Catherine, I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what you've been watching

from your home in Toronto ever since the pandemic started hitting North America?

Well, I have written a lot about death over the years. It's one of those things that

for whatever reason it interests me and I keep coming back to it. So because I've always been

interested in death and written about death, I've been looking through the birth and death notices

and the Obyts have been really interesting because something that I'd never seen before

at the bottom, you know, whether or not the person had died of COVID, you know, many of them

have died just of old age or of cancer or whatever else. But at the bottom, I started to highlight

these statements that seem to repeat themselves over and over again, which with things like,

though we cannot celebrate her life now, a happier time will come and we can all come together,

or a celebration of her life will be celebrated when it's safe for us to be together.

We will get together when we're allowed to get together.

And so that planted a seed of like a thought in me like the public part of mourning

is ritualized in our society by coming together. We come together and we acknowledge

the past and we have a sense that this is real and we are grieving together.

And if this isn't happening or we're delaying this, like what does that mean? How are people coping

without that ritual? Is anyone trying to do this differently?

So then I found kind of the perfect person for this.

Who did you find? Can you see us on your computer screen or no?

No, I'm sitting, I'm talking on my phone. I've got my wig on straight, but it doesn't matter.

Oh, I really wish we had stayed, we could see you then in that case.

His name is Wayne Erwin, he's 75. He's a retired minister and a church in Canada called the

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