As of Wednesday, Apr. 8, we have hit 12,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States. And there’s an unfortunately decent chance that we will have 120,000-plus deaths from the virus this year.
The odds are high that most people in the country will know someone who succumbed to the virus by the time it has run its course. Now seems like the season for contemplating mortality and thinking specifically about the best way to remember those who one day will no longer be with us.
“To Be Close to the People That We Care About”
On the Apr. 3 episode of the Post Reports podcast, Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post explores how social isolation impacts people.
One of the hardest aspects of this coronavirus outbreak is that in this really scary time, all we want is to be close to the people that we care about, and closeness is the one thing that we’re not allowed to have. …
Humans are social animals, and our bodies, at a very sort of basic biological level, are built to be around one another. …
The idea is that we get a sense of security from our friends and family, and that allows us to go into stressful situations with a kind of calmer physiology. …
So, socially, we want to stay connected with one another. We want to be communicating, talking to our friends and family over Skype or Zoom, doing something kind for a neighbor or for a coworker from afar, whether that’s like sending them a card or, you know, just writing them an email. There’s actually evidence that what psychologists call prosocial behavior — so things like volunteering but also any kind of act of generosity — also bolsters your immune system and curbs the physical symptoms of stress. Things like that, ways that we can maintain our human connections, maintain our kindness and our sense of togetherness in the middle of this are really, really important.
And this is not to say that we should not be keeping apart from one another physically. … But we shouldn’t think about it as social distancing. We should think about it as physical distancing because even though we are physically apart from each other, we’re not alone.
This might seem weird, but the way I think about my distant friends and loved ones now — I’m over here in Iowa, staying inside my house, and they’re somewhere else, and we’re not able to see each other directly — that’s probably how I’m going to think about them when they’re gone, whether they die soon because of the coronavirus or many, many years in the future from natural causes.
I will probably never actually think of them as dead. Instead, I’ll just think of them as somewhere else, someplace where I’m not.
Maybe that’s to say that the way I think about death will be different: We eventually all return to our place of birth.
I won’t be able to pick up the phone and call them, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to talk to them either out loud or in my head. It just means that they won’t be able to respond.
But they won’t need to: I’ll still know what they would have said — because I know them.
“The Ones Who Love Us Never Really Leave Us”
I’m reminded of what Sirius Black tells Harry Potter in The Prisoner of Azkaban.
“The ones who love us never really leave us. You can always find them in here.”
Sirius survives the dehumanizing isolation of Azkaban for 12 years, nurtured primarily by the memory of his friends who are nowhere near him.
One way or another, coronavirus or otherwise, everyone we love will one day be dead.
The extent of their absence will depend on us. If we will it, even in death they won’t be gone.