Graves

Last Friday I was in a cemetery attending a burial. It isn’t a new cemetery. Not only did I walk through this cemetery on my way home from grade school, Gary did the same eight years earlier, in the ‘60s.

I noticed a new grave a few yards away.

Then I noticed another.

Then I started counting. There were nine fresh graves I could see; who knows how many more if I had turned around. 

Of course, I attributed the fresh graves to the Covid. 

Later, though, I realized that it had rained that morning, at the end of a rainy week. Any exposed dirt will look new when it’s water-logged. I decided what I was looking at were just graves the grass hadn’t covered yet, and the muddy clumps were from the spring rains.

On the afternoon drive home, Gary and I saw a dead deer on the side of the road and said the requisite “Aww.” Still, I thought, odd, because the crews that tidy the roadkill usually get on it in the morning, and that deer looked like it had been dead a while, and “Oh God, is that another dead deer?”

Yes. Within half a mile another slightly smaller yet just as dead deer. 

Again, I attributed the deer carcasses to the Covid. Not that they died of it, just that the crews hadn’t picked them up. I don’t suppose picking up dead deer is considered an essential task, and perhaps the people who usually report the roadkill are sheltering in place.

Or more likely, I want to attribute everything to Covid to give it more importance, because I want my life disrupted by something of significance rather than a nuisance.

Comments

[KC]

The Italy obituary page bulk for a while there was... really something.

That said, yes, not everything is COVID-related, although an amazing number of things are indirectly COVID-related, since it's messing with everyone and everything and thus is probably an ingredient in the Decision Brain Smoothie for lots of stuff.

But you can probably look at the obituaries page for a specific local newspaper vs. the obituary page for one year ago and see whether there's a volume difference? It's a little unclear in some areas how many people are dying of COVID because there are areas they're just not testing many people, and they don't tend to test people after they're dead, I think? Anyway. For some people, it's just a nuisance (because they're working from home with those pluses and minuses, and dealing with grocery differences and shipping delays and all that) but for many, it's... really something else...

[TheQueen]

KC - I’ve just now looked and my area only has 1,400 case and 71 deaths. Still, the curve is going up and gou Gun exponentially. The odds that nine fresh graves are due to the carina virus is very slim.