Mortality around us, and in us

On the first full weekend in March, we flew from Ohio to Virginia for my 93-year-old mother's funeral. That alone would have had me thinking about the impermanence of life, although it is hardly the only death in the family. Both my wife and I lost spouses. My father died more than 20 years ago. Both of my wife's parents are gone. Last year we bid farewell to a beloved uncle. There had been many months of late when Mom's various ailments had me wondering when the call about her would come. Yet when it did, it was wrenching; I still have those times when I think I should be calling her, and she has been in the front or back of my mind ever since she passed.

Moreover, our funeral travels took place during the beginning of the larger national grappling with mortality. COVID-19 was in the air, and the alarms about it visible at airports, where the desks by the departure gates had bottles of hand sanitizer and you could begin to see people in gloves and masks. We returned to Ohio on March 8; on March 9, I taught my classes at the University of Akron; on March 10, the university ended face-to-face instruction and told us to get ready to teach online only beginning March 30.

In the days since then, we've seen the global shutdowns, the warnings about self-protection, the change in the shape of the world. A playground near our house has police tape around the rides, and has removed the swings. A panhandler's nest by the university is empty. Our grocery store has had the ghostly, empty shelves meant for toilet paper, and the deli counter is shut down, its front barred by a wall of potato chip bags. Every day we get new tallies of the infected, the hospitalized ... the dead. 

And it is, not surprisingly, the deaths that hang over us. Not only the actual deaths but the little ones: the end of face-to-face, or the transfer of it to the artifice of online chats and posts and presentations which still lack full life. Saturday Night Live made a serious effort at humor in the time of coronavirus, but it was for the most part lacking because it was coming from a screen within a screen, across too many divides to easily bridge. The one time the show most clicked was the time it dealt with real death, the passing of Hal Willner, and the emotions his dying produced.

In this world I am reminded of Data's words in the season finale of Star Trek: Picard, when he explains why he wants his consciousness erased: "I want to live, however briefly, knowing my life is finite. Mortality gives meaning to human life, captain. Peace, love, friendship. These are precious because we know they cannot endure. A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all." 

Data is not the only one to see immortality as a problem. In Gulliver's Travels, immortality does not come with "youth, health, and vigour" but with "a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it." Those who live forever become more and more infirm, devoid of happiness. Yet who among us would not want to have as many days as life allows? What we see around us is the consequence of mass mortality: empty playgrounds, mourning at every turn, fear that a loved one, a friend or ourselves might be the next to face death.

Better to face living. Better to look at the world of now and grasp what joy we can find, make what contact we can, and look ahead to the day when the health system has gotten a grip on this disaster and we can go safely to each other. Even then, I will think about Mom. But I will also think of how her final services were a celebration of a life well lived. SNL's tribute to Willner was about his talent, sure, but also about his kindness and generosity. Another celebration of a life. That, not death, is what gives meaning to us all.