Remember The Silence
To sit at the bedside of the dying is a profound and sacred thing. It's a great evil that we denied this to so many people.
Seven years ago, my father died. Just typing those words is still painful. Dad would be 69 today, which still doesn’t seem old enough for a man so in love with life and everything it had to offer.
When my dad died, I wrote about it as it was happening. It was a surreal experience and I know it made some people uncomfortable but it also helped others see the raw grief, the helplessness of it all, the weird bureaucratic nuts and bolts of death. There is something in that experience that changes us. It changed me.
Someone I know recently wrote about her mother’s death. What I saw in her grief was a mirror of my own experience, one of the most terrible episodes of any life. As awful as these experiences were, they were also profoundly good. Death is an evil but it is an evil we all must face and we should face it with courage, dignity, and love.
I looked at my journey through my fathers death and I read the story of her journey through her mother’s death and I thought about how glad I am that both these deaths happened outside the window of 2020-2022. I thought about how much the Covid response damaged individuals and families beyond even the pain of death.
The Covid virus killed a little over a million people in the United States. The virus attacked their lungs and heart but it did not force them to die alone. Our medical and public health institutions did that. The Covid virus didn’t isolate children from their parents. It didn’t abandon centuries of religious comfort in the face of death. The virus didn’t wrap plastic gloves filled with warm water around the hands of the dying in order to make them feel like a human was there to comfort them when they were utterly alone.
I know Covid is over. I know no one wants to talk about it any more. I know that some people don’t want to talk about it because the things they said, the policies they supported, and the actions they performed during that time is something they have difficulty looking straight in the face.
After I finished reading another heart-rending story of a family gathered around a wife and mother and literally holding on to her until the very last moment, I had to take a few moments to quietly mourn for the lost.
Then I thought about all the stories that were lost because hospitals insisted on isolating families from their dying loved ones. In his intense and emotional piece on wanting to become a father, Colin Wright noted that, when his father suffered convulsions during the pandemic, his family was barred from joining him in the ambulance and hospital. Thankfully, his father survived, but they didn’t know that at the time. They could have been unknowingly saying goodbye to the slam of an ambulance door only to collect updates over the phone for the next few weeks.
For many people, this was their experience. Cut off from their loved ones in those precious last days, they simply don’t know what the end was like for their fathers and sisters. Those experiences were devoured by silence. Families said goodbye through an iPad instead of at a bedside.
This was a tremendous evil. It was an evil happening quietly because no one was there to write the stories. The people who needed to be at a bedside were shut out of the room and the suffering of their loved ones went unnoticed and unrecorded in the dark.
