Eulogy for the World

Grief in the Time of Covid

I can’t stop thinking about death.

And not for the obvious reason of the pandemic. Yes, I’ve known lots of people who got sick, some of them perilously so. Yes, I’ve lost people to Covid. Yes, it was terrible, and it still hurts.

But today, they’re not the reason for my preoccupation.

Today it’s because someone I’ve known my whole life, one of “the grownups” from my childhood, is dying.

His family is doing everything to make it a gentle, loving passing for him. They are including a community of family and lifelong friends in the process of farewell, and I’m honored to be counted among them.

Honoring him, I have been thinking back over the years when he was a strong presence in my life — the father of the family next door, even though I never had a strong bond with him, he was always there. Marking all the ways he’s played a role in my life, my thoughts go to others whose roots are also tangled with his and mine, whose loss would wreak havoc in my world, tear everything apart, throb painfully enough to shake the foundations of my entire existence. More than once I have found myself shuddering with fearful gratitude that this time I am not facing those deaths. This time.

And because I’m 50 and no longer feel immortal, I’m also thinking about my own life’s brevity, wondering what it all means, whether any of it matters?

The sweetness of an abundant spring is all around me — but in every delicate flower, every happy bumblebee, every nest cradling little eggs I see two things: joyful rebirth and inevitable, cyclical death.

Death. It’s everywhere.

All of this is like a smoky haze that’s settled over my mind, my heart. And what rises out of it, a strange kind of phoenix from the ashes of contemplating mortality, is eulogies.

Over the last few days I keep catching myself composing eulogies for all of it: the people I’m thinking about, those yet-to-hatch baby birds, even the purple chains of wisteria blossoms that cascade fragrantly, embellishing their vine, whose top flowers are browning and beginning to flutter down, at once beautiful and tragic.

They tiptoe into my thoughts, the words that compose these memorial tributes to people I love. They surprise me because they are not sad, except in the way that happy memories sometimes are — a sweet poignancy that comes from cherishing and gratitude more than loss and grief. More than anything else, they are filled with joy: happy memories, tender recollections, nicknames and their origin stories, funny adventures, inside jokes, fond retellings of personal foibles.

These eulogies have gradually, gently brought me the only answer to the question, “Does any of it matter?”

Narratives of love ,joy, and the lives of people who dove deep into the world that is given to us, they are emblems of the only thing that matters: our connections to each other, the sublime joy of human communion.

I’m still sad.

I’m not a person who cries often or easily, but I find tears sneaking up on me, taking over for a few seconds or minutes, and then evaporating again, leaving me to lick their salt from my lips and add another anecdote to the latest eulogy, a fresh memory, a rediscovered window into the past where then sun is shining, the blood sang in our veins, and we shared something worth telling about.

And that sweet sorrow gilds the truth at the heart of all my ruminations: we all die. Every one of us. It is inevitable, irrevocable, absolute.

But what we have here, together, during our time — those filaments of connection where our lives overlap, where we love and share and help and hurt and grow and grieve — those are our legacy, and no matter what I do with however many years I have left, as long as I open myself wide to this shared humanity, I will have lived well.

And maybe someone will say that in my eulogy.