Well, now there’s a thing. When life ramps up to full volume and you wonder where your key priorities might be. In my journey as a life doula, I always believed that it was important to train as both a birth and death doula. Now it would appear that these skills are needed now more than ever. Especially surrounding Death Care with more and more reports coming in from Italy that the death system, like the medical system, is close to collapse. People are dying at home, unattended and alone, in one of the best medically equipped countries in the world. They are dying alone with their bodies being left ex
So it now poses all sorts of question about death care and highlights all the reasons why I have chosen my particular path as a life doula and the training that I am now undertaking. That we can’t outsource the human experiences and that the two most profound experiences of birth and death are things that should stay wherever possible in community. Now more then ever this seems very clear to me. The situation here in the UK right now seems to be under control and contagion rates in Scotland seem to be happening much slower than in England.
The Dentist has just called and cancelled my appointment so they can be used as locum doctors. It’s another little tick as the on the upscaling of this crisis as preparations take a much deeper grip.
My thoughts are also with South Africa right now. It’s a privilege to be living in a first-world country where free health care is accepted as a norm rather than a given. There’s a lot of concern about when COVID 19 hits the townships and what is going to happen there. AIDS, HIV and TB are all going to take there toll on the survival rates. When I think of the measures that the UK government is taking with a fully fledge health care system my heart breaks for South Africa. There are dark days ahead for us all. While many of us are grappling with the impacts of marshall law on our civil liberties. I baulk at the potential death toll and the things people will have lived through at the end of this experience. Many accept that in a country that still struggles immensely with economic and cultural inequality COVID 19 is going to be a massive social leveller. It’s a situation that is going to affect everyone, globally. Few of us are able to buy ourselves out if this one and even if we could? At what cost? As martial law begins to get rolled out on a planetary scale it’s intense. The conspiracy theorist, the sceptics, the cynics and the gullible all take their view. All that we can rely on is our own subjective reality.
For obvious reasons, my phone has been ringing. I’m distracted, grounded and weirdly focused on the conversations that matter, as I do my best to stay present. Emotions are high and I feel the writhing of collective consciousness flowing through my nervous system. It doesn’t feel surreal to me. It feels normal like the world is only just catching up to what life is like for the poor, disabled and the elderly on a daily or even yearly basis. Millions of people live like this locked in their homes and in their neighbourhoods all completely socially isolated all the time. Many of us are going to be lucky enough to die like this, in our gilded cages. Figuring out that all that really matters is life. All of it.
This is a situation that you can’t buy your way out of.
