Beyond honouring the dead and bidding a final farewell, funerals serve another important purpose – planning them can be strangely comforting and even therapeutic. Coffin, Bible readings, death certificates and newspaper announcements… all these allow people to move past the initial shock and help confront that awful limbo of waiting and grief.
The coronavirus pandemic has given grief a new edge and calls to mind Orson Welles’ famous words that we are born alone and die alone. One of COVID-19’s cruellest features is indeed the isolation of hospitalised patients, separated from family members (who may themselves be in quarantine). Cruellest of all is not being able to bid a loved one that final goodbye.
The bottom line is that people are dying in empty rooms. This is heart wrenching and the sort of thing you can only understand when it hits you and you find yourself wondering in the middle of the night, on Day 25 (and counting), how your 72-year-old mother (with no underlying conditions) is managing at that same lonely hour. You almost bless the ventilator’s constant attendance.
Fast forward to the tear-choked virtual goodbye on Skype or Zoom on Day 30. The only contact there is. Next, in bereavement, the irrational feeling of helplessness and guilt that, when your mother was in extremis, you abandoned the person who gave you life and loved you unconditionally.
Just as the global pandemic has forced a reappraisal of the way we work, socialise and travel, it has also upended the whole death process – the hugging, the kissing, the last goodbye and even the funeral itself.
Now, while I appreciate legitimate public health decisions to limit the risk of contagion, I find that there are still double standards at work. And. sadly, it is the dead and their loved ones who are losing out.
Are they such a risk to public health?
What about those who, though infected, do not require hospitalisation?
They seem all too often to be left to their own devices. Indeed, I know of people who tested positive after taking the test privately and were off the health department’s radar until they themselves telephoned in. And, according to two acquaintances, the quarantine follow-up was practically non-existent.
After the trauma of not being able to say a proper goodbye, the hardest part was the lack of information, the mismanagement, and the unacceptable way the bodies of their loved ones were disposed of
Their decision to self-isolate and obey the rules was their own. But can we really count on everybody to be public-spirited? And are we talking just isolated incidents or the tip of an almighty iceberg? The point here is that COVID-19 doesn’t get the attention it deserves until a person is hospitalised.
Then, when it proves fatal, the shutters do indeed come down. Gone is the slap dash Fawlty Towers approach and Teutonic military efficiency takes over. The COVID-19 victim is dispatched to the grave within a mere 12-hour window. Yet, the dead, who can’t cough, sneeze or go anywhere, are potentially far less dangerous than the planeload of people who have just landed at Malta International Airport and are coming to a restaurant near you (a teacher, perhaps, or health worker).
And there you have it: the dead denied a dignified funeral and family members told at the eleventh hour (literally) to organise a brutally short burial by the twelfth. No time to inform the extended family, let alone engage a priest, Instead, it’s a couple of prayers downloaded from Google en route to the cemetery. And if that isn’t distressing enough, once there, you find yourself having to battle with undertakers telling you that your mother can’t be buried in the family mausoleum and will have to be buried in a government grave instead.
I am at a loss to understand how a patient who has died from COVID-19-related complications (and who, 35 days later, is now no longer positive) can possibly pose a threat to anyone, living or dead. And even if the deceased were still carrying the virus, how can you possibly justify that cruel 12-hour deadline when, just before, the patient was being cared for in the controlled environment of a hospital? What difference is 24 or 48 hours going to make, now that the deceased is safely sealed in a body bag and lying in a coffin in a morgue?
I speak not from my own experience but from that of close friends. They told me that, after the trauma of not being able to say a proper goodbye, the hardest part was the lack of information, the mismanagement and the unacceptable way in which the bodies of their loved ones were disposed of.
Malta’s COVID-19 infection rate is close to the highest in Europe. That may (or may not be) down to the fact that we are carrying out far more testing but it doesn’t change the fact that people have died and more people are going to die. These are people whose lives mattered and were cut short by a decade or more. They would still be here today, underlying conditions or not. That’s an incredibly important consideration.
The government has done much to ease the economic damage. We’ve been treated to vouchers, wage supplements, electricity refunds – all good things – but if we as a nation can’t treat the dead with respect, it’s all for naught.
I was very happy to heap praise on the way the health ministry handled the pandemic in the early days. We all knew that the minute lockdown was lifted, we would see a second wave. This is not unique to Malta. Lockdowns suppress the virus but they can’t eliminate it.
We can’t even be sure if a vaccine will do that when the time comes. We can only wait and see. But while we do, we need to respect and honour the people who paid the ultimate price for us to be able to sustain our economy.
The least the authorities can do is acknowledge that fact. Official condolences don’t go far enough: what does are true respect for those who mourn… and dignity for those in their final rite of passage.