Pandemics and the Black Death

To grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear. Too many are dying apart from those they love, saying good bye over video chat or telephone line. In the new england journal of medicine, one physician wrote of a wife watching her husband die over face time. And i think maybe that is the real reason i cannot stop reading about pendemics at the moment. I am haunted by that separation. Just a few years after my friend died, i was 21 years old and working as a student chaplain at a children's hospital. The black death was vastly, incalculably different from our current pandemic. It was orders of magnitude deadlier and far