Cumulative Effect

It’s been a long while since, as happened on Friday, I took two funerals in a day. The crematorium has been working at a distinctly elevated rate and our village undertakers were responsible for no fewer than nine of the day’s ceremonies. Oddly, it’s hard to ascribe the apparent upsurge to COVID. Since the emergency began I’ve carried out one funeral of someone who clearly died because of it, and another of a member of the congregation who died with it, but given his record of being dragged back from the brink repeatedly over the last couple of years there was every likelihood that he wouldn’t have left hospital after being admitted with yet another seizure. All the other deaths seem unrelated.

So last week we lost Miriam, one of the longest-standing church members, a former churchwarden and treasurer who knew absolutely everything there was to know about the church’s life, past and present: she’d fallen over at home, broken an ankle and hip and never recovered from the resultant operation. No Wuhan Distemper involvement there. But then there’s Daphne, former congregant (she and her husband moved away 18 months ago), who had a stroke, and Richard, who died yesterday of a heart attack. Neither has any apparent link to the virus, and yet the rate of death within a relatively limited network of souls does appear to me to be elevated from normal. Is low-level stress and uncertainty hitting people who would normally not be dying? I start to wonder about vague things like the sudden increase in my tinnitus over the last couple of months, and the sense of ‘cerebral congestion’ I seem to feel. Heaven knows what people who are actually under real strain feel.

It is Rogationtide, when the Church prays especially for the fruitfulness of the earth, prosperity for communities, and divine protection for localities. There will be no Beating of the Bounds in Anglican parishes this year. But yesterday I went into the churchyard and prayed a Litany in time of plague, invoking the prayers of a variety of relevant saints (patrons of nurses and hospitals and so on) culled from a Roman Catholic website and adding petitions for the sick, the dying, the dead, and against this sign of wrath under which we labour. The sun shone and the birds sang as though there was nothing wrong at all.

Marion the curate said her phone had auto-corrected ‘Rogation’ to ‘Rotation Sunday’, a liturgical observance which I think has a great deal of mileage in it.