taking care with just the one

I am currently reading a book-length poem by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. An English professor whom I had the pleasure of taking a course with sent this as a recommendation to our class.

I am still slowly making my way through the book: its entirety is only (only) 106 pages, but each page is densely packed with history. The history of people, places, objects lost to time...lost to the distortions that come with "the passage of time".

I find myself lingering on page 38: "Harm".

The very last line is:

Most of them is still missing. 

The use of the (state of being) verb "is" with the pronoun "them" should make any one stop. Just as Zong's brilliant lines display the "man" in "many", Gray wishes to call attention the "one" that is lost in the sea of masses (here, the sea of dying and dead men).

What does that do for a person? It may seem that this is a decency that all men are deserving of and yet, this singular act of "taking care with just the one" is a measure of decency not offered to many, living and dead.

How do you revive this? It is literally a lost "state of being".
How do you amplify a single dot on a vast grid of dots?

take care with just the one(s)