One of the great innovations of the 21st century has to be that no one dies any more. Okay, some might disagree. They may insist it has delivered even greater wonders. It is true technology and the internet have revolutionised our lives beyond wildest imaginings in the 21 years since this third millennium began.
Where would we be now, for instance, had there been no internet through this Covid-19 pandemic? What would that experience have been like if we couldn’t have worked from home, for those of us who can work from home?
Or if we had not learned that Zoom was no longer a cartoon word describing how Road Runner escaped the attentions of Wile E Coyote again, but was a further means to ensure we can never escape yet more meetings to trammel our lives?
Or had no streaming services that allowed us watch so many films and unexpectedly good series from the comfort of our suddenly overused couches as isolation reigned once again?
Not to mention shopping online, with goods from all over the world delivered to our door, depriving us of the special “joy” that is trundling, baggage-laden, through crowded streets and equally crowded shops where imperious assistants occasionally bother to offer disdainful opinion on our poor taste.
Yes, it is also true, the 21st century has brought us the very first pandemic that has spread to all corners of our round planet with a speed only air travel could have made possible.
But we should also remember it has delivered, almost as quickly, so many vaccines that mean we may all soon be free at last.
Yet, and allowing for all the above wonders of our age, and even as that ongoing pandemic continues to weave its fatal way through our world, no one has died. They have “passed”, we are told.
We are not told what. Water? Exams? Outside? Or have they, like Yeats’s Horseman, just passed by? Casting a cold eye, on life, on death?
Formed in the last millennium, I’ll stay with the old word to describe a person who is no more – they have died. They are dead. And some day I will be too. It’s not necessarily an ambition, just my destiny. Yours too.
Death, from Old English deaþ, "total cessation of life".
inaword@irishtimes.com
