At some point in our lives, we have our first experience with the “comfort cart.”
The comfort cart, for those who are lucky enough to not yet know, is the cart of snacks and drinks that gets delivered to the room of someone who is actively dying in a hospital or nursing home so that friends and family have less of a reason to step away while awaiting the death of their loved one.
I will always remember my first experience of the comfort cart, as it arrived on the day of the death of my mother. Having spent two days in the ICU after the failed intervention following her stroke, I was repeatedly asked about beginning hospice care. When I finally saw signs of active death, I gave permission for the ventilator to be removed. Immediately the comfort cart appeared for us to facilitate the next three hours at the end of which she would die. Always prone to dark humor, I joked that it was a reward for removing the ventilator.
There is another memory I have of a comfort cart that strikes me with far greater sadness. I had been summoned some years ago to one of our local nursing homes for a woman who was actively dying. The nurse had called indicating the family had requested the final sacraments. When I arrived, the dying woman was unconscious alone in her dark room. The comfort cart stood outside of her room, completely untouched.
Troubled by this, I visited the nurses’ station after completing the rituals for which I had been summoned, in order to learn what had happened. What she told me broke my heart; the family members visited only for a few minutes, and then on their way out told the nurse to call the priest because that is what she would want. They had no intention of returning.
My initial reaction to the events of 2020 was that we had collapsed civilization, but this story from prior to 2020 suggests that we were well on that path already. True civilization respects the reality that we will all die and obliges us to accompany the dying with certain rituals, both religious and non-religious. The progressive loss of these rituals with the apparent motive of avoiding thinking about death both set the stage for the Covid hysteria and was accelerated by it.
A Brief History of Funeral Practices
I’ve repeatedly been struck not only by how radically funeral practices have changed in Catholic circles over the last century, but also by the loss of collective memory that prevents people from even realizing it.
My mother would repeatedly tell me about how my great-grandmother, after she had died and before her funeral, was laid out for viewing not in a funeral home, but rather for three days in what was at that point the living room of our home.
I was also aware that, for my grandparents’ generation, the expectation was that viewing would occur at a funeral home (which were at that point basically converted large homes) according to the following three-day schedule: 7-9 pm, 2-4 pm, and 7-9 pm, and 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm.
By my childhood, nearly every viewing schedule had been abbreviated to a two-day schedule: 7-9 pm followed by 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. I have many memories of my mother dragging me along on a public bus to these viewings. Often, we stayed for the entire two hours. At one of these I was quite popular because I happened to have a Walkman radio and I could relay to the family the progress of a Steelers playoff game which they were missing because of this obligation.
By the time I was ordained a priest in 2009, some funerals followed the two-day schedule, but those 7-9 pm times had become 6-8 pm. Others, however, only had one day of viewing at 2-4 pm and 6-8 pm.
The lockdowns of 2020 accelerated a decline that was already present in 2019. Increasingly, funerals were preceded by no public viewing at all or perhaps only an hour or so before the ceremony.
Also increasingly, families were opting out of taking the body to Church for Mass and instead were requesting a brief funeral service at the funeral home. Even sadder, some were being directly cremated with no ceremony at all. Accompanying the body to the cemetery began to be omitted as well.
What was a three-day period of mourning prior to the funeral seems to be dangerously close to disappearing completely, which I argue renders us less human and less civilized.
At the viewing for my mother, I couldn’t believe how many people I had either never met or only met when I was too young to remember showed up to pay their respects simply because they had read her name in the obituaries and were moved by duty and love to be there.
It’s what civilized people do. Civilized people are comfortable with death and dying. The rituals which surround death and dying are obligatory for them, which means death and dying are always before their eyes. The loss of these rituals means that it is increasingly easy for people to push death out of their minds, and I’d like to suggest that these changes helped set the stage for the hysteria of 2020; people experienced inordinate terror at being forced to contemplate that they might die.
Memento Mori (“Remember to Die”) as a Mark of Civilization
At one point after sitting at a bar and eating a meal normally became legal again in Pennsylvania, I happened to be sitting next to a gentleman who was not sympathetic at all to my complaints that we had been prevented from living our lives for no reason whatsoever.
I tried to walk him through the age distribution of Covid-19 mortality, and the fact that the vast majority of deaths which had been ascribed to this supposed plague couldn’t be considered particularly tragic, as they had lived a full number of years. He bristled at this, saying that every death is tragic. I rhetorically asked him if he thought the death of an 80-year-old was as tragic as the death of a teenager. To my shock, he answered in the affirmative.
It was at this point I recognized what was going on in this man psychologically and spiritually. He was older than me by a decade or two, but he was still deeply uncomfortable pondering his own mortality. Death was still something that is supposed to be avoided completely, and to think otherwise would be to admit that his own death was closer to him than the majority of the life which he had lived to this point.
He never learned the lesson that the rituals of civilization were supposed to teach him, and I would guarantee that this was a direct consequence of him spending radically less time around the dying and dead than any of his ancestors.
In just a few days, many Christians will be celebrating Ash Wednesday, and we will hear the words “Meménto, homo, quia pulvis es, et in púlverem revertéris” (“Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”).
Remembering death isn’t optional. Refusing to remember death is what opens the mind to escapism of transhumanism, of which lockdowns and mandates were mere symptoms.
Let us remember to die.
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