a grim reality

The Covid-19 pandemic has touched each and every one of us in ways we couldn't have imagined just a few weeks ago. From disbelief to fear, from illness to exhaustion, from annoyance to anger to grief to guilt, it has invaded every aspect of our lives. We weren't prepared for schools and businesses to close. We believed our health care system was infallible. We never thought we'd have to worry about affording or procuring food and supplies. We thought we were pretty safe.

"Expectation is the root

of all heartache."

~William Shakespeare~

It has been a challenge to reconfigure our lives just when things were going so well for so many of us. It isn't easy to home school your children, or to work from home when you've never done it before. It's annoying, if not maddening, to have to clean and sanitize everything you come into contact with over and over again, to don a face mask every time you wander outside, to worry about every cough or sneeze. It's unsettling to witness family members and friends taking ill. It's downright scary to think it could happen to you.

But this is the worst thing, I think. Worse than social distancing. Worse than quarantine. Worse than watching the emergency room door close behind someone you love because you are not permitted to be with them in the hospital. Worse than abandoning them to their fate.

"Love knows not its own depth

until the hour of separation."

~Khalil Gibran~

The worst thing is knowing that the person you love may be left to suffer alone. That they could die unattended. That there will be no loving presence at their bedside to support and comfort them. No song or prayer to see them off. No funeral. No burial. At the end of life, they may be assigned a body bag in a refrigerated truck, and, as we learned just today...some will end up in a mass grave. A grim reality that offends everything we hold sacred.

As if it weren't hard enough to have watched family and friends fall ill, suffer, and die, how will we ever bear the heartbreak of coerced separation? The void of utter helplessness? How will we survive the tidal wave of bitterness, despair, and sorrow we feel?

What is the way through? How will we rise again? 

"I am wounded but not slain.

I will lay me down to bleed a while.

Then I will rise to fight again."

~John Dryden~

What would you do if someone you love died like this? How do you dignify and honor a life that passes abruptly, cruelly, unjustly? 

How do you want to be remembered if it happens to you?

"When someone you love
becomes a memory,
the memory becomes a treasure."
~author unknown~

jan