Why We Make Love After a Funeral: What to Do With Who We Are after COVID-19

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 We live in times unlike even those of us who wear many years have ever known. These last days, we find, take a grim toll on body and spirit. Many died, and many more walk wounded, broken by illness or dread, as though having abandoned hope of ever again living in peace.

We recognize the worst of sufferers by their resolute faces turned toward chaos because there is nowhere else to go. This chaos, the like of which we have never seen before in either scope or magnitude. This chaos, from which we can see little relief or solution ahead. It's a dismal landscape to wander and we feel every sad step of it. This is our post-pandemic world of shared grief, one which will never brag a declaration of victory. We will not have won, but we can survive. 

We Need a Funeral

Deaths are all like that, of course - endings and darkness, and the pains that come with them. What we need is a funeral. We need to lay these sorrows to rest and raise a headstone over them - "Here lies the COVID-19 pandemic. It killed something carefree in us all, but we survived its deceitful malice. We survived." And then, once we have done thrown exultant handfuls of dirt into the grave, raise a toast.

We need do away with dread and panic. Every death leaves survivors wondering how to find a new firm place to stand. It's how surviving is done, and it is always done while grieving. 

Actually, we already know exactly how, having gone to enough funerals during our long years of life to recognize them through song and rhythm, smell and flavor. We know how to preside over the coffin lid's close, over the scattering of ashes. We know how to walk away from the grave and lift faces toward a world still alive.

That's why we make love after a funeral. The love gives loud voice and firm action to the life that remains. It declares that no amount of death can defeat whatever life still holds for the breathing.

And When the Funeral is Over

We will never run out of threatening sorrows. Misfortune constantly lurks, but graveyards do not make nourishing homes. No one residing there thrives. We, the living, bear no fault for turning our backs to the tombs, even as we remember them.

There is no going back. What we've lost is gone forever, but if funerals perform any service at all, they let us leave sorrow and memory where they belong - behind us. They let us remember our living humanity, fully expecting to grin and grow again.

COVID-19 cannot dismantle our humanity unless we let it, unless we make our beds among the dead. If we breathe, we are meant to live, and so rediscover common ground and the joy of rebuilding. Look somebody full in the eye today. They are hurting, too.