Dealing with Death during COVID

 Hello to my gorgeous readers! I have been on a tiny break due to a death in my family. My boyfriend lost his second grandmother in less than six months of losing his first grandmother all during this COVID life (both Nonna's did not pass from COVID). As if this year could not get any worse, it does. It is truly amazing how much one person can take until their body just can't take any more. 

My Boyfriends family is Italian like mine so we share a lot of the same traditions. Italian funerals are usually extravagant. Tons of flowers, line ups of people coming to give respects. Our "normal" process of a death takes up to three days. Two days consists of the family coming to the funeral home, and spends all day there receiving peoples condolences/respects. Then the third day is the funeral. If the family is huge you don't get a break. You sit there in front of the casket and shake peoples hand and you say thank you as they look at you with remorse, but that was before COVID world. 

Now during COVID, if someone dies, you are to get everything done the visitation, mass, and burial services all in one day. The first hour of arriving, the immediate family gets to spend time with the body. The second hour they begin to allow people to come and give their condolences. Thirty five people are only allowed into the building at a time. You have to wear a face mask, and you should not shake anyone's hand or hug anyone. Do not forget you must keep your distance. The third hour, the priest will come in and do a twenty to thirty minute mass service in the same room, then the family follows the casket to the cemetery for the final step, the burial.

There are all kinds of traditions in the world when it comes to death and dying. But at the end of the day all the cultures in the world share the same common idea, the loss of a loved one. After experiencing so many deaths in my own family over the years, and then experiencing this death, in my hopeful soon to be family, I thought to myself how much COVID has stolen from all of us. The time spent with our loved ones, or the proper traditions when someone passes, or even the traditions when we are alive. I felt awful to watch my one day Mother-in-law hunch over her mothers casket and cry saying to everyone that could hear her, that she wouldn't be able to gallivant with her mom ever again. 

I felt awful thinking that my mother-in-law to be did not get the proper traditional three day process, where she could see her mom in her casket and mourn for her while able to touch her mom a couple days in a row before the final goodbye. It felt like the moment we saw Nonna at rest, then in a blink of an eye it was time to wrap up the services. There was no time the family could spend with the deceased and just be able to be in her presence. I was speechless. 

When someone dies, it is a huge deal when you get the time to spend with their body as a part of mourning and closure. I am fully aware that we are born to one day die, hopefully when we are all grey and old like Nonna was (She had just had her 80th birthday late January). I know that one day I will be in my mother-in-laws place when I lose a parent, and as morbid as that sounds it's facts. I am a realist. One day I will lose my parents. Hopefully not for a long time, but it is inevitable. I hope by that time COVID is gone and over with.

COVID this year has taken so much from all of us, that it's times like now when we lose a family member I begin to think that, life is way to short to sit here and watch it pass by us as we wait for this stupid deadly disease to go away. Then another part of me is frustrated because the scientific facts, if accurate, I would not want to put my parents in harms way. 

This year has been a trying time for the entire world, and I truly hope that with the new year coming, better things are ahead. I hope my Nonna-in-laws rest in peace. They both are a free spirit now, and they can fly wherever they please without any pain or suffering.

To my fellow readers, if you have lost someone this year during this difficult time of COVID, I give you my condolences. You are not alone. I pray that you begin to adjust to your life without that loved one physically here, and know that they will always remain with you inside your heart. 

Peace,Love, Joy

Ant