At some funerals the churchbell tolls once for every year of the lamented person's life. With five or six seconds between peals it's strangely long and short as one listens, suspended in the resonating memory of time past, seeing the ages of our lives and those dear to us in our mind's eye. (On Good Friday, the bell tolls thirty-three times.)
There would be no end to the tolling were we to mark the years of the lives of all those who have fallen to Covid-19. Indeed there would be no end to the tolling even were we to ring a bell just once for each of the nearly one million souls so far lost globally, one fifth of them in this land. Yesterday the bell of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC pealed for twenty long minutes. American casualties only, but each tolling of the bell bore the weight of one thousand whole lives.
