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Friday Slide Show: All Souls
10 November 2023
The news has been unrelentingly dismal for weeks now. Just when we thought nothing could surpass the brutality of the Russian bombardment of Ukraine, the Middle East erupts in barbarity and the inevitable response to it.
Halloween intervened but it wasn't the year to be a ghost or a ghoul or a skeleton or a gored figure. There were already too many real ones in October.
All Souls Day followed, starting the month with the quaint reminder to honor all those we've lost. As if, with all the bloodshed in October, we might forget.
In the back of our head, as the week went along, we kept thinking about a slide show honoring all the innocent souls who have perished in the world's conflicts this year.
Equal at last in their final state.
War is as ugly as our species gets. And we instinctively shield our faces from that portrait of humanity.
As it happened, we found ourselves visiting a mausoleum the other day.
As we wandered the aisles of crypts and looked at the names, calculating ages from the dates, we realized we didn't know anything more about any of these people than that.
A name, the year of birth, the year of death.
We didn't know if they had any money when they died, if they were famous in their day, if they were conservative or liberal. We didn't know how they dressed or what personal peculiarities they may have possessed.
It was a comforting realization. As if our follies here on earth, a lifetime of them, amount to nothing.
All that matters, in the end, is that for a time of no fixed duration, one has lived. After that one joins all the other souls whose lives have come to end, one way or another.
All souls. Equal at last in their final state. And unable, ever again, to do any harm to each other.
