My Dad. 24th August 2018
The most annoying thing in this mood, where nobody seems interested in, is that you die alone and you are buried almost alone. The virus is forcing us to give up two very important moments of human civilization:
1) the accompanying to death, the final greeting to our beloved ones before they leave, very important if not viscerally intimate. People die in total isolation because their relatives cannot enter the intensive care wards; there is a very strong limitation in the entrances even if the pathology is not due to corona-virus.
2) the funeral ritual, celebrated among very few close relatives, even if the deceased person, in life, was much loved and respected. The burial of corpses, with all its rites and its chrisms, is the trust sign in an afterlife, and this is what makes us human.
But, giving up the culture of the dead, even if for an absolutely indisputable and shareable reason, we carry away the chink humanity that has remained in this society, now twisted by the purest individualism, by the exploitation of human beings and by the predominance of profit. We are humans when we are donors and death is the last gift we give to others. How we die remains in everyone’s memory. Death forces us to donate everything, willy-nilly. The difference is in who hosts it. The gift that people who are dying now can give us, is to make us understand the importance of the relationship with those who are about to die and with those who have already died, in order to remain truly human. We just have to accept this completely.
The socialization of mourning is a fundamental tool that lacks at this time. Avoiding the word death is now a generalized thing. We are all unprepared, as a country and as a culture. For this reason, it is easier for a country that is afraid of death to be brought to its knees than one that is more familiar with death. In Africa, the coronavirus cannot create a worse situation than the one already on the ground. Here, however, dawdled by general wealth and lacking a minimum of ethical value, we are overwhelmed by fear. Instead of having a positive attitude nourished by the love for ourselves, our fellows and our habitat, we get ourselves to be carried away by the fear for our future. We want to avoid death without realizing that it is precisely the reason for many of our choices and many of our orientations.
Time for reflection is due: do we want to open our eyes, overcome the emergency, and work to create a better country or do we prefer to bury our humanity definitively? Are we able to transform the well-known “common weal”, to which everyone refers when explaining that it must prevail over the “individual weal”, into a “common weal” that serves to PROTECT each of us as individuals? No…. just to get the point ….
@Wizzy, Afro Bodhisattva, Entrepreneur, Physical Anthropologist, Freelance researcher of African Studies, culture, tradition and heritage, CEO Dolomite Aggregates LTD and Founder MBA Métissage Boss Academy and @metissagesanguemisto.
