Lonely deaths and empty funerals: this is the reality of coronavirus. Credit: CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU/AFP via Getty Images
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“I despise the set of warlike metaphors that so many apply to cancer. [It] says that only those who fight hard against their cancer survive it, or deserve to survive it — the corollary being that those who lose the fight deserved to do so.”
I was reminded of the late John Diamond’s words when Dominic Raab described the Prime Minister as a fighter. I know Raab was simply trying to gee up a beleaguered nation worried. So we can forgive him for the callous implications of his remarks: that all those who have lost their lives didn’t fight hard enough. But the implication is there. It’s a common fantasy to which many of us succumb, in our desperate wish to have the power to stave off death.
Death cannot be fought, though. We are all dying. The only real question is how fast it is happening. All we can hope for is the deferment of our sentence, and that its approach will be benign when it comes.
If you ask them, most people will tell you that they would like to die suddenly, at home, in their sleep. So frightened are we of death that, if we could, we would ask it to creep in unannounced. It’s not the being dead that frightens us, but the act of losing life. Or as Francoise de Beauvoir says in her daughter Simone’s memoir, A Very Easy Death: “Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.”
We want to die at home, comfortable and in familiar surroundings. We want friends and family close by to say farewell. And one of the great tragedies of Covid-19 is that it robs us of these simple hopes to make that last jump easier to bear.
The published data on daily deaths tells us only about those who die in hospital. The real number could be about 7% higher, once deaths outside hospital — at hospices and care homes — are taken into account. But still, the vast majority of people are dying in hospital, a fate only 1 in 15 of us would choose. And not just any hospital or any ward: they are treated by medics in protective equipment that might as well be a space suit. Faces obscured. Hands double-gloved; not even the comforting touch of skin on skin at the last. It is hard to even imagine how frightening this must feel like to someone in and out of feverish consciousness, or someone with dementia.
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SubscribeI too agree with so many of the sentiments expressed. But I disagree with the final imperative. I do not wish to have to live my life to the fullest day after day. Could life please be a little less immodest and expect a little less from me.
I heartily agree with so many of the sentiments expressed in this piece. Thank you. The ‘blitz spirit’ approach in response to so much of this Covid crisis does little more than denigrate the emotional reality of the situation for so many up and down the country. I understand the temptation to fall into omnipotent defences against all the pain of the situation -fighters will survive etc…, but it just gets in the way of acknowledging the reality and truth of all the suffering and loss. We are then prevented from responding in a truly humane way. I think the ways in which people are dying and being buried says a great deal about the need to cover up a very unbearable reality but ultimately we need to mourn, and to mourn properly, if we are ever to work through the loss. The psychoanalyst Winnicott famously aspired to be alive at the moment of his dying, and I think this articulates a current need to be alive to the dying that is ever present, especially in this time.