The desire to die in the presence of those we love is so deeply ingrained that during the Civil War, soldiers dying on battlefields pulled out family photographs to create the experience in their imaginations. In 2020, the face-to-face family death vigil largely became an impossible luxury. While relatives wept on sidewalks, people with Covid died in isolation by the tens of thousands, attended only by masked nurses and aides holding iPads and dressed in hazmat suits.

Just as deeply honored, for millennia, is our unspoken promise to handle the bodies of our dead with reverence. So visceral is this obligation that in the powerful Greek tragedy Antigone, the heroine knowingly courts imprisonment when she ventures onto a battlefield to give her disgraced brother a proper funeral, rather than leaving his body to be chewed up by birds and dogs and violated. Now, during Covid surges, the dead are zipped into body bags and stacked in refrigerator trucks.

During the Great Plague of London in the mid-1600s, church bells tolled day and night, each peal announcing a single death to everyone within earshot. Today the death toll arrives quietly, in a daily email from my county health department.

The novel coronavirus is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. this year and responsible for roughly a tenth of all American deaths in 2020. We are in for some horrifying months before widespread mass vaccination reduces these grim statistics. Death, which once seemed tamable, hidden away in nursing homes, and pushed into the upper reaches of the lifespan, came out of the closet in 2020: contagious, capricious and striking people of every age. This is forcing a profound reckoning with the limits of free will, American exceptionalism and technological utopianismin short, with human powerlessness in the face of death.

This is a profound surprise for many people in the U.S. and the wealthy developed world. For three-quarters of a century, deadly contagions (with the exception of polio and AIDS) had mainly been problems for another century or continent. Average lifespans for the comfortably off were lengthening. Futurists, misreading the science, wistfully imagined that ordinary people might someday live to be 120 or even 150. Alphabet Inc.s Calico division and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison sank millions of dollars into research on extending longevity. One of the stated goals of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Changs $3 billion foundation is to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century.

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Covid Is Reshaping Death. And Maybe Life. - The Wall Street Journal