Tryna Deny Your Mortality in the Time of Plague

Thwarting the Age-old Tendency

a lament from  the editors

Does the threat of everyone dying together work to prevent the age-old denial of our own individual deaths?   What does the world look like after the fire of corona sweeps through global society?

“The worst is still ahead of us,” we hear said on the tube—talking about young people as carriers of the infection.   And does the thought of universal healthcare seem reasonable to more people, when everyone is in the same boat?   Or do images this week of tens of thousands, drawn to gather in close proximity by the lure of warm spring beaches, belie the notion of shared concern for even basic public health?

Sadly (or is it gladly?) it seems to impact the old and infirm more than the young and healthy.   Shall we “cleanse” society?   The Stock market commentator Rick Santelli suggests we’d be better off if we did that and “got it over with.”   Of course he apologized (and, laugh out loud, of course he meant it).

Climate change and the virus present us with two separate dilemmas: the older (presumably wiser?) parts of the population being killed off, and all of us dying together in the near future (one or two generations) due to habitat loss, rising sea levels, lack of food, uncountable buried poisons of mass destruction (chemical, radioactive, biological), widespread violent conflict, etc.

Does this group threat allow us to be distracted from our own mortality?   In some ways we can focus on our parents and older relatives with corona virus, or on the dangers to our children and grandchildren due to climate change.   Somehow the fact that each of us will face our own death can be ignored when we are worried about so many others facing such catastrophe.

Are we scared of our own deaths for ourselves or for our kids?   How will each of us die alone?   If we are not able to live with our loved ones around us, how will we be able to die with them around us?   Should we be creating more “loved ones” for ourselves to be around?   How can we build meaningful relationships in an era of “social distancing” that goes against our very nature as socially gregarious beings?

Is the loneliness our own, or is it one aspect of a larger social sickness that we are all participating in?

Some of us got texts from an acquaintance of ours recently—hadn’t talked with him in about a year—reminding us that we all need to stay home now: no socializing, no human contact, no more “normal” life.   And one of us mused about how possible it may be that staying alone in our own homes may actually kill us faster than some virus—and about, even if we survive, what kind of life we are leading if loneliness is the “new normal.”

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