Zoom memorials highlight the ironic cruelty of trying to mourn together during the pandemic
Earlier this month, I attended my first Zoom wedding. A week after that, I attended a Zoom baby shower.
Tomorrow, I'll attend a Zoom gathering to mourn the loss of a family friend. His name was Peter. He died of COVID-19 last week.
This gathering isn't technically a funeral or memorial service, but rather a virtual devotional taking place on Zoom at the same time as Peter's physical burial. A few close friends and family will gather at the gravesite—masked and distanced—while the rest of us share readings and prayers over Zoom to honor his interment.
It's weird. There's no other way to say it. With the wedding and baby shower, we all sort of laughed our way through the weirdness. We acknowledged the bummer of not being able to get together, but at this point we're all accustomed to having to meet virtually. Zoom celebrations are better than no celebrations at all.
But mourning this way feels...different. We can't laugh away the awkwardness of it when the Zoom meeting itself is a reminder of the tragic cause of our friend's death.
Celebratory gatherings are fun, but not necessary. Gathering when someone dies feels necessary in a way, and the inability to do that adds an extra layer of loss to the grief we're already experiencing. Normally, our whole community would gather together to honor Peter's life tomorrow. We'd put on appropriate funeral attire, stand side by side at his grave, hold hands or hug one another as we mark the momentousness of his passing. We'd all bring food and break bread together as we share stories of his life. We'd pass around tissues, crying and laughing and sharing in the oh-so-human experience of bringing together the lives he had touched.
But we can't do any of that. If we did, we'd run the risk of having to do it all over again for another friend or loved one taken too soon by this stupid virus. So we do what we can do and deal with the strange questions—What does one wear to a Zoom mourning? How long it will be before we can actually gather for a real memorial service? Will it feel like it's too late then? Will we want to do that in the midst of celebrating a return to non-distanced life?
This pandemic has taken so much, and each thing stings in its own way. The death toll itself is overwhelming, especially here in the U.S. where we have already lost more than 330,000 lives. A hundred 9/11s and counting. Five Vietnams in less than a year. It's unreal. In the beginning, we were told that all of us would likely end up knowing someone who died of COVID-19, and some people have now lost multiple family members. More will follow as we head into the deadliest month of the pandemic. That's not doom and gloom forecasting—that's the reality of the current moment.
But the loss of in-person mourning as millions are losing loved ones before they expected to is a tragedy in and of itself. There's a cruel irony in it, that we can't gather in person to mourn if we want to stop the thing that's making it so we can't gather in person to mourn. When we need the comfort of coming together the most, we can't, as indulging in that comfort could lead to even more suffering. Of all of the sacrifices we've had to make, the loss of communal mourning is one of the hardest.
And so we open our computers and enter our virtual meeting rooms and try to comfort one another through our grief amid the inevitable unmute reminders. It's weird. It all feels wrong. But it's necessary. We need to mourn our losses together. We also need to be able to mourn the fact that we're not able to do that the way we want to.
There is gratitude to be found in all of this, of course. It's pretty incredible that we live in a time when we have the technology to at least see one another's faces and hear people's voices as we share our losses at a distance. If this pandemic had hit in my childhood, we'd have had no community ability to mourn at all. A Zoom gathering to mourn is better than no gathering at all—but it's still all of the weird, wrong, sad things at once.
And what's extra painful about it is that it didn't have to be this way. Next time we have a pandemic, let's all agree to just follow New Zealand's lead, shall we? Hundreds of thousands of Zoom funerals really ought to be enough to get us all on the same page.
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.