The Blessings on our Doorsteps & Dying Alone in the Time of Corona

Hello dear readers. I hope that you, and those you love, are well in these extraordinary times. This is just a small sharing before I write more in the weeks to come, especially as we move into the strangest of Holy Weeks & Eastertide. For now, we are continuing our forty days & nights in the wilderness, which has seemed so deeply apt this year. But, of course, it is a wilderness whose blessings we have unlearned how to see.

We are well here in our self-isolation and I have been enjoying many heart-opening walks, during which I have foraged for wild medicine. I have bern hugely drawn to nettles, who I am finding more and more ways to incorporate into my diet, and also to cleavers spring tonic, of which more soon. Today, I have heard that it's going to be beautifully sunny for many of us and so I am hoping to go for a little walk to the woods to see if I can find wild garlic. These are blessed times in so many ways.

But I wanted to write a little about another nearby plant and all that her presence and recent flowering has led me to reflect upon.

The plant pictured above is beautiful herb-Robert, also known as red robin, fox geranium, & stinking Bob, amongst many other names, who has come into flower just by our front door.  She has so many wonderful edible and medicinal qualities that I'm quite determined to write a longer blog about her soon. But what her presence makes me think about today is how supported we are by the other-than-human world, and otherworld, that surrounds us.

Aside from herb-Robert, on one side of our front door we have cleavers and, on the other side, nettles. All either support our immune systems, or are, like herb-Robert, actively anti-viral. I feel better, and more protected, just by knowing that they're there but I fully intend to add herb-Robert into my daily medicine taking practice; not because of what I hope to gain, but because its presence by our door feels like an invitation to relationship.

Over recent weeks it has become more clear that so many of us feel deeply, achingly, alone and unsupported; this is why swathes of us immediately took to stockpiling when Covid-19 first came to our shores. It's why so many insist on going out to get-things-done, even though they would be better staying at home and asking for help. And it is making our mourning even more painful to think that our loved ones, or anyone, has died 'alone' in a hospital bed.

This wound is deep; borne partly of the human condition; that feeling of separation that so rarely leaves us. But it has also been nurtured in us through many years of the deliberate erosion of community, and also our disconnection from sister death, our loss of relationship. No wonder that we panic so. We just don't trust Life. If only we were able to look just outside our front doors, or in the cracks in the pavements we walk every day, or in so many places that are so familiar that we look but rarely see. We are surrounded by friends. We are never without good company or support for the journey, and that feels to be especially true now.

But, today, I especially want to say something about dying alone, as we come to a time when some of us and some of those we love may fall to the coronavirus. It is indeed a terrible thing to contemplate dying without the surrounding presence of those who love us. Particularly in this country, we are very used to that being possible, although we might also breathe deeply into the fact that many choose to die when their loved ones have slipped out of the room, and that our animal kin will often take themselves away to wait for their final heartbeat.

To die is a solitary activity, but we are never alone in it. Sister death is with us, our ancestors are there to hold out a hand, our God. I know in my bones that many beings of good intent will show us the way.

When my dear, beloved dad died I was the only one who was with him; it was a privilege, the holy of holies, but I didn't feel that it was my presence that made him not alone. He was so busy with what he had to do; he moved his hands in the air in ways that I later discovered mirrored the movements he made at work when using his lathe, every now and then he would reach up as though picking an apple and then hold the prized fruit to his lips with great pleasure. When he had been struggling, for what seemed like forever, to let go of this wordly life, I prayed for his mum to come and show him the way. And I swear that he took three more deep breaths and died. It was the most beautiful moment of my life and it mattered that I was there as a witness but no, it wasn't my presence that made him not alone. Far from it.

And yes, it must be frightening and heatbreaking to be in hospital ill and dying and not to be abe to have visitors, and the greatest of tragedies for loved ones not to be able to hold a hand one last time before death comes. But we are never, ever alone and no one dies alone. The herb-Robert, the cleavers, and the nettles by my door tell me that. My dad taught me.

Be of good heart, beloved friends. We are held in this world, the next, and the places in between. We could not be more blessed.