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An unfathomable number of disabled people died in 2025. In the U.S. these deaths have come as political will has swayed toward limiting oversight in cases of abuse, locking away the unhoused — many of whom are disabled — instead of providing resources, and making the road to education even more difficult for disabled people. Five years ago, in 2020, we saw a disabling pandemic wreak havoc on our communities. Those ripples have now converged into a full-on tsunami of fear and pain.

Attempts to quantify the acute experience of mortality that disabled communities are facing feel both impossible and vital. For example, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, which organizes an annual Disability Day of Mourning, has highlighted more than 60 cases of disability-related filicide, where a disabled person is murdered by a family member or caregiver.

Meanwhile war and genocide across the world have also fallen heavily on disabled communities, as Russia sends disabled people to the front line as cannon fodder and Palestinian hospitals and their patients have been attacked repeatedly. And any formal numbers would likely fail to touch on avoidable nursing home deaths, or coerced medical assistance in dying cases, or the still underdiscussed death toll from an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

We can measure AI water usage in swimming pools, or disaster relief dollars by the number of zeroes, but there is no simple calculation for the depth or breadth of disabled death that the world has seen over the past year.

I take a small amount of solace in the ways our communities are learning to talk about the impact of these deaths. Fellow disabled journalist s.e. smith, who has an upcoming book about grief being published, penned a description of the relationship between disability and grief for........

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