Dose of coronavirus perspective here
more at ease. I learned this week about the organic burial pod: biodegradable starch plastic pods in which you might be buried alongside a seed and from which a tree then grows.
I can see myself in such a thing. A ko¯ whai, for tuis, probably.
Some people take comfort from the idea that there is a life beyond this one.
I take mine from the notion that our atoms take leave of us, keep on moving, and form up in new ways; a shared cosmic existence that we remain a part of. It comforts me, my religion of the lava lamp.
I’m full of admiration and sadness for someone I know only from her posts on Twitter who just months ago learned that cancer has given her just weeks to live.
Sadness, for the richness of life she imagined that won’t come to pass, admiration for the way she’s coming to terms with this.
She shared some writing this week about making the end of life ‘‘a time not of fear and anxiety but of love and connection and a time to access our deepest emotions’’.
You’d share stories about dying, there’d be books that walk you through it: What to Expect When You Are Dying.
You might throw a death shower where there might be blessings, poems, playlists of favourite music, shower games like ‘‘I will remember you every time I …’’
People might maybe create crafts to keep hands busy while their hearts and minds are prepared.
The idea is to mark this as a meaningful culmination of a life, to make death a more conscious part of our experience of living.
You live with it, you engage with it, you’re prepared for it.
Flood, earthquakes, eruption, viruses, death. For certain things, preparation can be invaluable.
Panic buying toilet paper is not preparation. But an emergency kit in your house for whatever catastrophe takes place, sure.
If we focus our clear eyes on the future, we can do much better.
Our mortality can be terrifying but it can also help us to see what matters most, and embrace that and live our days in better ways.
‘‘Imagine if we treated climate crisis like coronavirus,’’ someone wrote.
That’s a top call, that. Boy, wouldn’t hourly daily updates with numbers on the possible death of life on earth we know it be good at concentrating minds?
We’d surely be hanging on every report with advice from experts and suggestions about what to do.
But we’d also probably still panic and buy toilet paper.
Death. Our fear of it looms over all of this.