Life, and death, in a COVID-19 world

The number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. crossed the one million mark this month. For many, the most striking impact of COVID-19 has been this sudden and intense confrontation with mortality. Worldwide, the death toll well exceeds six million.

Never in our lifetime had we seen death in such numbers, being updated around the clock.

At the peak of the pandemic, those numbers were increasing at an alarming rate, causing a rise in stress and fear across society — in large part due to our unfamiliarity with death.

Many social, economic and spiritual factors have led us as a society to adapt to a deathaverse culture that glorifies youth, while making death hardly noticeable.

Medical breakthroughs in the last century have significantly decreased mortality rates. Today, Canada considers deaths before the age of 75 as premature.

Speaking to the CBC about his 2017 book “Beyond Surviving: Cancer and Your Spiritual Journey,” chaplain David Maginley said our culture sees death as a failure we must “strive against with every aspect of our being.”

This makes death not just a difficult experience, but also a frightening one — the rejection of death has detached dignity from dying, making it even more agonizing.

Our perspective on death has been further altered by the declining importance of faith and religion in our daily lives. But this is not the case with all cultures. Eastern cultural beliefs largely conceive of death as a mere transition. Death is not taboo in Islamic traditions, for instance, and is extensively discussed in the Qur’an. In Islamic scriptures, death is not glorified, but it is described as an eventuality of life that brings perspective to a person’s place in the universe.

The pandemic has made us all conscious of the fragility of life. This might have a positive effect in the long term — hopefully, it will help us humanize death by rethinking it as part of the human life cycle.

In his role as a hospice physician, Dr. Christopher Kerr is a strong advocate for the recognition of death as more than just a medical failure.

He explains that when faced with death, the dying frequently express feelings of love, meaning and grace. Similarly, the chaplain Maginley notes that people’s final moments are most defined by whether they have loved well and been loved.

To guard against forgetting those who passed away during the pandemic, Maclean’s created They Were Loved, an obituary project commemorating the thousands of coronavirus victims in Canada. As we scroll down the many faces in this digital record, hoping the pandemic is behind us, it may offer us an opportunity to re-examine and find purpose in both our lives and deaths.

May the memory of those who passed be a blessing for their loved ones.