Over the last few weeks we have been delving into time. And you know, Einstein was right – time is relative. For many of us, since this pandemic started, time is like Groundhog Day – "Is today Wednesday or Thursday?” For some, say alone in their apartment, time is an albatross hanging upon their necks. And yet for the first responders among us, time is flying by, exhausting and heavy.
But this pandemic has bound us all together under one common and agonizing umbrella – grief. Philosopher Simon Critchley says grief is the only thing that can stop time. Grief, he says, makes us yearn for the ebb and flow of time to re-continue.
A young man remembers the smell of wood he used to make a coffin with his ailing father. An African American mortician is overcome by the smell of death in his funeral home. A photographer captures the images of the 30 oldest living things in the world - photos that document both the adaptation and fragility inherent to surviving for tens of thousands of years.
We are fragile. We adapt. We grieve. And, not alone, we continue on.
–Charles