Afterthought is a feature documentary about COVID memorials and the people who build them. Over the past three years, COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than one million Americans. Nearly one-fifth of us knew someone among them. All of us have been impacted. In a culture that avoids talk of death and puts grief on a timeline, what does our mourning look like? How will we manage the voids the pandemic has created? Our film centers on two projects: a community memorial in Detroit involving thousands of participants, and one artist’s personal memorial in New York commemorating the loss of a friend. Each narrative unfolds over three years. In documenting these stories, Afterthought memorializes lives lost and communities changed by the pandemic and asks universal questions about shared trauma, memory, and healing.