Did you know that Mozart’s parents had SIX babies, but only two survived infancy? And those two turned out to be world-changing musical geniuses. What about the other four?
I used to think a lot about how death was much more a part of life before the discovery of antibiotics or modern childbirth techniques like forceps (which today’s moms think are barbaric, but were actually THE turning point in midwifery that made childbirth more survivable than not.) In the not-to-distant past it was common for women to bear half a dozen children, or more, but for only a couple to survive, or none, or for the mother herself to die in the process. But in my lifetime I had the luxury to assume I would survive childbirth (I almost didn’t, the last time, but then I did, thanks to modern medicine.)
We have been saying, “This isn’t normal. Don’t normalize this behavior,” for four years now. But the problem is that humans have an ability to adapt to changes. It’s a built-in, necessary response for sentient beings; otherwise, we would be driven to paralysis and despair by continual awareness of the enormity of uncontrollable, horrific circumstances. In truth, this is how we cope, under the best of situations, with the ongoing knowledge that we must someday die. But this, this is a demonic abuse of our mental resilience.
I believe that we are simply going to normalize the deaths of everyone around us, just as we normalized the death of democracy.
Happy Mother’s Day. I can’t visit or touch my mother, my mother-in-law, my four daughters, or my grandchildren, and I don’t know when I will ever be able to do that again. Several of my friends lost their mothers to the pandemic in the past few weeks. “Lost” is a euphemism. Their mothers died of Trumpery. This did not have to happen. And now it’s normal.
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