Jesmyn Ward writes about losing her husband shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the U.S. to its knees in a new essay for Vanity Fair.

Ward’s essay, titled “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic,” shook the literary world after it was published on Tuesday.

Ward, the National Book Award–winning author of Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, wrote that she, her husband, and her children became sick in January; she and her kids recovered, but her husband did not.

“I brought him to the emergency room, where after an hour in the waiting room, he was sedated and put on a ventilator,” she writes. “Within 15 hours of walking into the emergency room of that hospital, he was dead. The official reason: acute respiratory distress syndrome. He was 33 years old.”

Ward writes about processing her husband’s loss as the country dealt with COVID-19 and police violence against Black people.

“Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter,” Ward writes.

Readers and writers reacted to Ward’s essay on Twitter with amazement. “We truly do not deserve her heart,” wrote National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas. “We are so lucky to have her heart. We are so much better for her strength and love and staggeringly brilliant mind.”

And author Andrea Thome tweeted, “Jesmyn Ward is one of the great writers of our time and with this essay, she both broke my heart and inspired me to be better.”

Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, memorialized five young Black men, including her brother, who died young when she was growing up in rural Mississippi. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.