Living in Death's Living Wake

Cafe Locked Out

I wonder if death would have been more active earlier if it knew how little resistance it would face now that someone—or someone’s—had opened the gate that protected our mortality.

No one points out death; instead, they whisper in his wake.
“John’s son died, did you hear? Dropped dead at work. They found him on the staff room floor. He was only thirty-six.”
At a café, an owner, unjabbed, who now speaks openly about his thoughts, has become a library of such stories. People come there to unload.
One old man has lost his entire family. Eight people. He has no one now. He is alone—or was—until another family adopted him.
Or there’s the farmer’s wife who lost her daughter first, in her twenties, then found her son in the kitchen, also on the floor, but was unable to revive him. Recently, her husband died too when his heart gave out.

Interview in Canberra with a Grandmother who was there for months

Now, she too is alone, and nature is the farmer until she decides to sell, unless death returns and reunites her with the only three people who gave her life purpose.
I know you could carry on, adding your own anecdotes. Mysterious, tragic, and unprecedented losses that sound like horror stories from a third-world dictatorship, viewed through a late-night documentary on SBS—not a first-world country… not, us.
But to keep things calm, these stories are being hidden under a thick communal lie. Senator Alex Antic recently declared that the Bureau of Statistics is no longer publishing the excess death stats, which are still high. But he was only given a minute to speak before he was shut down by a voice that clearly didn’t care about the issue.
A voice that lets us know, in case you didn’t get the memo, that pointing out death and its excess wake is frowned upon.

So, what happens to these fallen souls?
Covid was sold to us as a war, but whereas the victims of previous wars were commemorated with shrines, here the stories of these fallen Australians are kept alive in these worn and baffled, whispered conversations.
But what is this silence? Why can’t we ask those above us to explain what’s happening? If a plane falls out of the sky, we scour the wreckage looking for the cause so we can fix it on all our other planes.
Or are the politicians doing what they do best—reading the public for what they actually want?

She lost her brothers.

So, are we the arbitrators of silence? And if so, why?
What is the secret that scares us so much we are happy to look the other way as death haunts our cities and towns, taking those who were not due to leave, at will?
Or are most of us blinded to death’s presence by a fact that we can’t believe?
Who above us knew?
Obviously, many knew that the jabs were dangerous, but how far down the food chain did the raw truth sink?
Is this why politicians and judges were exempt?
Did those who are meant to serve us agree to a cull, as long as they and their families were exempt?
On some level, have we all agreed to this, and now are we hoping, though silent prayers, that we are the ones who won’t suddenly die?

Our health system knows too, and we all know it—the ER wards, the oncologists, the paramedics who complied, and the police. We hear their stories, some times from their mouths, in the whispers. This frowned upon, oral history.

1 in 35 who had the booster has had hard heart issues.

One woman came up to me at a gathering and told me that the only job she could get, being unjabbed, was for a government-sponsored company that was traveling to cemeteries all over Victoria, stipulating new rows for new graves.
She was trembling as she told how she’d been to towns where the death rate is so low that the town can’t support a funeral director, and yet here we are, marking out enough places for thirty new graves.
They know, she whispered, trying not to cry. They know.
I asked her if she’d let me record her, but she said, deeply apologetically, I can’t.
Then, in the café, the owner tells me the story of a salt racer. One of those men who sail across the salt flats on small boats with wheels.
They got bogged, so they had to walk back, but halfway back, this man, known for his fitness, collapsed and died as his mate used all his love for his friend to try keep him here.
I can see him prostrate on all the caustic white, while above, the blue sky looked down over his friend, fighting vainly to keep him alive.
And then he was gone—hovered into the silence, kept alive by the underground truth that breaks out here and there but is quickly dealt with, like milk spilled over a laminated kitchen top.
Which leaves us all hunted by another possible truth: without a humanitarian leader, a uniter, reminding us of our responsibility to each other, to who we fundamentally are, is our ability to care for one other is severely limited.
A point we are making clear by almost unanimously voting for hate speech laws designed to coerce everyone into silence.
In fact, we might be on the road to becoming those people in history who are never the heroes of stories and films.
The sort of people who not only watched, as freedom fighters filmed an old woman being pushed down and pepper-sprayed by police, but helped spread the state lie that the old woman was a man.
A moral decay is eating away, unfettered, at our communal identity, protected by fear and another horrible fact about many of us:
Status. Our hunger for status, for at least being seen by our neighbors as a good person, has led us to do terrible things. We have ignored the compass in our souls. We have ostracized those we love to appease the people on television who asked us, “What are we going to do about our unvaccinated family and friends?” and we’ve ignored, and continue to ignore, the injured and the dying.
And to help us hide the now-public, ugly side of our nature, the government—or those above them—allow us to fly Ukraine flags, or Palestine flags, or rainbow flags, or block highways in the name of preventing climate change, an issue that facts prove is not a crisis.
But then, there is no way to survive in the truth. The jobs are all owned by corporations that demand we lie in order to earn the wages that we use to pay off our mortgages.

I can see death now meeting up with the Devil on Mount Sinai. And as the Devil dances, he points out all the souls that took the deal, as those who chose to hold onto their souls, wonder if the light they are defending will rectify all this, or perish with them.
Early on, when we used to sit on the steps of the Victorian parliament offering solace to those who were lost, a young woman told me that I had a moral obligation not to sell hopelessness, no matter how tight its grip.
Well, its grip is tight today, and we are leaving soon, traveling as we do in the wake of death, no matter which direction we take. Therefore, the hope, I guess, is in the Australians who flag us down or seek us out to talk.
Each, like a Rat from Tobruk, low on supplies, almost out of ammunition, but still scanning the horizon beyond silence’s dark and besieging army, for the light of truth’s army, that they know is coming. It has to.
But then, here, back in the café, the stories of the fallen stop when two old Aussies come in after coffee and a sandwich.
“How are you going?” the café owner asks.
“Great,” says the old man. “And what a beautiful day!” he adds, as both of them, and both are obese, bend to peruse the awaiting cakes.

Michael Gray Griffith