Over the past two years, I've had an uncle, an aunt, two great aunts, one great uncle, and a brother-in-law who have all died, and none of them died of coronavirus -- coronavirus wasn't even around to claim the prize.
My mom said people are dropping like flies. More than one of them had been sick for quite some time. Though some of us may have missed their company, many of us also celebrated their release from pain and their journey onward to the realm beyond.
Sickness and death are a part of physical life. Those who suffer should be held compassionately and encouraged. When they die, its an initiation into a new existence, a continuation in another form.
Typical of a society and especially of media trends that deem suffering unacceptable and that count death as the ultimate loss, the Covid-19 epidemic has been sensationalized to the nth degree. Every case, every onset, every outbreak, and every death is portrayed as the end of the world -- a threat to everyone, to be avoided at every cost no matter how extreme or imbalanced -- when in reality the world is frought with threats far and wide. Fear and ignorance, and an inablity to accept that human life is mortal decimates the world and is turning society at large into germ frieks and control frieks. We've had pandemics before, but never anything that has led to this degree of apprehension and grasping control.
Lyme disease, to name just one, is a pandemic that causes lifelong suffering for many people throughout the world, including myself and several of my closest friends. It's been said to be the fastest growing epidemic over the last number of years (unless that's changed since I read that), and yet there is hardly any focus on it in the medical profession - almost complete ignorance among the majority. A rare few, like two admirable doctors I've had, take it seriously and attempt to understand it (they are called Lyme-literate doctors or also environmental medicine doctors). Since chronic Lyme disease doesn't have sudden, dramatic onset, is difficult to diagnose, causes multi-system complications that don't fit nicely into doctors' pet classification schemes and which evade detection in normal testing procedures, and bedragles people for decades before they finally die, its usually misdiagnosed or brushed off as something of little consequence.
Each of us has our own challenges. They are all different. It's a part of life. Some might even say its a part our learning and growth as beings who are much more than just a body and that death is an unfettering of consciousness from the confines of a body-bound perception of reality.
I remember, around the time my brother-in-law died after having been sick for a long time with cancer - I had been out of touch and, if I recall correctly, I didn't even know he'd died - I had a dream that I was with a group of people from the church I grew up in which he had also been a part of. Then I saw him coming my way, and he saw me, and our spirits soared. He came over to where I was and we talked excitedly for a long time, not paying any attention to the rest of the people there - not that they didn't matter, of course, but I felt a special resonance with this brother and cherished his exuberant spirit just as I had known of him when he had been our Sunday School teacher when I was an adolescent.
It was the first and only time I dreamed of him. It was the first and only time I'd seen him in 30 years.
