The New Era

Today I attended my first Zoom funeral. My great aunt passed away from cancer last week hundreds of miles away from where the majority of our family lives. It was sad but uplifting that our family was able to come together to be there for my great uncle and cousins during this difficult time. My mom sang. My uncle gave words of comfort. We all cried.

Now if you would have told me a year ago that we would be having funerals via video conferencing I probably would have laughed, paused and said something to the effect of “well it could happen”. I just didn’t think it would happen like this.

We couldn’t be together in one room. We couldn’t offer hugs and laugh together over fried chicken and pound cake provided by friends of the family. We couldn’t look at old pictures and talk about memories of days gone by, because of Covid.

Yet there was still a blessing in all of this.

We are in a time where everyone is so busy living life and this shutdown has forced us to stop and figure things out. There are no excuses at this point. Someone dies. Okay, bet. Let’s see how we are going to do this. There were no plane tickets to buy or time to take off work. All it required was to click and link and bam you are there.

When you really think about it, we have been forced fast forwarded to the time of the Jetsons. Grandparents are now using all of the features of their smartphones. We buy groceries using video calls and websites. We are working from our home. We are visiting the doctor via a screen.

These Corona days are really going to change how we do things everyday. So for all you who said in January, “I thought in 2020 we would be doing x”, well welcome to 2020, the year where everyone realized that we are in the middle of the virtual revolution.