Loss and Hope

In the New York Times today there was an article about Covid (and it seems like every article is about Covid…..but that is a topic for another day), a chaplain at a hospital in California, speaking about the ways in which people are dying alone in the pandemic explained how she and her staff try to ease the loneliness and grief of families losing a loved one in the pandemic.  She explained how they look to find opportunities to make human connections in these moments.  One example really stood out to me.  She explained, “We Zoomed in a person’s son who was incarcerated, and she hadn’t seen him for years before she died.”

The description hit me like a sucker punch.  This seems so undeniably sad and such an indictment of our national character.  How can justice be served by punishing people who are incarcerated by denying them access to the people who love them?  How can we hope to build a strong community for all of us when we punish families in this way.  So much of the way we live has changed in the pandemic and I hope that when we get to the other side we work on treating people - all of us - better.  We need to re-think the ways in which we use prisons and jails in our justice system.  No one, no matter how terrible their crime, should be so isolated that they cannot see their family while they are incarnated.  There is nothing to be gained by such cruelty and so much of us that is lost because of it.