Covid-19 death statistics give pause for thought about mortality

It is a sobering composition, but a very human, somehow affirmative one too. A shrouded coffin is tressled across two wooden chairs outside what looks like a simple cottar’s home. You can feel the nip in the frost. You know the earth will be hard this morning, the shovel sharp and the digger tough.

The sky is low. Snow has fallen. It is rutted by feet. A minister in a coal-coloured coat raises his hands in blessing over the blackness of the coffin at the heart of the picture, and the unknown soul it contains. There’s a collie in the crowd.

A young lad looks out from the middle of the painting, surrounded by greybeards and mutton chops, all knuckling their hats, heads all bent in sorrow. There might be a hand on his shoulder. You wonder about the boy’s relationship to the person in the coffin, but who can say?

The mourners are ordinary folk, but there are no women present. Death in Victorian Scotland seems to have been a man’s affair – but Guthrie’s funeral scene isn’t untender. The painting’s stark plainness captures all the dignity and pathos of a community in mourning, of people assembling in a church without walls, doing what human beings have done since the first days of man.

Some of the hardest stories to emerge from the current crisis is for families who find they can’t even do this.

While funerals are exempted from the closures the ongoing lockdown has imposed, the restrictions mean services are dignified but brisk, peopled only by immediate family.

You can only feel for friends and comrades, who want to be there, but know they can’t be. Whatever we owe the dead, the living matter more.

Our Thursday nights have resounded with a chorus of applause and clattered pans for those working in the NHS and caring professions – but perhaps we should expand our understanding of who we mean by this. On Twitter this week, Church of Scotland minister Alistair May asked us to spare a thought for the country’s funeral directors, “working in a job where social isolation is impossible, and comforting families in horrific situations with truncated funerals”.

Former Kirk moderator Derek Brownlee reflected on conducting two recent funerals: “I spent nearly as much time supporting distraught funeral directors as I did the families. Women and men wanting to do their professional best but finding the limitations so difficult.”

Among all the many people facing down the present crisis with fortitude, I’ve got to admit their predicament hadn’t occurred to me. Just another reminder – if we let it, if we keep hold of its lessons – that we can emerge from this crisis having expanded our circle of empathy and social understanding.

But let’s not be trite. This isn’t always easy. One of the terrible rituals of the current news cycle is the daily updates on how many lives coronavirus has claimed in our hospitals in the last 24 hours. Last week, the numbers soared.

While Boris Johnson’s recovery was leading some headlines in some newspapers, 980 people were announced to have perished on Friday, bringing the UK total almost 9000 at the beginning of this Easter weekend.

There seems every likelihood now that Britain will be one of the worst-hit nations in Europe by the virus.

In Scotland, the death toll was just shy of 900 souls succumbing. In relaying this daily death duty, Nicola Sturgeon often takes the opportunity to underscore that behind these numbers are real people and families bereft.

She’s right to do so. But the fact she feels the need to say this is because – in our heart of hearts, we know – that numbers are deadening and distancing even – and perhaps especially – when we tally up the fallen.

The larger the number, the greater the sense of unreality which can accompany it. Some of the commentary on the figures – which show Covid-19 deaths predominantly falling on those aged over 65 – has also been strikingly inhumane. As my friend Peter Geoghegan has rightly emphasised, the phrase “underlying health conditions” isn’t a synonym for “they weren’t really a real person” or “they would have died soon anyway” so who gives a damn.

But I’ve realised that these death numbers – reported without any kind of context – can be difficult to fathom for other reasons. Death leads us out through many different doors. In 2018, across the whole of the UK, 616,014 people died. Winter months are crueller than summer ones, but that’s 1692 people each day. In the same year, 58,503 people in Scotland died. More than 16,252 of us succumbed to cancer, 14,823 to heart diseases and other ailments of the circulatory system. Diabetes accounted for 1033 in the same year, while dementia and Alzheimer’s disease took 6484.

BUT those are only natural causes. In 2018, some 2500 Scots died in accidents, 1187 due to drugs, and a further 626 by suicide – 74% of them male.

I don’t recount all this data just to be morbid – or to underplay the significance of Covid-19 – but the daily death duty only seems intelligible against this wider background. It makes you think about how we define a public health crisis, and how we respond to it.

Last week, I was talking to my parents about wills. Like many spry middle-aged people, they hadn’t got around to making one. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year – it never seemed like a priority. They’re not alone. Surveys suggest that only something like a third of us have made a will.

While the intestacy rules can sort out our affairs, this is often a costly and messy business. There’s no reason why this should be the case.

As my old law Professor George Gretton used to say – write it on whatever you like, state your wishes on the back of a Chinese takeaway menu if it’s all you have to hand – so long as you sign your full name at the bottom, your will is valid and your wishes can be given effect to if the worst should befall.

You don’t need umpteen witnesses, three notaries public, and a wax seal to make your wishes known. There’s something adult, I suppose, about being able to discuss this in a rational but not unfeeling way.

A South American friend always used to tell me she thought folk in the UK have a strange and awkward outlook on death, avoiding thinking about it or talking about it till it overtakes us. My Irish friends often say the same.

Covid-19 has made the confrontation with our own mortality unavoidable. With sore hearts and sympathy with those who grieve, we shouldn’t be afraid to keep its acquaintance.

Scotland is in lockdown. Shops are closing and newspaper sales are falling fast. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of The National is at stake. Please consider supporting us through this with a digital subscription from just £2 for 2 months by following this link: http://www.thenational.scot/subscribe. Thanks – and stay safe.