of a no confidence vote against Romanian Prime Minister Florin Citu's government in Romania's parliament in Bucharest, on Oct. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Holocaust survivor Rivka Papo, 87, gets makeup applied during a special beauty pageant honoring Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem, on Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Israeli Arabs stand under a waterfall during the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday at the Gan HaShlosha national park near the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean, on July 21, 2021. Eid al-Adha meaning "Feast of Sacrifice," marks the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Christians and Jews) to sacrifice his son. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Simone Biles of the United States trains on vault for artistic gymnastics at Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo, Japan, on July 22, 2021, ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Vendors wear hats for shade as they sell cooking coal at a market in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, on July 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

A home is engulfed in flames as the Dixie fire rages south of Janesville in Northern California, on Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)

Men place a coffin containing the remains of Francois Elmay into a tomb after recovering his body from the rubble of a home destroyed four days earlier by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Tobek, Haiti, on Aug. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

A child weeps as he is unloaded from an inflatable raft after being smuggled into the United States across the Rio Grande in Roma, Texas, on March 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Young cadets attend a ceremony on the first day of school at a cadet lyceum in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 1, 2021. Ukraine marks Sept. 1 as Knowledge Day, the traditional launch of the academic year. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Guan Chenchen, of China, performs on the balance beam on her way to winning the gold medal during the artistic gymnastics women's apparatus final at the 2020 Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, Japan, on Aug. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Luciana Benetti, 16, embraces her pet pig Chanchi at home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Sept. 4, 2021. Benetti found her plans for a big traditional 15th birthday party scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic last year. In its place, her parents gave her a pig, which turned out to be a loyal and loving companion. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

A model waits to have her headdress removed after a presentation of the William Zhang collection by designer Hongwei Zhang during the China Fashion Week in Beijing, on Sept. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

A firefighter places his hand on engraved names on the south memorial pool during a ceremony to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2021, at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Children watch a movie of the "Cinema no Morro" or "Cinema on the hill" project in a cultural center at Vila Cruzeiro favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sept. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man from the Kiryat Sanz Hassidic sect prays on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea during a Tashlich ceremony in Netanya, Israel, on Sept. 14, 2021. Tashlich, which means "to cast away" in Hebrew, is the practice in which Jews symbolically "throw away" their sins by throwing a piece of bread, or similar food, into a large body of water before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Children jump over a puddle of water as they play during a rainstorm on a street in Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Russian communist supporters hold flags and portraits of Vladimir Lenin as they walk to the mausoleum housing the Soviet founder's remains to mark the 151st anniversary of his birth on April 22, 2021, in Moscow. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

A man runs to escape the heat from multiple funeral pyres of COVID-19 victims at a crematorium on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on April 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Amit Sharma)

A woman carries a wooden cross during a pilgrimage to pray that the Pacaya volcano decreases its activity, in San Vicente Pacaya, Guatemala, on May 5, 2021. The volcano, just 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Guatemala's capital, became more active in early February. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)

Father Felix Mendoza, a Venezuelan Catholic priest, prays over a woman who is crying out in physical pain, at a public hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

A blast from an Israeli airstrike on a building in Gaza City throws dust and debris on May 13, 2021, as Hamas and Israel traded more rockets and airstrikes and Jewish-Arab violence raged across Israel at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

A group of migrants arrive outside a holding center for migrants in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla, on May 18, 2021, after crossing into Melilla in the early hours by jumping over the enclave's double fence. (AP Photo/Javier Bernardo)

Impoverished Sri Lankans salvage debris that washed ashore on May 26, 2021, from the burning Singaporean ship X-Press Pearl, which caught fire several days earlier off the coast of Colombo, Sri Lanka. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Anti-government protesters angry over proposed tax increases on public services, fuel, wages and pensions clash with police in Madrid, Colombia, on the outskirts of Bogota, on May 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia)

New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso walks to his position between innings of the team's baseball game against the Chicago Cubs on June 17, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Health care worker Nazir Ahmed carries a cooler with vaccines and looks out from a hillock for Kashmiri shepherds to vaccinate in Tosamaidan, southwest of Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on June 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Surgeon-turned-refugee Dr. Tewodros Tefera performs surgery on a man's severely infected toe, at the Sudanese Red Crescent clinic in Hamdayet, eastern Sudan, near the border with Ethiopia, on March 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

Performers dressed as rescue workers gather around the Communist Party flag during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, on June 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Kian Navales poses at home in Quezon city, Philippines, on July 6, 2021, holding a pillow with a photo on it of his late father, Arthur, who died from COVID-19. Navales, who also had the virus, says he misses going out for noodles with his dad. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

President Joe Biden speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington after returning from a trip to Cincinnati, on July 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

A boy bicycle-kicks a ball in a flooded area of the Belen community in Iquitos, Peru, on March 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

A fighter loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) mans a guard post on the outskirts of the town of Hawzen, then-controlled by the group but later re-taken by government forces, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia on May 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

A Palestinian man carries an olive tree as he crosses illegally into Israel from the West Bank, through a gap in the separation barrier, south of the West Bank town of Hebron, on March 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Victor Tripiana, 86, reaches out to touch the hand of his daughter-in-law, Silvia Fernandez Sotto, separated by a plastic sheet to prevent the spread of COVID-19, at the Reminiscencias residence for the elderly in Tandil, Argentina, on April 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Villas on the fronds of the Jumeirah Palm Island in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, are seen from the observation deck of The View at The Palm Jumeirah on April 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Lisa Lampkin, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., on April 6, 2021. "I would go home, try to sleep," she says. Then she would "wake up to the reality of this pandemic again." (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A funeral worker removes empty coffins that held remains that were later cremated at La Recoleta cemetery in Santiago, Chile, during the coronavirus pandemic, on April 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Military police officer Everaldo Pinto, dressed as superhero Captain America, greets children and encourages them to protect themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic in Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, on April 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

A train passes a railroad crossing surrounded by floodwaters from rain and melting snow in Nidderau near Frankfurt, Germany, on Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Trump supporters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress prepared to affirm President-elect Joe Biden's victory. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Migrants and refugees of various African nationalities wait for assistance aboard an overcrowded wooden boat in the Mediterranean Sea 122 miles off the coast of Libya as aid workers on the Spanish search and rescue vessel Open Arms approach on Feb. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Bruno Thevenin)

A ray of sunshine illuminates the face of a baby Jesus figure, held by a man waiting to have the figurine blessed, at the Purification of Our Lady of Candlemas Chapel in Mexico City, on Feb. 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Khushi Mir, left, a transgender Kashmiri, relaxes with friends after a meeting of community members in the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on June 4, 2021. Khushi and four young boys have begun a volunteer group to distribute food kits to the transgender community. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

An Ethiopian woman argues with others over the allocation of yellow split peas distributed by the Relief Society of Tigray in the town of Agula, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on May 8, 2021. In war-torn Tigray, it is not just that people are starving; it is that many are being starved, The Associated Press found. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Relatives and neighbors wail during the funeral of Waseem Ahmed, a policeman who was killed in a shootout, on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on June 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

A wood frog looks out from the clover in East Waterford, Pa., on June 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Switzerland's Marc Hirschi lies on the side of the road after crashing during the first stage of the Tour de France cycling race on June 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and children read by candle light from the book of Eicha (Book of Lamentations) during the annual Tisha B'Av (Ninth of Av) fasting and memorial day, commemorating the destruction of ancient Jerusalem temples, in the Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, on July 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington as they try to storm the building on Jan. 6, 2021, while inside Congress prepared to affirm President-elect Joe Biden's election victory. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

A man watches as a wildfire approaches Kochyli beach near the village of Limni, Greece, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) north of Athens, on Aug. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Thodoris Nikolaou)

Stephen Mudoga, 12, tries to chase away a swarm of locusts on his farm as he returns home from school, at Elburgon, in Nakuru county, Kenya, on March 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Larrecsa Cox peers around a stairwell in an abandoned home frequented by people struggling with drug addiction in Huntington, W.Va., on March 18, 2021. Cox leads the Quick Response Team, whose mission is to save every person who survives an overdose from the next one. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Migrants walk on a dirt road along the Rio Grande in Mission, Texas, on March 23, 2021, after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Jen Ho Lee, a 76-year-old South Korean immigrant, poses in her apartment in Los Angeles on March 31, 2021, with a sign from a recent rally she attended in Koreatown against anti-Asian hate crimes. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A patient in a car receives oxygen provided by a gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, in New Delhi, India, on April 24, 2021. India's health system has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, leaving patients desperate for oxygen and other supplies. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

A ballerina in the National Opera performs during the avant premiere staging of the 1870 comic ballet Coppelia in Bucharest, Romania, on May 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

River herring, also known as alewives, swim in a stream on May 16, 2021, in Franklin, Maine. The fish were once headed for the endangered species list but have been making a comeback in some U.S. states. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

A group of migrants mainly from Honduras and Nicaragua wait along a road after turning themselves in upon crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, in La Joya, Texas, on May 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Lucy Mbewe, a traditional birth attendant, assists a pregnant woman at her home in Simika Village, Chiradzulu, southern Malawi, on May 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Daniel Turjman, 60, rests in a bomb shelter that is also used as a synagogue near his apartment building in Ashdod, Israel, on May 19, 2021, as fighting escalates between the Israeli military Hamas militants. (AP Photo/Heidi Levine)

Taliban fighters ride in a boat in the Qargha dam outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Laila poses for a photo on Sept. 27, 2021, as she plays in a poor neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, where hundreds of internally displaced people from the eastern part of the country have been living for years. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Police beat a woman participating in a protest over the death in prison of Mushtaq Ahmed, a writer who was arrested on charges of violating a sweeping digital security law, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Feb. 26, 2021. Ahmed, 53, was arrested in May 2020 for making comments on social media that criticized how the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was handling the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)

Medical students grieve and some flash the three-fingered salute during the funeral of their fellow student Khant Ngar Hein in Yangon, Myanmar, on March 16, 2021. Khant Ngar Hein, 18, was shot in the chest two days earlier by security forces during a protest against the military takeover of the country. (AP Photo)

Displaced Tigrayan women, one wearing an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian cross, sit in a metal shack to eat food donated by local residents at a reception center for the internally displaced in Mekele, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on May 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)