Coronavirus 19 (Covid-19) is making the news on a daily basis, so we have a fair understanding of what it is and how it effects the human body, as well as how it is spread from person to person, so I won’t explain it for the purpose of this article. What is an unknown and is new on a daily basis however, is the number of contractions and casualties, but only in one direction, and that is up. Based on these numbers, the stay at home orders may change, which effects retail operations, limitations of private gatherings, and more.
Hearing the daily numbers in the news can be very troubling, if not downright frightening. But the effects the Covid-19 virus has had-and is having-on humanity sinks in and becomes real when we personally know someone who’s life it has effected. I would venture to say that, in fact, we can not completely understand the impact the virus has on a person’s life until we are the person, or at least the person who loves the person.
But what about all the other people who have died this past year of some other cause? They too are being effected by the virus, are they not? Prior to the pandemic, whether a person died at home or the hospital, an assisted living facility, or any other place they may call home, you could bet that there would likely be friends and family at the bedside. I personally have known (or known of) several people who have died alone since the beginning of the pandemic because of the restrictions. I can imagine how lonely it must be for the person who will leave the planet with no one there to send them off with love. And as sad as that thought makes me, how must it feel to be restricted from the ability to say farewell to our beloved? How many times will we play that over and over in our mind, and for how long? For many of us, a lifetime I am afraid.
With or without the Covid-19 virus, people are going to die. It is what we do as humans, and in and of itself, is right as rain. But there are better and worse circumstances and I bet that if we knew that we or someone we love will die before this pandemic is over–and perhaps not in favorable circumstances–we might be a little more safe and work a little harder to prevent the spread of the virus.
Death in the time of Covid is just plain ugly and sad in a way that ordinarily would not be so. Because of this, I challenge us all to find just one way that we can be more safe in order to slow the spread of the virus, therefore reducing the number of deaths during this horrible time in humanity.
