We are living in a world full of grief. It might be prudent to notice that the world we live in is constantly distancing us from the real experience of grief, making us substitute it with rituals that hardly help us heal from the deep rooted grief. The more we drown into it the more we forget the difference between actual grief and the never yielding pressure for us to feel the grief and let others know that we do feel the grief. It is as if we have something to prove. But we don’t. When grief strikes it does not leave that window open. We are left with our own devices to deal with our grief and no amount of social exposure of our perceived grieving can shield us from the real grief that is part and parcel of this dystopian reality that we live in. Justin Ward, a young man who has lost his brother to this devastating sickness has written about his experience of empty feelings of pretentious grief around him and how that has alienated him from the society. The very society that was solely responsible to shield him from that. He shares his experience saying that he couldn’t even attend his brother’s funeral owing to his brother’s teaching job in Kazakhstan. He contracted Covid-19 and was subjected to an utterly untimely demise, being 41 years of age. His funeral took place within a few days of his passing and Justin couldn’t reach in time with the travel restriction. How pathetic it might be for someone to lose their loved ones and not even get the chance to bid them good bye. He had to watch his brother’s funeral on YouTube. Like a film, like something that happened with someone else, not to themselves. The 11-minute long video could hardly give him any respite. Starting off with a morbid trip to the morgue where the wife of the deceased had to identify the body before it could be transported to the actual site of the cemetery where the funeral would take place. It was as macabre as it could be, shot from the wife’s perspective where she goes into a dimly lit room with the casket sitting up against the wall. The camera closes in on the casket and tilts down. That’s it, it’s his brother. How was that one shot sum up all the childhood memories that the Ward brothers might have been living through. But it had to. He says, “There he was” lying in a cold and dimly lit room, his, “one and only brother.” He wonders, did he look peaceful?
