We are grieving the passing of the eminent mycologist and author Jochen Gartz, PhD. Dying is a natural process, it is often said, and yet losses are usually reported clinically and impersonally as something that happens to others. There seems to be a persistent fear that the confrontation with death might somehow attract it, a strange form of magical thinking, since we will all surely die when our time has come, which can be anytime. Moreover, the process of dying awakens irrational feelings that are deemed “private” and better kept under lock and key. It is also said that there is nothing wrong with dying as such. And what speaks for it? Are the people who comment from a distance on the dying of others ready to go themselves? Are they so much looking forward to “another life” and a “reunion in the hereafter” as a reward for their worldly toil and sorrows that their own death would not matter to them? Let us not forget the suffering that has come over countless families and their loved ones in the past weeks and months. Let us think of them when we celebrate the arrival of a new and better year with the advent of the winter solstice.
With my sincere wishes for the holiday season,
Susanne G. Seiler