There are the dead: Relatives, traveling by night and by boat, travel down a Peruvian river to bring a body home for burial. Row upon row of new graves are dug in the largest cemetery in Latin America.  

And there are those who negotiate the grim space between life and death -- chief among them 16 Italian doctors and nurses exhausted from their labors, their faces haunted and haunting.

Amid the pandemic, it was sometimes easy to overlook the world’s other turmoil -- and its tragedies. A loving uncle carries his 11-year-old niece away from the devastation of a massive explosion in Beirut -- her neck was broken, and her older sister was among the dead. In Syria, emergency workers pull the body of a boy killed in a government airstrike from the wreckage.  

Wildfires gave the American West an eerie glow; a volcano eruption clouded the sky over Manila.

Across the United States, photographers documented an epic and bilious presidential campaign. An exultant Joe Biden, projected on a massive monitor under fireworks after he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. A dejected Donald Trump, after a sparsely attended rally in Oklahoma.

And perhaps the most appropriate image of 2020? It was captured during the waves of protests and riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. A protester strides past a burning building in Minneapolis; in his hands he holds the American flag.

The flag is upside down -- the international signal of distress.