Looking back over the last eighteen months makes me realise how dangerous it is to say things like ‘It would be hard to cause more damage than three and a half years of uncertainty and doom-saying…’…
Coronavirus did that without even trying. Of course, it had help: the Government’s rather muddled approach to lockdown as a form of biosecurity for a start.
There has been a lot of wailing and breast-beating about those people who died from the pandemic, but much less has been said about the remarkable drop in ‘excess deaths’ ever since. What’s happened is that many of those ‘vulnerable’ people who would have died anyway popped their clogs a little earlier than they otherwise would.
This is not to say that the deaths of many hundreds and thousands of people, including youngsters and medics, is not sad, but, to quote from Ben: ‘…but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.‘ We’re all going to go at some time: the only real questions are when and how…
The how has been one of the worst aspect of this horror: people dying in isolation without being able to see their loved ones. Not what most people would generally describe as a ‘good’ death, if there can be said to be such a thing…
It has been brought home to me how much disruption a death can cause: even an expected one with no relation to Covid-19. No matter how well prepared you think you are, it all starts to come unravelled: often before the departed is even cold…
There seems to be a sort of mental block in our society about death. Probably because we actually see so little of it. In the ‘good’ old days, people used to bury their relatives on what must have almost seemed like a weekly basis. People were much more ‘involved’ with death (and I don’t just mean the victims…) and it was an almost everyday event.
It’s quite a surprise to most people nowadays how long a lot of people actually lived in the ‘old days’. Assuming, of course, they reached puberty in the first place. Child mortality was the order of the day, and people had to sprog a dozen babies to have one or two grow up. This is one of the main reasons for our global population explosion: many more of our babies survive to reproduce.
As was described, many years ago in ‘Limits to Growth’ such a situation cannot continue forever: sooner or later something has to ‘give’.
To (mis)quote Mr Dickens and his ‘two cities’: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ and, to be honest, I’m beginning to feel that we’ve had the ‘best of times’ and that things are likely to be downhill -possibly steeply – from now on. I must be getting old!