I think about the gaping hole that the effects of Covid have unmasked in the world. I think about the collective human body being tragically affected and that the calamity of death is just unwavering.
In the more recent times, especially during the onslaught of Covid and its many variants, the wreckage of death by Suicide has compounded the toll of corpses added to the already shattering body counts.
When Regina King's son's death by suicide was announced, there was a chilling awareness that many are experiencing an invisible and incalculable and desperate need to implode and therefore the only way out is to self-explode. It happened more intimately with family and loved ones. In another headline, a beautiful young woman, a celebrity figure, a very refined, educated, articulate, and popular personality, was found dead, after leaping from her 9th floor New York City apartment.
We, all our us, family, friends, acquaintances are left with the anguish and the horror of how to reconcile with the tragedy of death by suicide. There is a gaping hole that we are left with.
This gaping hole isn't just the graphic mortal wound that may have been inflicted by a loved one, or a public figure, as was a recent Maryland Councilman, who also succumbed to suicide, it also is the gaping hole of what may be the human void that has been exacerbated during this time of Covid.
Where we have been drowned in our masks of self-protection and fear and isolation and insular self-care regimen, the human construct is being shattered into pieces.
The core of social engagement has become strained and devoid of physical emotional and life-sustaining energy. Many are presenting to be normal or ok, while they have become combustible internally. Where the everyday interaction with friends or family, or contacts has become virtual rather than normal, behind the masks, the covers, the apparatus of self-protection for others, are eyes, tears, sorrow, hurt, pain, and suffering. And in this new age of virtual encounters, a mask does not cure the dying within.
When a responder on social media stated that to send our thoughts and prayers to the grieving, or to comment, or to lend a word of consolation was being intrusive and not allowing the loved ones to grieve in peace, I shared that it is in the common reaction of human care, outreach, support, sharing, that we fill a piece of that gaping hole that has been left open. That we as humans need an outpouring of love and kindness to help fill each other's emptiness.
While I do not have the answers to the gravity of extremes that may cause a soul to leave this earth by choosing to die by their own hands, because of their internal haunting desolation that our hypotheses or prognoses can never fully grasp, I know that there is an alarm sounded to those of us in the world of the living, to be awakened.
How are you feeling? I hope that my life, my thoughts, my feelings convey, I care. I have no supernatural understanding of thoughts and actions, but perhaps, we are not behind masks to protect ourselves from a pandemic.
If only we could look beyond the masks we wear, physically and emotionally and demonstrate the human instinct, to render the heart, the spirit, the energy force of love and care we can pour resilience and possibly hope to the invisible dying right before our very own eyes
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