Dying is never fun. I think I can safely say that, although I suppose there may be people who gather together for some kind of final bacchanalia as they expire.
As Peggy Lee sang, long ago, “If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze, and have a ball…”
But such a party would, I imagine, be only a way of suppressing their fear of dying.
Those who have been close to a dying person know what it’s like. Pain, even with constant medication. Helplessness. Loss of independence. Loss of control. Loss of memory. Bewilderment. Confusion. Sometimes calm resignation, sometimes anger and bitterness.
Not a pretty picture.
Death tolls rise
When someone you care about is dying, that’s all that matters. Everything else – indeed, everyone else – fades into insignificance. Which makes it hard to extend your awareness beyond an individual’s death to statistics about the deaths of many individuals.
As I write this, there have been almost 9,000 COVID-19 deaths in Canada; 194 in B.C.; 2 in this health region.
In the bigger picture, the figures become more numbing: almost 700,000 deaths worldwide. Nationally, the U.S. leads the pack, with 154,000 deaths. To put that into perspective, it’s roughly 20 times the total U.S. deaths fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brazil, Mexico, and India follow, in that order.
But you’re still not getting the whole picture.
Because those statistics don’t, and can’t, include those who die as a result of the pandemic, but not because of the coronavirus itself.
Seniors, for example, who may never get the virus itself, because of their enforced solitary confinement – for their own good, of course. But they are dying of utter loneliness.
Vivek Murthy, surgeon-general of the U.S. from 2014-2017, cites figures that 22% of Americans admit to feeling lonely, all or most of the time – even before pandemic lockdown.. Australia and Britain estimated 25%.
Those figures will certainly be higher now, as a result of the coronavirus.
There’s also no accounting, even here in the affluent world, of the number of suicides attributable to business and farming failures that wipe out life savings and family futures. In the non-affluent world, suicides have soared.
Collateral damage?
And now the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, declares that 10,000 children are dying every month in the non-affluent world because of the pandemic. That’s not just 10,000 children dying – it’s 10,000 MORE than would have died anyway.
On top of that, says a UN report covered by Associated Press, to be published next month in the British medical journal Lancet, “more than 550,000 additional children each month are being struck by what is called wasting, according to the U.N. -- malnutrition that manifests in spindly limbs and distended bellies. Over a year, that is up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million.
“Wasting and stunting can permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”
“The food security effects of the COVID crisis are going to reflect many years from now,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, the World Health Organization’s head of nutrition. “There is going to be a societal effect.”
Indeed, there has already been a societal effect. The pandemic has reversed a 40-year trend. Since 1980, the world’s infant mortality rate has been steadily dropping. Now it’s rising again.
Making it personal
But that’s still general statistics. Let’s bring it back to individual tragedies.
“Haboue Solange Boue is an infant who has lost half her former body weight of 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) in the last month,” Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick of AP wrote from Burkina Faso. “Her mother is too malnourished to nurse her. ‘My child,’ Danssanin Lanizou whispers, choking back tears as she unwraps a blanket to reveal her baby’s protruding ribs.
“The infant whimpers soundlessly,” Hinnant and Mednick wrote.
These children are not slipping softly away. They’re waking in the night, wailing because their stomachs are empty, and have been, for days. Maybe months.
They’re emaciated. Skin and bones bagged together. Too weak to go looking for food. Too weak to make a sound. Too weak even to brush away the fly that crawls across an eye or ventures into an open mouth.
I want to do something about it. I make monthly donations to UNICEF. I don’t know what else I can do.
Except cry.
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
I got mixed reactions to last week’s column, in which (I think) I argued that the recent uptick in coronavirus infections was a (more or less) inevitable result of Covid restrictions on our natural need to get together.
Tom Watson replied, “I understand what you're saying about the impulse for socialization, but there's also an impulse for self-protection. I don't like this current time as I'm an extrovert so enjoy being with other people, but the need to protect myself and others keeps me from doing things that, up until mid-March, I'd have done at the drop of a hat. When I was 18 or 20 [like the party-goers who caused the uptick] would the impulse for self-protection have kept the impulse for socialization in check? I'd like to think so...but when I was that age there was nothing nearly as serious as Covid-19 to deal with, so it's impossible to answer the question in a vacuum.”
Shauna Meek suggested, “I think you’ve missed a fourth reason for the spike in cases among the 20-30 range: work. People those ages are more likely to be employed in the service industry (restaurants, bars), which opened back up. Along with the inability to maintain social distancing, these jobs also expose the employees to a large number of different people, making ‘keep your bubble small’ impossible for them.”
John Shaffer: Something bothers me about your analysis, but I don't have enough experience to be sure of myself.
One of the biggest social lubricants of our society is fueled by the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The irony is that the more of it that is consumed, the less connected people are to one another. At the extreme, people pass out, puke or deal with painful hang-overs. What is social about that?
Same with gambling. The most popular social gatherings in my last two communities were at casinos and the few times I walked through, there was no evidence of socializing. Where is the togetherness when individuals are focused on a machine or the roll of the dice?
So a lot of people crave the need to feed their addictions, but I don't see it as a particularly noble endeavor. And then there are political rallies. And sports venues. I won't mention church worship...At least the focus isn't on booze consumption to the extreme.
Bob Rollwagen: I have been watching my kids bring up their children. We gave our kids some choices, more than you and I had as kids likely. They are giving their kids even more choice. Each generation seems to be more independent earlier than their seniors. It appears that each group has a greater feeling of entitlement to act as they wish that their predecessors.
In Brampton this weekend, 200 gathered for a house party with little distancing and few masks. Guests ran when the bylaw officer arrived. Now officials are forced to use photo tech and Licence plates to try to do contact tracing.
Young people want to party but not be responsible. I doubt that they gave the issue the amount of thought you have about touch. I would guess they have [also] been shopping without masks until the retailers were forced to insist on masks. Will we have to put up with the complaining when some of them get sick and have lasting symptoms that affect their life?”
“Before I assist a potential customer, they have to declare that they have not been in the presence of any one testing positive for Covid and have maintained the bubble required.”
Bob thought I had overemphasized the importance of touch in this period of isolation: “It is possible that tens of thousands have died in the US unnecessarily because guidelines have been ignored. When they were sick in the hospital, touch was the last thing on their mind. Touch was probably the last thing on the minds of the party goers. While I would like to hug a lot of people right now, I have too much respect for them and I can be patient, and they respect me.”
“Mmph,” was Isabel Gibson’s reaction to my focus on touch. “I'll give you the innate need for physical contact and the psychic comfort of groups. But our ancestors didn't satisfy those needs by gathering in rowdy groups 200 strong and then visiting another such group down the road, and neither do we need to.
“And I'll give you the immortal, invincible, in-the-moment nature of some young people. I'm thinking of the stereotype of high school and college students. But if that describes a significant percentage of the 20 to 40 (40!) age group, we do have trouble, and not just Covid-19.
“Or maybe I'm now just so old that I really can't remember what it was like to be young.”
Priscilla Gifford was inspired to write a poem about Covid-iinduced isolation. Here’s one verse:
“Here we are in the era of ZOOM
We can meet but stay right in our room.
We're a face in a square--
We are here, we are there!
It 's the new way to brighten the gloom.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.