Covid death as a mere statistic

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

AN ANTI-VAXXER letter writer recently attempted to justify his position on the subject by taking “death” as a statistic to measure the efficacy of vaccines and other protocols, citing our situation in TT that even with the unusually high number of covid19 deaths, such is a relatively minuscule statistic vis-a-vis the population at large. For a seemingly critical approach to the subject, such a one-dimensional view is disappointing, looking at death as a mere statistic and overlooking the human aspect of such an experience.

One death is too many and in the context of family – it may be a father or mother, sister or brother, a close friend or relative, even a young eight-11-year-old – the grief is beyond measure. Grief is a real emotion which some of us talk about from the outside, but for a young one losing a father who only yesterday was there to be hugged or a mother losing a child who was her joy, so suddenly, is immeasurably devastating. Losing someone in a flash can generate an irreparable sense of loss.

But grief, when it comes, as against anger and envy and other similar emotions, brings out the better side of our nature, making us more human. So too death, when it reaches our doorstep, and even with the pain of separation, on sober reflection, we can say like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play of that name, despite his arrogance, that “Death, a necessary end,/Must come when it will come,” acknowledging its inevitability (Act 2 Sc 2 – 35-37).

Or, like for the murdered king Duncan from his own murderer Macbeth in another great Shakespeare play by that name, that “Duncan in his grave, and after life’s ‘fitful fever’ he sleeps well” pointing to the idea of death as release from life’s woes (Act 3 Sc 2 – 21-24).

Or sweeter yet, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on the seeming death of Juliet by poison, “That death lies upon her…/Like an untimely frost on the sweetest flower of all the field” (Act 4 Sc 5 – 31-32), Capulet’s voice generating the finest feeling of a father on such an unbecoming, premature departure of a loved one.

But this covid19 death is not the accepted inevitability of a life, possibly well lived, coming to an end, or a comforting sense of relief from the troubles we must endure while alive, or the bittersweet sense of losing one so young, so fresh, so beautiful.

It is, in a word, ugly, the stricken marked for death even as the seeming “sustainable” are allowed to live, with the precious breath of life thinning out, exacerbating that sense of the oncoming end for those so marked, and this decision of life over death forced upon those without the moral authority to make such a decision.

And the indignity of bodies being stacked together in true “holocaust” fashion, bundled somewhere in central in a cold makeshift “trench,” or the horrors of Batchiya in Penal with the black cross without a name, leaning as if in shame against the mound trampled up in a hurry, without a rose or carnation, not even a tear, to ease the pain of loss.

And worse yet is that the ugliness of this covid19 death has become almost routinised, a mere statistic with colourful graphs and numbers strewn across the TV screen as if to say, “See how much hard work and research we have accomplished!” – as if to impress us and make us forget the harrowing reality.

Or fodder for the local TV hosts to gleefully betray their obvious delight in the higher than usual numbers to pounce on the Government and cast blame. Or for the anti-vaxxers no less, the statistician included, using the same numbers to make the rounds on Facebook to puff their chests and shout about how right they have been all along.

Again with the numbers featuring, something to blame the people for and to justify the lockdowns to come, with no thought that maybe being on their backs all the time has spawned the “covid19 fatigue,” leading to indifference, even unto death, as the vendor in Port of Spain featured in a newspaper, stolid, who couldn’t care less about the policeman pointing out his unkempt mask.

Or the many in this country who are sticking to their anti-vaxx guns, almost unexplainably in the face of their likely demise without the vaccine, maybe because they don’t trust anymore the people who are urging them to take it and have more faith in an Almighty who will protect them, or maybe are just overwhelmed by the powerful anti-vaxx discourse that lies like a death pall all over the world.

John Donne, the English poet, at a time when mediaeval England was being ravaged by the plague, in true revolutionary style, would use his remarkable intellect in his poetry to scoff at death, urging it not to be proud: “Death be not proud.”

Those who scoff at possible death by covid19 in this country are no John Donnes by any means. But even as some indulge their “intellect” bereft of the human touch to satisfy their own egos and others their thirst for power since there is none to make them accountable, those who grieve in silence can be comforted by the words of William Wordsworth in Intimations of Immortality, applying them to their own loss as much as Wordsworth used them to lament the “loss” in nature:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour of the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind.