Mortality calls us to one another, to hold and be held by one another, embrace and gather. When someone is dying we want to be at the bedside. I read the daily death count, the numbers, the statistics. The tally itself is a deep wound to those who are dying and those who survive that death in the family because it takes away one of the essential elements of a good death and a good funeral; the element of story, our story, which not only includes our biography — what we did this day or that day — but it includes our ancestors, where we came from, what we believed in, what we hold dear, what gives us hope. Our religious and our faith impulses are all included in the story that in this pestilence we’re not allowed to tell because we can’t gather together to share it with one another. It is such a deep wound to the impulses that grief calls us to, to get together, and to commune with one another. 

It adds insult to injury. The numbers on mortality are convincing; they hover right around one hundred percent. But we’ve all seen individual deaths that have been so overwhelmed by circumstances — the act of terrorism, or the school shooting, or the plane crash, or the pandemic — that we lose the individual stories. 

What kind of crisis is there coming, is there now, with people who are not being allowed to grieve in the way that many people expect to get to do, whether it’s being at someone’s bedside as they’re dying or if it’s just being able to come together for anything from an Irish wake to a formal gathering in a church? One of my teachers, Brevard Childs, the bed of heaven to him, may he rest in peace, used to say, “Grief will have its way with you.” You can pay the psychotherapist. You can pay the clergy. You can pay the bartender. But you will pay. Grief is really the other side of the coin of love, and it comes calling for the tax that is due on loving people.

People have said to me for years that it must be very difficult to see people in their grief and bereavement, and it is. But you also see the deep attachments and real love we bear for one another and the kindness and the courtesy that humans do to and for and with one another. 

The time will come round when we can exercise the large muscle investments we have to make in our dead, the heart and the shoulders and the shovel work and that type of thing. In the meantime, the bereavement letter, which used to be a formal ritual in Victorian times, we should find again, the putting pen to paper to condole and console with one another.

Someone asked me the other day what I would say to those who are going through losing a loved one in this pandemic. I am not qualified to say. I’ve buried people I love, a still-born daughter, a father-in-law, close friends, but I’ve never been through a grief that I couldn’t embrace, that I couldn’t whisper in the ear of, that I couldn’t place something in the coffin of, that I couldn’t bend and kiss the forehead of, and pat the hand of, so I can’t imagine the heartbreak. But I will say that faith sustains us, and family and friends sustain us. “Grief shared,” Edgar Jackson used to say, “is grief diminished.” We have to find people to help us do the heavy lifting. These times remove a lot of those options from us, but we’ll find ways.