I have been thinking about what it means to have no one (or very few people) at a funeral, as has been the case for most victims of COVID 19. How does it change how we celebrate life? If we can’t gather next to a grave and mourn, can we create a benediction and an honouring from words alone?
The angel of history can only look back at the wreckage piled behind us. We, more than ever, can only look forward. If that’s even how time works. I don’t think that’s what time works. Of the many things that have been laid bare this year, in 2020, that’s one. Time was never linear. Places were never something that you just got to by car or plane.
I believe in the future, simply because there is no other place to go. But if our deaths can’t be memorialised, if no one will remember our lives and actions, then we need to focus ever more fiercely on the now, and make everything of it that we can.
(the picture above shows the glass church in the film of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda)
Raising Orlando 