Considering that we see it all around, hear about it on the daily if not hourly radio news bulletins, let alone watch events with deadly outcomes on the nightly news, you’d think we’d be across death as a part of life without any hesitation. But no, this is not the case. Denial in the face of it being in our face is the default for many many people.
Now with the COVID-19 pandemic taking its toll on thousands of lives across the world, to take literally the “it won’t happen to me” approach, is looking more selfish than certain. But is that notion changing? Does the acceptance of the limitations of freedom that has brought our “global society to a screeching halt” indicate some doubt is creeping in? When people realise that what we are up against “is little more than a packet of genetic material surrounded by a spiky protein shell one-thousandth the width of an eyelash,” (Washington Post, March 23, 2020 – see story below), they perhaps know that people are succumbing to something much smaller than them – that is at the same time in some ways more powerful than them. Fear of the unknown let alone the unseen is another factor.
Billions of years of evolution means these little ‘creatures’ have had plenty of time to work 
out how to survive regardless of what we humans think is a good idea or not. Best we learn to live and coexist with them, rather than fight them, which seems to be the order of the day as we conduct a war on the virus as well as many other species within nature.
This backdrop provides us with the opportunity to listen and learn to a series of podcasts titled: Let’s Talk about Death, compiled by the Pineapple Project, an ABC Radio production. There are 8 in the series. Here’s what program One (1) is about.
S4 01 | There’s a body, what next?
Listen to one or more here at this link: Let’s talk about death
For background stories about COVID-19 these links might be helpful: The science behind what makes coronavirus hard to deal with
Die-alogue Cafe 