August 2, 2021: About pain and grief
August 2, 2021: About pain and grief. The pandemic has perhaps allowed us to re-consider what we mean by pain. The disease itself, as I watched it sometimes ago in people I care about, has a component of pain. The discomfort can be from just simply a cold to gasping for breath. It has also reminded of the centrality of death in our lives. How death can come so suddenly or can be a prolonged expensive battle armed with ventilators and other apparatuses. Who finally makes the decision about when to stop? Or is the decision made easier by nature intervening. Many, perhaps a little bit of me also, saw the futilities of extending life by appendages and then still undergoing the pain and the grief, because eventually nature found a way. Now, we are told, there will be no more deaths from the disease. In some places, the delusion that we will no longer die from the disease, leads to conversations about the need for masks. We stand again at a point of inflexion as in some parts of the World th