Last week my uncle died. He wasn’t a casualty of COVID-19, but the virus certainly made its presence felt, both before his death when visits were limited and at his funeral, the church scattered with the twenty of us allowed to attend. COVID ensured that

Last week my uncle died. He wasn’t a casualty of COVID-19, but the virus certainly made its presence felt, both before his death when visits were limited and at his funeral, the church scattered with the twenty of us allowed to attend. COVID ensured that his church congregation could not be there, nor the members of the local Men’s Shed he had established nor those of the local historical society where he had been an office-bearer. Instead we were a small family group with a couple of close friends. I greeted none of them with a kiss, not even my aunt, who had loved my uncle for more than sixty years. Instead, I helped myself to sanitiser and sat at a distance on a marked place in the pews. Together, the twenty of us listened to hymns we were not allowed to sing.

COVID could do many things but it could not dampen the love and the creative force of my uncle’s family. In the last days of his life, his children kept vigil over him, lighting candles and reading to him. A phone was put to his ear so my mother and I could speak to him, even if he could not speak back. His granddaughter designed the cover for his order of service, filling it with sketched leaves and trees and garden tools for the man of the soil he had been. Her sister, stopped by COVID from travelling back to Australia, read a eulogy, pre-recorded, as her cousins placed a basket of vegetables from my uncle’s garden on his coffin: the coffin later carried out by his sons, his grandson and his nephew. My uncle, Warwick Leal, was a good man who lived a good life and I’m glad I had a small part in it.