Few people want to die alone, and even fewer want their loved one to be alone in the final weeks, days and hours of their life.
By Julia Corfield
It’s a cold Saturday morning in Melbourne and I am a doctor at work in a palliative care unit. I have just reviewed one of my patients, whose body is beginning to reveal some of the tell-tale signs of dying.
His son stands over him and sadly remarks that “this is a bad time to die”.
With strict visiting restrictions firmly in place across Melbourne, there is a very real chance that his father will die alone and he knows it. This is the new normal.
In a state of disaster, there are a set of rules and visiting restrictions for families and friends of those dying in a hospital setting. These restrictions vary slightly between health services, but the message is the same: as few visitors as possible, for as short a time period as is reasonable.
For months now, hospital staff (myself included) have been chanting the mantra of seemingly arbitrary visiting windows, maximum numbers of visitors per patient and numbers of visitors permitted at the bedside.
In recent times, I have found myself asking questions such as “do all six of your siblings need to visit?” or “could your grandchildren say their goodbyes via FaceTime?”. These conversations are among the hardest I have had as a doctor.
Many find these new rules unacceptable, and with good reason. Few people want to die alone, and even fewer want their loved one to be alone in the final weeks, days and hours of their life.
However, these are not normal times, and a balance must be struck between compassion and safety. Across the world, and now in Victoria, we know that many people with COVID-19 are dying alone; but so are those without COVID-19. Both are tragic realities.
Under normal circumstances, achieving “a good death” is laden with obstacles, let alone in a pandemic. An inherent challenge is that a good death is an individualised experience, reflecting the diversity of the human person.
There are some commonalities across what constitutes a good death, and the company of friends and family features almost universally.
A current patient comes to mind — a woman in her 70s dying of lung cancer — who tells me almost daily that her breathing is bad but the feeling of loneliness even worse. She would like to see her grandchildren, but no children are allowed in the hospital.
Her brother visits, but the allocated two-hour visiting window is not long enough to fill the void created when faced with one’s own mortality. And so on. Her story is not unique.
Dying in a pandemic has brought with it new and more challenging obstacles, ones that make us question what it means to be human. Death is normal, but dying alone is not. So, frankly, when I hear my patients and their relatives say that it is a bad time to die, I can’t help but agree.
Ultimately, how we live and how we die tells us about society as a whole. Today, people die alone to protect society and this at least may be a small source of solace. Their strength and determination to push forward and adapt to this strange new world is a testament to the human spirit.
I hope, though, that those dying in this COVID-19 world know that their sacrifice has not gone unnoticed. Every day, their struggles are seen and felt. Many have had to forgo the so-called good death, and that is the undeniable truth.
This pandemic year, grief is everywhere but we have nowhere to mourn, except online. There have been lives lost, and also jobs and the closeness of relationships in daily life. Those combined losses can put us at risk, and they require managing. First we need to understand the ways that work used to help us with our personal griefs, and why virtual work doesn’t have the same effect. Then managers need to do three things to give employees the space to mourn: Begin by acknowledging that things still aren’t normal. Then offer truth: Take people’s questions and give honest answers — or acknowledge that you don’t have the answers. Finally, provide concrete goals and guidelines for work. All of these actions help to ground your colleagues in reality and orient them to the present, rather than the lost past or an unknown future.
For nearly 20 years, after his first heart attack, I feared losing my dad from a distance, without being able to comfort him or to say to goodbye. And then one day I did.
He died suddenly on a September morning. I flew back to my childhood home that afternoon. He was still there yet gone — his body resting, as they say, or rather, spent. A small crowd of familiar faces hovered as I walked in and hugged him, reaching for what I will always miss most. He was a great hugger. I was too late.
I fell into a pattern in the week that followed. The days were frantic. There were rituals, visits, arrangements to be made, hours of intense sociality and sorrow. The nights were still. When the commotion ceased, I sat at my dad’s desk, opened my laptop, and caught up with work. I found it soothing, as I found getting back to the office soon after. Duties, deadlines, and colleagues simultaneously gave me a break and made me feel my dad’s presence. Work was the place where I had seen him most alive, after all. The place where I could always find him.
I return to those memories often in these days that are so full of loss — of loved ones, of work, of proximity, of a way of life. This year, grief is everywhere, and though it’s been written about and discussed, it’s still going to be felt more acutely at year’s end. Hearing a holiday song, someone told me the other day, brought them to tears. I’m not surprised. “All I want for Christmas is you” takes on a different meaning when you have suffered a loss.
Yes, this year grief is everywhere, but we have nowhere to mourn, except online. With social and working lives going virtual many have lost access to familiar customs, gatherings, and routines that used to comfort the bereft. Those combined losses can put us at risk, and they require managing. A different kind of managing than that we have long been accustomed to.
Complicated Grief
Grief is the personal experience of loss. Mourning is the process through which, with help from others, we learn to face loss, muddle through it, and slowly return to life. Last year, after reading her poignant bookGrief Works, I interviewed British psychotherapist Julia Samuel for a piece I wrote with Oxford professor Sally Maitlis about mourning in the office. Samuel had impressed upon me “how physical the experience of loss really is.” Grieving is something we do with our bodies and with each other. It takes stamina and space.
She had also stressed that, for many people, as was true for me, working — and the workplace — can be one of those spaces that help with mourning. Work can offer a sense of stability and predictability, the office some comfort and respite. Routine is soothing. Caring coworkers, at times, can be as valuable and less demanding than family. We hug colleagues who have lost a loved one; our team sits together when facing the loss of one of its own; or we just work quietly next to others and get a reprieve from grieving.
So what happens now that we are besieged by grief while we work and live at a distance for many, many months? “A lot of grief will remain frozen,” Samuel told me recently, “because many people won’t have enough support, enough ritual, to grieve.” Those are circumstances in which the normal and healthy experience of grieving can take a debilitating turn known as “complicated grief.” The term refers to the persistence of acute pain, apathy, and disorientation long after a loss. Reports of exhaustion, angst, and numbness are now beginning to emerge in the workplace. Those experiences are often understood as symptoms of burnout after a burst of panicked productivity earlier in a nine-month-old crisis. But in a year of many losses and much distance, those experiences might well be expressions of a collective bout of complicated grief.
Even those of us who embrace virtual work, I suspect, are struggling with virtual mourning. Recently, for example, I learned that LinkedIn data revealed a change of mores. In 2020, people have been discussing being bereft with their networks in far greater numbers. Those virtual exchanges might be touching, so to speak, but they don’t quite work like actual touch, according to Bill Cornell, an American psychotherapist and author who specializes on the embodied nature of relationships and losses. Cornell advocates using the word remote rather than virtual work to remind ourselves that working this way involves a loss too, that of physical proximity.
Once we acknowledge our remoteness, we can try to understand its impact, Cornell argues. The fatigue that we feel after a video conference, for example, might stem from the fact that each Zoom meeting subtly reminds us that even if our colleagues are very much alive, there are ways that we have lost each other, too. In the same spirit, Samuel reminded me that losing the camaraderie and routines of office life does not end our relationships with work and coworkers. But finding new ways to muster presence, patience, and support requires making room for loss.
How to Make Room For Loss
Many losses cannot be undone, but spaces for mourning those losses can be rebuilt at work. And managers are best positioned to do that. Those who can hold people through loss, whether it involves death or work or proximity, will help them stay healthy, loyal, and productive.
This is how to go about it.
First, acknowledge that people will be anxious, vulnerable, and disoriented — and so are you. Don’t just pretend that things are normal: Share your experience, invite people to share theirs, and make that behavior normal. Even just sharing what you miss most of your old working days at the office, and how you are struggling to learn how to deal with it, might be liberating.
Second, right after sympathy, offer truth. Here is the data. Here is what we are dealing with right now. Take questions. It will soothe people’s anxiety to be heard, even if you don’t have answers to their queries. If it is hard to make long-term predictions, better not make any. Sharing your company monthly revenues and your plans to deal with a steep drop, for example, will be more honest and useful than giving people a pep talk about how bright the next quarter will be.
Third, simplify the work. Make it more manageable. When we are anxious and remote, it helps to focus on clear and concrete goals, to know what is expected and what is enough. Such clarity is ever more important as people return to the office, but not to old normality. Knowing where, when, and how long people are expected to work, for example, is grounding. Grief hijacks the imagination, filling it with catastrophic projections. Just like mourners can find some comfort focusing on their breath, a meal, or regular exercise, there is value in manageable work. Grief erases our sense of agency, and work can help restore it. “Having a task that you can complete when you feel powerless is very helpful,” Samuel advises.
All of these actions help to ground your colleagues in reality and orient them to the present. That is the best work can offer: Reminding us that we are here for now. We often tell those who manage and lead to portray confidence, spark the imagination, and focus on the future. That future orientation is “all well and good,” Cornell cautions, “but it’s difficult when you are sitting with people who have no idea what next week will be like, let alone the future.”
I do not mean to say, with all this, that we need to just get on with an ill-defined “new normal.” That would be like telling those who have lost a loved one that they “will get over it.” We never do. But staying in the present, focusing on the reality of uncertainty and remoteness, can keep us going and connected as we learn to live with loss and maybe, slowly, grow through it.
For managers to make room for loss, however, they must brave a loss of their own: of principles and prescriptions that have long oriented them. By turning from the future to the present, from a sparked imagination to a held heart, from confidence to care, a manager can help us regain our footing and, slowly, some hope. Letting those old prescriptions go, I have written before, might help us humanize management. Likewise, these months in which we have lost each other might end up humanizing work. If it reminds us that we need space to share and soothe our grief, remoteness might even bring us closer. That might be a hopeful ending for a year of loss.
How can emptiness be so oppressive? Absence hangs darkly in the air, a steadily descending, suffocating pall of grief threatening to choke out the joyous light of life. Obligatory smiles are forced around the family dinner table. Tears are not, falling unexpectedly with flash images of happier times. Death did not take a holiday this year.
This Christmas, the families, friends, and loved ones of the more than 9,000 people who’ve died from COVID-19 in Los Angeles County will struggle with the grief. Loss upon loss upon loss—not only death but job loss, the loss of financial and relationship security, the loss of feeling in control of one’s own life—suffered in silence creates a numbness that can make even the simplest task a struggle.
David Kessler understands and wants to help. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Kessler, the gay founder of Progressive Nursing Services, helped care-providing friends of those dying from the stigmatized disease cope with their fears and grief, later cofounding Project Angel Food with his friend, former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. Kessler subsequently teamed up and wrote two books with his mentor, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who pioneered the concept of the five stages of grief in her ground-breaking book On Death and Dying. After the 2016 accidental overdose death of his 21-year-old son during the opioid crisis, Kessler wrote Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, about “remembering with more love than pain.” On his website Grief.com, Kessler posts helpful videos, including one in which he shares how to heal the five areas of grief, as well as resources and help with myriad feelings not generally associated with grief. He also started a free Facebook group so people can connect virtually.
“It’s really important that we name our feelings because you can’t heal what you don’t feel,” Kessler tells Los Angeles. “People don’t realize that grief is exhausting and that heaviness you’re feeling, that sadness, that lack of motivation—there’s a good chance this time it’s grief. And when we name it, we no longer feel we’re crazy or something could be wrong with us. Grief is a reflection of what’s going on in our life and in the world. And how many losses are there right now?”
Every day in L.A. is a 9/11. “The problem is we can’t see this,” Kessler says. “Because it’s everywhere and there’s no funerals and there’s no visuals. Our mind can’t comprehend what’s really happening. When you look back on the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam war, 9/11—there were caskets and nonstop funerals. We are not seeing that. Now we’re at home. Funerals are rarely happening, and if they are, they’re on Zoom.”
Meanwhile, the comfort of physical contact with loved ones who live outside our households has been temporarily taken away. And we’re subconsciously mourning little things every day. Even discovering that a beloved neighborhood restaurant has shuttered can trigger grief.
So what do we do?
“Part of our work is to try to find a meaning. Now, meaning isn’t in the pandemic. There is no meaning in a horrible death or a pandemic. The meaning is in us,” Kessler tells Los Angeles. “I live on a street here in Los Angeles where I never knew my neighbors. I mean, I kind of waved at the people to my right and to my left, but I didn’t know them. During the pandemic, all of a sudden, we got a whole text chain where we started texting one another. Someone was going to the grocery store. Check on the elderly man at the end of the street because he may need groceries. That was finding meaning. All of a sudden, I saw kids in the front lawn playing with their parents. I’ve never seen them play with their parents. That’s meaning. We’re suddenly, ‘well, it’s so horrible, we can only connect on news.’ But suddenly, we’re talking to people around the country, around the world on Zoom.”
Kessler hopes that people find a lot of new meanings. “Maybe part of the meaning is that we take our government personally. Maybe we make sure that we’re fully in line with our government and the future and that our government really represents us,” he says.
And what of finding meaning during a holiday season in which cheer seems like an insult?
“Love is still important,” Kessler says. “Even if I just have conversations with people I love. Even if I realized that this is going to pass. Sometimes some of those worst moments become the meaningful ones when we’re no longer having superficial conversations with each other. I can’t tell you how many people have said, ‘I just can’t go commercial on a lot of gifts or do that whole thing this year.’ It’s going to be more love than commercial gifts. Maybe we’ll be a little more meaningful this year.”
While removals, wakes and refreshments have all stopped, Irish people did different things to pay their respects during the pandemic.
By Joyce Fegan
Standing around in a churchyard and going for soup and sandwiches after a funeral is part of a centuries-old tradition, but we have had to adapt to different grieving measures due to Covid-19, writes Joyce Fegan.
AT THE height of the global pandemic, just 10 mourners were allowed per funeral. When restrictions were eased that number only increased to 25.
Wakes did not happen. There was no gathering in churchyards to shake the hands of the bereaved and no soup and sandwiches in the local pub afterwards to share stories about the life of the deceased.
This curtailment of our oldest and most celebrated ritual has meant that people have not been able to grieve their loved ones nor be consoled by the sympathies of others, as they normally would have been.
Donal Forde has been burying people for 35 years but, in 2020, funerals as he knew them changed.
Director of Forde Funeral Homes in Cork and president of the Irish Association Of Funeral Directors, he says the thing that people miss most is “contact”.
“They [the public] miss the physical contact of being able to shake hands and hug. There were people who would have always expected big crowds at their funeral and that didn’t happen.
“The general public miss being able to go to funerals. People like to offer their support — just being there and shaking hands can mean so much,” says Donal.
When it was down to 10 mourners only, families found that restriction particularly hard but, with 25, most families could just about manage.
While removals, wakes and refreshments have all stopped, Irish people did different things to pay their respects during the pandemic.
“At the rural funerals, you’d have people on every corner, from the house to church and from the church to cemetery, paying their respects. And in the city, it’s gathering outside the house,” explains Donal.
However, what has had the biggest effect on people, in his observation, is families being unable to be with their loved ones as they die.
“The biggest thing we’ve noticed with families is the not being able to enter into nursing homes and hospitals and the just getting in on last few days. That’s had a big effect on people. Or only one family member has been allowed in,” he states.
The effect has been, people are still upset. It’s hard to know how it will affect them in the long term.
One organisation that flagged the possible side effects of grieving in exceptional times was the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF).
Orla Keegan is the head of education and bereavement services at the IHF. At the height of the pandemic, the IHF decided to set up a bereavement helpline for people experiencing the death of someone they loved because of Covid-19 or a death from other causes.
They realised that people may also be finding a previous bereavement more difficult at this time.
While so much was “unknown” in March 2020, the helpline was set up and modelled on the “notion of psychological first aid or bereavement first aid”, says Orla.
People of all age groups ring the helpline, from adult children to friends and people in their 20s right up to their 90s.
As head of education, Orla says that the foundation is very clear to “never minimise a loss”.
The longer you’ve had someone, the more you’ve had to lose and mourn. There is a lifetime of memories.
People say: ‘Oh, you get used to loss as you get older’, but that is a myth,” she says.
Orla says that the wake, removal and funeral all serve functions for human beings and each of those have been “disrupted” this year.
“They help us come to terms with the reality of the death, that physical presence. The being there at the time of death helps with that, so too does the funeral. It also helps us feel our pain and have our pain witnessed by the community and, in viewing pain, people want to come towards us to commiserate. It’s part of the social contract.
“It’s showing us the person’s place in the community. You get to really define who that person was; you’re beginning that part of telling the story. You meet people you haven’t seen for years and they’re telling stories you’d never heard — it could be your father’s work colleague.
“So that got a bit disrupted, to put it frankly. People have to find different ways of doing it or they are feeling robbed or cut off from that,” says Orla.
The Christian funeral is of “profound importance to Irish society, allowing a celebration of the life of the deceased,” says historian Dr Marion McGarry.
The rituals surrounding our funerals allowed the bereaved to mourn, grieve and, hopefully, recover in a healthy manner.
She says the purpose of rituals at an Irish funeral is twofold.
“It is a way for the community to mark the passing of one of their members and show sympathy to those who have lost their loved ones,” says Dr McGarry.
For the bereaved, seeing people turn up in this way, gathering together in large numbers to shake hands, acknowledges their grief and can be of great comfort.
Going back hundreds of years, Irish people have had the wake, in various forms, and the sharing of refreshments afterwards.
“In older times, there were many rituals and practices around Irish wakes and funerals. People would ritually smoke clay pipes at wakes, professional mourners or ‘keeners’ were hired to cry over the dead and there were even ‘wake games’ played to keep mourners awake as they sat up with the corpse.
“These customs have fallen away and, while the Irish funeral is more sombre now than it was in older times, it differs little from the past where prayers were said, refreshments were provided, alcohol may have been served, and stories and occasional laughter were welcome,” she explains.
With Covid-19, neither the wake nor the sharing of food and drink were permitted.
“The wake — that allows time spent with the body — can help in the grieving process. The substantial funeral service and burial, with the time taken and numbers involved, are all curtailed. After the burial, time taken to share food with neighbours and friends is no longer allowable,” states Dr McGarry.
Proving the importance of funerals to Irish people is the fact that you don’t just attend funerals of people you know, “there is an unspoken rule that you attend funerals of those closely related to people you know too”.
Case Study: ‘I lost six people this year — I couldn’t even say goodbye to my own mother’
Niall Lynch lost six people this year, including his mother, Ursula Lynch, 93.
She died at the height of lockdown which meant he was unable to see her in the weeks leading up to her death.
It also meant his wife and children had to wait in the car outside the church during his mother’s funeral mass.
Several days later his wife’s father would pass away too, still in lockdown, so it was now Niall who would be watching the funeral on his phone in the car outside the church.
“My mother had dementia, she was in a nursing home in Navan, she died April 6. Vascular dementia shuts down different functions, and her swallow function shut down, so she hadn’t eaten solids in a week. This was the second or third time this happened in nine months, and at 93 you can’t survive too many bouts like that.
“It was in lockdown and my sister was able to visit her through the window, but my mother couldn’t really see her because she had limited eyesight. Then my sister was with her for the last hour, by her side. They called her and said: ‘You’d better get here’.
Ursula Lynch and baby Amelia White-Lynch
They met her at the front door of the nursing home, gowned her, and she was given 60 minutes with my mother. She couldn’t touch her. They were being super careful,” says Niall.
Niall last saw his mother on March 13, the day after the first tranche of government restrictions were announced.
So when Ursula passed away on April 6, the full lockdown had been enforced and his family was left grappling with manoeuvring itself through different counties and Government restrictions.
Niall was stopped four times by gardaí on the way to his 93-year-old mother’s funeral.
“It was strange at first, you’re trying to get your head around things and calculate this and that and where can we go, what are we allowed to do. The funeral home was open for max an hour, you had to stay your distance – all the usual stuff you now take for granted was granted.
“And we were travelling from Cavan to Meath, so we worried about that and being stopped by the guards. So I said: ‘I’ll keep RIP up on my phone if guards stop us’, and they did. We were stopped four times and they saw us as a family dressed up,” explains Niall.
Niall was able to see his mother in the funeral home before her mass, and his children were too, so everyone was able to say their goodbyes.
“Just to be able to do that little thing,” says Niall.
As lockdown was so new and so little was known about the spread of the virus, extreme caution was taken, meaning that when Ursula’s coffin arrived at the church, the front door was not open.
“The undertaker had to rap the door and the priest opened the door and said it was locked because he had to make sure it was no one else and that’s why he had it bolted. Only 10 of us were allowed in and I had to give the undertaker a list of those people and he showed it to priest who kept a record.
“The priest led us in and it was quite strange – this large open church with galleries upstairs it was like sitting in the Gaiety with 10 people and you could see the emptiness,” says Niall.
Ursula had six children, meaning there wasn’t room for sons and daughters-in-law, nor grandchildren.
My wife and children sat in the car park and watched it on the parish webcam.
One thing that Niall missed was the Navan tradition of neighbours and friends gathering for the “big old chat in the chapel yard”.
“You’d look forward to that, that was all gone. Now you’re reading comments on RIP and it was just ‘goodbye old neighbours’ and that was as close as you got to locals coming up to you in the chapel yard saying that your mother was an ‘auld native’ and that she was a ‘good one’. My mother would have loved that,” says Niall.
At the graveside, cousins gathered, but again everyone kept their physical distance and as soon as his mother Ursula was buried “there was nothing after that,” as everyone went their separate ways.
Ten days later, Niall’s father-in-law, Tom White, 88, died unexpectedly. He had been up and about walking at home, when he developed a chest infection.
He ended up in hospital but it was arranged that two of his family members could go on a rota and be with him for the last two days of his life.
“They all got to see him, and one of them got to be with him when he died,” explains Niall.
This funeral was a “rural affair” and “people lined the roadsides” as his coffin passed. Again, the 10-mourner rule applied as Tom died on April 15, however, there were far more than 10 in his family as he was survived by his wife Teresa, 10 children and 24 grandchildren.
“I remember the undertaker saying: ‘Between you and me I think I’ve let 11 in’,” says Niall.
At Tom’s graveside, with everyone dotted around with two metres apart, about 19 of his grandchildren joined together in song and sang as his coffin was lowered into the ground.
Niall Lynch and cousin Declan Reilly.
Niall would attend four more funerals, his aunt, a daughter of a very good friend of his and two first cousins, Declan Reilly, 60, of Swords, Co Dublin, and PJ Lynch, 74, of Clontarf and Artane, Co Dublin.
“We used to check in with each other all the time, we were the three from the three different families that always touched base with each other,” explains Niall.
Both of those funerals took place during the Level 5 restrictions.
Niall has seen both the good and bad in 2020.
“What we used to dissipate our grief with was company and chat and ritual and we’ve not been able to do that, but on the other hand, and it’s strange to say it, but it has been a kind of a gift. We’ve been forced into a space we might not otherwise have allowed ourselves to have – to sit back and contemplate,” believes Niall.
The good and the bad aside, Covid-19 has taught him to express any love or gratitude he has for a person, before it’s too late.
“Too much loss and lack of memory and ‘biting of the holy cords atwain’ is going to affect us all for years. Who knows for the better or the worse? So I know that every phone call I make is a must. I don’t want to lose anyone else without saying ‘I love you, I’m grateful for knowing you, you made a difference’ in whatever way I can say it and without delay.
“Because all we have right now is now. We can only hope that [a life] lived well, will carry us through to some friendlier place. We may someday be grateful, even, for what changes Covid-19 wrought in us”.
Case Study: She mouthed ‘I love you’, and she was gone
Margaret Kelly lost her mother Mary O’Connor (née Duggan), 89, on October 6.
Mary, raised in Frankfield View on the Old Youghal Road, had been living on Capwell Road until her death.
However, Mary, who loved company and “out”, moved in with Margaret for the duration of lockdown.
“Mum lived on her own, but she lived with me and my husband and daughter for March and April, we had her for 12 weeks, it’s a blessing. I finished up work on Tuesday and collected her on the Tuesday evening.
“Her biggest thing was loneliness. She said to me: ‘If I don’t die of Covid I would have died of loneliness’.
“I live in Carrignavar, and we would drive down to the end of the road and she would walk that park every single day during lockdown, it was 350 steps but that was a huge deal to her.
“My husband and I would get up and have breakfast and take the dogs out. When we’d come home, she’d be sitting waiting with her coat on to go for that walk,” explains Margaret.
Unfortunately Mary took a fall on May 23, which resulted in a hip replacement. Mary was taken to hospital by army personnel and because she had been watching the news every night with Margaret and her family, she was well aware of what was ahead of her in terms of no visitors.
Mary O’Connor.
Mary recovered from her hip operation and returned home to her own house.
However, in October, she fell ill.
“In October she wasn’t feeling well. My son used to take her out every single Friday for lunch. She loved out, if you were getting the car NCT-ed she’d go with you.
“She was ages opening the front door and this was unusual, when my son got in, she just collapsed into his arms. That was a Friday and she passed on the Tuesday, she was brought into the Mercy Hospital and I got a phone call to say there was no hope, she had pneumonia,” says Margaret.
The fact that it early October, meant that the country was neither in Level 5 restrictions, nor lockdown, so Margaret was able to be with her mother as she passed.
The hospital was also very quiet, so they had peace of mind when visiting Mary.
Margaret describes the experience of her mother’s passing as both “beautiful” and something she is extremely grateful for.
My mum wasn’t talking but she was rubbing our hands and our faces and blowing kisses – that was her down to the ground.
“I said: ‘Mam you need to go, don’t be hanging on for us’, and with that she mouthed: ‘I love you’ and she was gone. There was no drama. It was beautiful and we were with her,” says Margaret.
“My mum’s own mum died when she was six weeks old, and she always had one dream in life and that was to meet her own mother, and at nearly 90, it was still always at the back of her mind. The fact that she was finally going to meet her mum gave us great solace,” she adds.
For the funeral, only 25 people were allowed into the church, but something special happened after the mass, that eased the restrictions.
“When we came out of the church and passed mam’s house, all the neighbours were out. The older people are so respectful and they all had their hands clasped, it was all people could do,” says Margaret.
Although losing her mother during 2020 was “not ideal”, gratitude is one of her overriding feelings.
“It wasn’t ideal, but we are so grateful to the Mercy. We didn’t take being with her for granted, and it has to be said because there are so many people out there who didn’t have that,” says Margaret.
Mary O’Connor was predeceased by her beloved husband Finbarr of 48 years. She is survived by her children Donal, Norma and Margaret, and her four grandchildren Yvonne, Darren, Graham and Leanne.
‘We can’t stay in touch on Zoom, it’s taking away our humanity’
For the first time in human history, in peacetime, we saw funerals physically banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in others.
But marking death and respecting the dead is what makes us human, and what makes us different from every other species on earth.
It is this basic fact that makes funerals extremely significant, says UCC professor of sociology Arpad Szakolczai. His work focuses on social theory, historical sociology, and political anthropology — the scientific study of humanity.
“The origin of human culture is related to burial, marking the dead makes us humans, burials go back half a million years,” says Prof Szakolczai.
“Remembering the dead and burying the dead, is one of the main, if not the most important source of human culture.”
Any time in human history when the dead have not been respected was a sign of breakdown in culture.
“The Iliad ends with Hector humiliating the dead body of an enemy — this is never appropriate,” says Prof Szakolczai.
But in 2020 terms, and in peacetime, he feels strongly about the impact of restrictions on rituals surrounding death.
“Prohibiting burial rituals, not taking proper care of the dead, is a very serious issue,” says the professor.
There are other factors around death, aside from the funeral itself, that have been affected by Covid-19 restrictions.
“Dying at home or with family was the normal condition for humans — that was the way of saying farewell to the dead,” said Prof Szakolczai.
“To discontinue these rituals — I don’t agree at all, it disrupts customs and family ties.”
While this did not happen in Ireland during the pandemic, some funerals were banned in their entirety to stop the spread of Covid-19 in other countries.
Prof Szakolczai describes this practice as “quasi- apocalyptic”.
“Death was also about the departing soul being given some kind of rest. What happens to people who are not buried properly? It’s quasi-apocalyptic, it’s not an enlightened condition.
“There is a problem that we don’t take care of the dead.”
In Ireland in particular, out of many countries in the world, funeral and burial rituals have all been “preserved in an exemplary manner”.
“It’s an important custom that has stayed on, but now it’s interrupted,” says Prof Szakolczai.
However, we have been able to attend people’s funerals virtually. Does this not go some way to creating ritual around death?
Virtual reality
Prof Szakolczai says “virtual reality” is not a real connection, and our physical presence is most important when it comes to death.
“Virtual reality — that’s another kind of issue, the importance of presence and concreteness cannot be underestimated when it comes to death,” he says. “Virtual reality is the elimination of presence and the delusion of family ties, that’s not a real connection.
“You can’t spread holy water through the internet.”
Physical presence is fundamental to our humanity, states the professor.
“It’s nonsense that we can stay in touch on Zoom, it’s taking away our humanity. It’s an extremely serious issue.
“We are human, we are not competitors of artificial intelligence.”
With all the advances in science and proliferation of knowledge, death still remains “this big mystery” to human beings.
“We don’t have a scientific answer about what survives after death, and this is what human beings have always thought about, it has never gone away,” says Prof Szakolczai.
Many anthropologists consider death, not birth, the most important turning point of human life.
Birth is an event, and it is hugely significant for the parents, but there are very few memories associated with the new life.
Death is the opposite.
“Birth involves a limited number of people, and there are not many memories when a new born baby is very little,” says Szakolczai. “However, when someone dies, everything that person lived through and who they interacted with come together.
“Death and funeral rituals show that we care about us, family and friends and colleagues and people. It’s crucial to keeping society together, and it is among the most important rituals for human life — and that [belief] is shared by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.”
Prof Szakolczai says he hopes that the interruption of social practices, such as funerals, and the disruption of human relations, through social distancing, will not continue for much longer.
“We shouldn’t get used to this, that’s the point. If a generation is brought up like this, what is the effect?”
COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate by race, yet it has still laid bare the brutality of racism in the United States
By Patrice Peck
All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk, but as Black people in America, we still feel a connection with one another. A reciprocated smile as we pass one another on the street; a spontaneous, but still synchronized, “Swag Surfin’” dip at the club; a “Cupid Shuffle” kick at the cookout. Small moments like these reinforce the bond I feel with other Black people. But these days, as I quarantine at home, the Black faces sparking that sense of familiarity are not nodding in solidarity or swaying in unison. They stare back, frozen in photographs accompanying obituaries that announce yet another Black life lost to the coronavirus. I do not know these people. I am not even one of the 31 percent of Black people in America who personally knows someone who has died of COVID-19. But in these faces I see my loved ones. I see myself.
I thought of these obituaries last week, when the United States passed yet another grim pandemic milestone. More than 50,000 Black Americans are now dead from COVID-19, according to data from the COVID Racial Data Tracker, a collaboration between The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. (And even that number is likely an undercount: We don’t know the race or ethnicity for roughly 20,000 of the 319,000 Americans whose lives have been claimed by COVID-19.) Everyone in the U.S. is at the mercy of the coronavirus; it doesn’t discriminate by race or class or gender or age. And yet, from the very beginning of the pandemic, the virus has exposed and targeted all of the disparities that come along with being Black in America. We are dying at 1.7 times the rate of white people from this virus, which means that the toll of these disparities has never been easier to quantify: 19,000 Black people would still be alive if not for systemic racism.
For centuries, Black people have spoken about the struggles we face, pointing to root causes like poverty, housing segregation, unemployment, and environmental degradation. And for centuries, those concerns have largely gone ignored. The same thing has happened with the pandemic. Long before any data confirmed our worst fears, Black people knew that the coronavirus would disproportionately devastate our already vulnerable communities. Driven by that foresight, I launched a newsletter, Coronavirus News for Black Folks, in early April. As the death toll crept up and up, the brutality of American racism became even clearer. Black people with clear symptoms of COVID-19 were turned away from receiving tests, sometimes on multiple occasions, only to die at home. Black families were entirely destroyed as members died within weeks and days of one another. By the end of July, twice as many Black children as white children had died of COVID-19: In Michigan, the first child to die from the virus was a 5-year-old Black girl who spent two weeks on a ventilator.
While a large swath of Americans, myself included, are able to safely stay at home, Black people are disproportionately essential workers, who have no choice but to brave the pandemic and head to work. Many have lost their lives working jobs they felt were unsafe and underpaid. “Our white executive director has not been in the office for the past six weeks, has not asked how any of us are holding up, and has not emailed us to say thank you,” a 20-something security guard told me in April. “I feel betrayed. I used to love my position and the people I work with. Now I’m resentful of the protection some people are afforded while others, like myself, are sent out to the front lines.” (The security guard was granted anonymity for fear of professional reprisal.)
As if the havoc wreaked by the virus weren’t already bad enough, the racial disparities will persist as the U.S. works its way out of the pandemic. Just as one in three Black people knows someone directly who has died from COVID-19, one in three Black people has said they will not get the vaccine, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Clinical trials have shown that the vaccine is safe and effective, but a long-standing mistrust in America’s predominantly white medical institutions is only deepening, and so the number of Black lives lost to this virus will continue to rise, even though we now have a way to end it.
Thankfully, moments of Black kinship still emerge even during all the suffering. The same week that marked more than 50,000 Black deaths saw a horizon of hope. Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican-born nurse in Queens, New York, became the first person to be vaccinated in the United States, after receiving the shot from Michelle Chester, also a Black woman. Even a pandemic can’t break the resilient bond of Black America.
Mourning on a wintry day at the end of a year that has all been winter.
By Dur e Aziz Amna
I walk out, steering the stroller with icy fingers. I pass the house that always appears as if someone is moving in or out, the gray house with a garage full of ugly toys, the white house with an attractive couple who dine every day at 7 p.m., which I know because I peek in on my daily quarantine walks, comforted by the sight of the woman’s top bun and the man’s beard as they sit across from each other at a farmhouse table.
Today is winter. A crisp, cold, sunny day, the kind that makes you think for a few hours that perhaps this — the end of the year in Michigan — isn’t too bad. But when I reach the park, it is all sorrow. Each blade of grass, shimmering in December light, is sorrow. The crackle of each remaining leaf is sorrow.
Muslims recite the azan — the call to prayer — in the ear of every newborn, but we leave it out of the final prayer for the deceased. The point is that our time here is as brief as the moment between the call to prayer and the start of prayer. Now, in the park, the journey each drop of melted snow makes from branch to wilted grass is sorrow.
For those, like me, living far from home, there is a worry so common it is banal: the Call. The call that comes when a loved one is hurt or dying. We brace ourselves against it, convinced that anticipation is inoculation against grief. To this day, I sleep with my phone on silent only when I am back in Pakistan; home is the place where late-night calls don’t seize the ground beneath you.
In Michigan, when the phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s usually just a wrong number or a relative who thinks America is five hours behind and not 10. Sometimes though, it is a sunny morning, the house smells of coffee and the baby is playing with tiny toes when the phone rings, and something in you, that animal that senses danger before it manifests, tells you that it’s bad news.
My husband once asked my father if he believed in saints. Abbu responded that if there was any saint in his life, it was his last surviving uncle, Chacha Jee. On Dec. 1, Chacha Jee died, his lungs, liver and heart collapsing in quick succession in an emergency ward in Pindi, Pakistan.
The official diagnosis was pneumonia, but the symptoms were close enough to Covid-19 for them to transfer him to the Covid ward. No family was allowed to visit him in his final moments. Globally, 1.6 million people have died of the disease this year. Many were also isolated from their loved ones in their last days, even if they lived in the same town, let alone across the world.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the famous Urdu poet, wrote that during his years in prison, time collapsed so that “the occurrences of a century seem to be like the happenings of yesterday.” Grief, particularly of the remote kind, seems to work in the same way.
Suddenly, I am 5 again, and Chacha Jee and his wife, Baji, have come over, armed with the Sandwich House they painstakingly made for our birthday parties. There is a garden of lettuce leaves and cottages made of sliced bread. In the middle stands Mr. Potato, on legs of toothpicks, with a bit of carrot for a nose.
Then I am 9, spending sticky summer afternoons at their house, Chacha Jee making the hot chai such a hot day calls for.
Then I am 25 and sharing sly smiles with my brothers because Chacha Jee is singing his favorite song: “Tu Ganga ki mauj main Jamna ka dhara /Ho rahega milan yeh humara tumhara.” (You are the wave of the Ganges, I am a stream of the Jamuna /Our union is bound to happen.)
These are the happenings of yesterday, yet far more real than the ephemera of sun grazing the backyard, my foggy breath, my mother’s voice over WhatsApp, saying that Chacha Jee has passed.
My father was only 30 when my grandmother died, and often relatives would try to reminisce about her with him. Abbu, resolutely private in his mourning, firm in his belief that one takes grief to the prayer mat and leaves it there, would quote the poet Ahmed Faraz. “Dukh fasana nahi ke tujh se kahen /Dil bhi mana nahi ke tujh se kahen.” (Neither was my grief a story, that I may tell you /Nor did my heart agree, that I may tell you.)
In the style of a child forever looking up to her father, I aspire to that, but that is not how I process grief. Instead, even as I am on the phone, I think to myself, I will write into and out of this.
“What skies this earth has inhaled,” wrote Ameer Minai, and Chacha Jee was that — a benevolent sky over everyone who knew him. Born in a rural Punjabi village where men rarely spoke to children and never showed affection to their wives, Chacha Jee carved out a path of his own. I remember him arranging saucers, pouring out cups of chai for Baji and himself. Complimenting the little frocks my cousins and I wore for Eid, when every other man would consider that frivolous.
The sun is now setting upon that world, but without a doubt, that world was there. I saw it — where the worth of a man was his brooding silence, his coldness, his anger. There was that line of fathers, haughty and unforgiving. And there was that childless father of us all, Chacha Jee, laughing his shrill, girlish laughter, joking with everyone, treating even the youngest child with wonder and love and curiosity.
He was a captain in the Pakistan Army. Sent to Germany for training, he tricked an American officer into believing the pungent taramira oil he used to smooth his hair was a Pakistani delicacy to be enjoyed by the spoonful. At 82, he drove himself from Pindi to our home village in Talagang every other week, although my love for him will not allow me to sugarcoat this: Chacha Jee was a truly terrible driver, with a recklessness that was not complimented by capability.
If Chacha Jee was modern enough to have shunned those older, tormented ways of being, he was still hospitable in a way that only someone brought up in the communality of the village could be. He settled in the city but brought the wide-open doors of the dhok with him. When I had a fever and my mother was not around, Abbu deposited me at Chacha Jee and Baji’s house for the night, because there was no one in the family who cared for the sick as they did.
A Palestinian friend tells me that in Arabic they say, “Ili raba ma maat”: The one who raises others never dies.
Now I am a mother, and I find that grieving with a child is odd. The world tumbles on its axis, and yet complete despair seems impractical, because there is a hungry mouth to be fed, a pair of curious eyes watching as you weep. That day we learned that Chacha Jee was gone, my youngest brother, who was visiting, and I kept seeking the baby, not for catharsis (babies are terrible, squirmy huggers) but for comfort. He is new. He has years and years and years, inshallah. He will go places, to spots in time, where none of us will.
“Your absence has gone through me,” W.S. Merwin wrote, “Like thread through a needle. /Everything I do is stitched with its color.” And so it is with being a parent; every feeling, high or low, is refracted through that identity, considered in the context of that tiny body lolling around on the lime green quilt. Chacha Jee, then, is another part of my life that I will not be able to share with my children. I add him to the tablet full of real things — people I touched, places I trod — that will live on only as stories. And yes, stories are important. I know that because why else would I be here with you?
My mother tells me of a time when she visited her grandfather. He was remembering the people he had known in his life, laughing mostly to himself as he relayed this story or that. Ammi sat with him, mostly out of deference, slightly impatient because she didn’t know any of the people he was talking about. Suddenly, she realized that he was telling her all this because everyone who did know the people in his stories was gone.
Children can be brutal to the past. My brother remembers standing in a row for our grandfather’s funeral prayer and having a 4-year-old cousin whisper to him, “I bet it’s going to be Grandma next.” Everyone was together in the village for three days of mourning, during which the little kids ran around, hopping from one house to another. For months they remembered those days with extreme fondness. “We had such fun at Grandpa’s funeral,” they remarked.
But I am obsessed with my parents, and given the way these things go, there is a decent chance that my children will be, too, not for my sake but because that is where any honest attempt at understanding their own selves would lead them. Lives should be led in the present, the eye has to look to the future, but all meaning is past.
So where does that leave us, on this wintry day at the end of a year that has all been winter? In the past, I have been embittered by mourning deceased family members from afar, while everyone back home gets together and seeks catharsis in crowded rooms. This time, we are all far apart.
In 2020, the congregation of grief is online. We call one another and spin stories, which we then rehear from others and wonder: Did this story start with me, or are we all saying the same things? On the family thread, I send a screenshot of Chacha Jee laughing with his mouth wide open, the baby curled up in tummy time in the top right corner. A cousin quotes Khalid Sharif: “Bichra kuch iss ada se ke rut hi badal gayi /Ik shakhs saray shehr ko veeran kar gaya.” (He left, and the season changed /He left, and left the city desolate.)
For my brother, more resolute in his faith than I am, the consolation is clear. As Muslims, we believe that Muhammad will never abandon a lover of Muhammad. And Chacha Jee loved Muhammad, the cousin and daughter and grandsons of Muhammad, the followers of Muhammad, and beyond. Chacha Jee will be at peace. It is us, the living, that I worry about.
I worry for Baji, who will wake up without a partner of more than 50 years; her loss is its own universe. My father and mother, who will miss the kindest shadow in their lives. And us — my brothers and I, the baby. Life will distract us; it is good at doing that. We will have other people to love and be loved by.
All day, my brother and I hummed softly to ourselves, stray lyrics that let us obliquely touch the place that hurt. I started “Tu Ganga ki Mauj” but stopped after a verse. The next morning, I put on the coffee and turned on a song by Mehdi Hassan: “Muhabbat karne walay kam na honge /Teri mehfil mein lekin hum na honge.” (Your congregation will still have other lovers /It’s just that I will be there no more.)
Last February, Nancy Chouinard took her father out to dinner. Two months later the world had changed, and her dad, Norman Ginstling, passed away alone in a hospital.
The funeral was held over Zoom. There was nobody at the grave. “I feel like the grief process has completely been delayed,” Nancy said. “When it ended, you just shut your computer. And that was it. You’re back in your life.”
Watch the animated story below:
Norman was born on July 4, 1935, and grew up in New York. He was a private pilot, an accountant and a jazz lover, and kept very involved in the lives of his children and grandchildren. Since his death, over 285,000 more Americans have died of covid-19.
I think that when things go back to normal, I’ll miss him more.
Nancy spoke with us in early October from her home in Maryland, in a conversation for this animated story.
