Weekend Essay: A Death That Awakens a Weary World

Since the death of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, much condemnation has surfaced about the 10-day mourning period being observed across the U.K. and echoed elsewhere, to varying degrees, around the world. Some Brits are opposed to the fanfare, believing it to be disproportionately disruptive to everyday life; some are dismayed by a lack of room for dissenting voices regarding the monarchy’s utility and value; and many are hopeful that the queen’s death heralds the beginning of the end of a far too antiquated station. While there may be merit to those arguments, I’m watching our progenitor country’s nationwide standstill, and I find it rather beautiful. To start, in a society and era as individualistic as ours, there’s something breathtaking about a shared pause and large-scale emotional experience of any kind. It’s why one of my many recurring YouTube rabbit hole searches is “national moments of silence,” with Israel’s stunning, traffic-stopping memorial sirens ranking most captivating. Moreover, there’s something stirring — some sort of exquisitely moving experience — about living through the death of this particular world leader. Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch and second only in the world to King Louis XIV of France, occupied the throne for 70 years. In that time, she witnessed Sputnik, the JFK and MLK assassinations, the moon landing, the war in Vietnam, the AIDS epidemic, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and Covid, to name only a few major world events. The queen was known as a traditionalist who didn’t like change, and yet she weathered more of the last century’s radical transitions and metamorphoses than most of the still living, and, throughout, she remained constant — steadfast in her duties and reliably unshaken by fashion.Perhaps that’s why so many of us feel drawn to this figure and her death, though we may have rarely paid attention to her stalwart service in life. In recent years, beginning with the coronavirus’s merciless spread, made worse by an economic recession, school shootings, and increasing political divisiveness, some Americans have grown highly anxious, wondering when life will regain a sense of balance and dependability. Young people, especially, have few memories of life prior to the frenzied digital age and feverish present to temper their unease and engender resilient perspectives. But then, across the pond, the queen died, and, though I can’t pinpoint the feeling exactly, her death and the ensuing media retrospective of her illustrious life awakened some amalgam of awe-inspired reverence and optimism.The queen was a woman who, irrespective of the criticism that enwreathes her crown, remained standing, beholding the world as it fell apart over and over again, a steady and abiding presence until it was, each time, rebuilt. She was many things, but, for all of us, she grants an important legacy: a reminder that this temperamental planet and our fickle lives are, in fact, survivable. A reminder that pain is impermanent and that, beyond it, another season awaits us.The monarchy’s future, England’s and all of ours, really, may be uncertain. But there’s a way in which our pause, in recognition of the passing of a giant, may bring us consolation and fortification. Amid crisis, people tend not to believe that, even if life is altered in its wake, reprieve is inevitable. Perhaps, though, we’d do well in moments of both personal and global upheaval to think of the queen and remember that, through close to a century of mercurial world chapters and changes, she endured.

Weekend Essay: A Death That Awakens a Weary World

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