mgpcpastor's blog

I conducted funerals during the COVID restrictions.
We had a family funeral during the later stages of COVID restrictions.

One of the most draining parts of a wretched two weeks was curating a list of 125 names that were coming to the funeral, which had to be provided to the funeral directors.
Of all the awful things that remains with me as a low point.

It was something of a relief to share the service by livestream.

From Nick Cave (who mentions his son’s bleak description of a ‘Zoomeral.’

If there is ever a time to come together, to hug, to be close, it’s a funeral, but the stringent protocols around the virus made this impossible. God, this pandemic is full of grim ironies, dying by Zoom being one of them.

Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, The Text Publishing Company, 2022, pgs. 75

There’s a lot of silence in times of grief.
We lack words to express what we feel.
We lack the capacity to bear what the grieving express.
I think living with grief gives a context in which a language to express feeling, and an ability to hear what the grieving say, can develop.
If we reflect, and perhaps oddly, if we don’t fill the space too quickly with words and plans.

From Nick Cave.

To be forced to grieve publicly, I had to find a means of articulating what had happened. Finding the language become, for me, the way out. There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It’s not something we are practised at as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it’s too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves.

Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, The Text Publishing Company, 2022, pgs. 44