Funeral numbers
It is, delicately, the right decision to relax the rules surrounding tangihanga and funerals. Let us not pretend it is an easy one.
It is disingenuous to parallel 100 people in bars in Auckland’s viaduct with a cohort at a funeral. The bars in Auckland will be (or should be) table-waited in groups of ten. Loss and grief has us behave very differently at tangihanga and funerals – intimate, demonstrative and reaching out to a breadth of people in an exceptional moment of cohesion and community.
Research in the US identifies that funerals, birthdays and church gatherings were charted as being responsible for the broader transmission of Covid in Chicago.
As Wuhan identifies a resurgence in Covid contagion, as Singapore charts an upswing of infections, we need to be cautious and mutually protective.
How we meet becomes as important as where we meet. Hubris is just a hug away.
Peter Rowlands, Northland
It’s probably due to my growing up in the UK in the World War II years, but I find myself irritated by the clamour to increase the numbers that can attend funerals.
WWII saw an ever-growing casualty list. In many cases the families of those who did not make
(May 9), although she did acknowledge the loss of ‘‘irreplaceable specialist skills’’ – institutional knowledge.
Businesses have devoted time, money and effort into educating their employees – why toss aside their big investment?
Can they not create some kind of apprenticeship system whereby these older workers can continue to work – keep practising their skills (maybe negotiate shorter hours etc) and so have the opportunity – and pleasure – to pass on their precious knowledge.
The new/young employees, working alongside them, would stand on these experienced shoulders whilst adding and applying their own knowledge of today’s technology (though many older workers are not sluggards in it), thus working together to grow the business.
What is this re-tire-ment? Just means getting a new set of wheels to keep moving forward for more productive years!
Edith Campbell, Seatoun