We Need To Have A Grownup Conversation About Death

Can we talk about death?

Since the scourge of #Covid-19 arrived in February none of the tens of thousands of current professional or collegiate athletes in North America have died from the virus. Despite voluminous testing, quarantines and hand-wringing no athletes from the above have even been to ICUs. 

Yes, former stars such as Tom Seaver (78) and Marv Luster (82) have reportedly died from its complications. (Seaver was also suffering from dementia.) But for all the concern we have learned that the immune systems of healthy people kick the ass of Covid-19; they treat it as if it were a bad cold or flu. Many don’t even know they’re infected.

Yet we remain in crisis mode. Games are delayed or cancelled. Fans are largely excluded from attending games. When challenged on the apparent lack of morbidity, public officials point to jeopardizing the older generation in case Tom Brady goes home to Grandpa after the game for dinner. Or to the unproven prospect of “longer-term impacts” on the athletes and staff.

Despite months of false stars and misinformation, no one in power can say when any of this will end. Instead, we’re reduced to a game of “Spot The Offender” as snitches in our society target those who don’t wear masks on planes or who get inside the magic six-foot zone of safety. Virtue is now a parlour game of who can “out” the most fellow citizens who believe the current draconian isolation/ masking situation is absurd.

(Question: If masks are as impervious to the virus as their advocates claim, why does everyone need to be wearing a mask on a flight? If they’re as advertised by the CDC as better than a vaccine you should be fine sitting next to an unmasked person . No?)

But to the panicked population that boldness would be flouting death. Speaking of which, I recently found the 1938 obit for my maternal grandfather. The headline in the Montreal Herald read, “C.J. Mahoney Is Dead”. Today, we have reached a point where people cannot even form the words dead or death. We now say “passed” or other euphemisms to mitigate the pain of death on the living. Our sensitivity is stultifying. 

Millennials and Gen-Xers, perhaps the most overwrought about the virus, have had little real contact with death in their lives. They have been told that, if you check all the boxes, you will live a long and healthy life.  Reading Eddie van Halen’s obit is their near-death experience. They are more vulnerable to suicide than the prospect of a Covid-19 death. Yet they clamour for masks, plexiglass and vaccines as an antidote to the virus that has carried off grandparents  at an alarming rate. 

They cling to the hope that a magic-bullet vaccine will crush the virus. True to their secular upbringing by the Boomer generation they see death as a punishment, a stigma, a curse rather than a natural part of life.

In this they are aided by a petrified media which conflates positive tests with cases or by a grave Joe Biden talking about the upcoming “long, dark night”. They laud the cardboard cutouts at games while fans at home overdose, commit suicide and see their families disintegrate. And they gravitate to the WHO or ICME grandees who produce fanciful numbers of “projected” deaths. 

But the numbers simply do not justify the fear of imminent death in people younger than 70 (99.97 percent of whom will not die of Covid-19) . The average age of death in the Year of Covid has gone up, not down. Indeed, the excess deaths paralyzing the critics are in many countries (like Canada) the a partial result of two years of lower-than-expected deaths in the vulnerable group.

As Dr. John A. Lee, retired pathologist with UK’s National Health System, told Irish TV , “We need to have a grownup conversation about death." Covid-19 is not the plague, he points out. Not even close. “The virus is within the envelope of many years in the past 30 years.”  People die every year of something. (Canada had 280,000 deaths of all types in 2018)

Further, he points out that most being sequestered from the virus have no desire to live in a world where phone calls and plate glass barriers are their only communication with the outside world. They resent being “infantilized”, having no ability to make decisions for themselves. Using unprecedented policies or the threat of future vulnerability that have never been used on previous epidemics, “removes the things that make life worth living.”

But since Bill Clinton, empathy, not courage, is the hallmark of presidential behaviour. According to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has seen 33,500 deaths (almost twice those of comparable states Texas and California), his grandmother’s life was not going to be sacrificed on the Covid-19 altar. So lock her up, keep people away. 

This “every life is sacred” is a new brand of political accountability. (Joe Biden is using it to counter Donald Trump’s demand to re-open.) It’s in keeping with #BLM conflating 13 police deaths of unarmed black men in 2019 with a genocide. It’s disproportionate and impractical as a leadership style.

On the day before D-Day, General Dwight Eisenhower went to meet troops about to lead the invasion of Europe. As supreme commander of the operation he looked into their faces, knowing he was sending many to their deaths. He anguished over the cost (2,499 Americans died that day along with 359 Canadians) He could have thought of their parents, said one life is sacred and called it off

But Eisenhower also understood that the terrible toll was worth it in defeating the Nazi aggression that had brutalized Europe. So he gave the go-ahead. We face the same ominous choice. But under the Cuomo empathetic standard of “no sacrifice”, that would have been impossible for him.

It’s time to lose our fear. Understand that there will be death. But, for god’s sake, open up society again. And that starts with the footballs stadiums, ball parks and hockey arenas. Let ‘em in.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca November 3.