https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coping-with-death-awareness-in-the-covid-19-era/ > In Charles Dickens’s much beloved novella A Christmas Carol, the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge is unmoved when the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present show him how his cruelty and selfishness have harmed others. Only when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Scrooge face-to-face with his own impermanence in the form of his tombstone does the old miser begin to show benevolence and compassion toward others. > The coronavirus pandemic has brought all of us a lot closer to our impermanence. Faced with news photographs of makeshift morgues and dire headlines reporting body counts, we see that all of us, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson, are vulnerable—a fact that we push out of our minds in less threatening times.