This Life/Death Thing is Hard

This week's subject might be tough for lots of folks. People who have issues surrounding death might want to skip this episode. Because we, teZa and Carter Lord look compassionately deep inside the really hard letting-go involved with death, both by the person "doing the dying" and the loved ones who are left behind to grieve.

During this time of Covid, death is on everyone's mind more than usual. Today's episode we discuss the recent passing of Carter's dear friend from his early school days, who had cancer. What Peter demonstrated to all who knew him, was the grace of acceptance, especially in the most intensely difficult time of all: facing one's own final days on Earth.

LIfe is hard, there's no easy way through or out of it. But here we offer hope based on our own experiences: that acceptance of a Divine Source of Inspiration -- a Higher Power (whatever name you call it doesn't matter), some form of sacredness -- is essential in order for we mere human mortals to make sense out of the often overwhelming incongruities of life on Earth. Without accepting the Sacred in our everyday mundane existence, life is not only harder, but it's often chaotic, depressing and fraught with fears and confusion. Many people substitute politics for religion for this very reason, to try and make sense out of the incongruous Mystery of Life.

This episode starts with a conversation about physical death, but ends with an odd "right hand turn" into what's defined as the end of civility, the so-called "death" of respect that appears to be very real in today's ultra-divisive atmosphere here in the United States. This podcast suggests that people start talking more about our culture's loss of respect. We offer how we can all participate in helping our culture heal: by recognizing that disrespect is what's really happening, and by this awareness allay and hopefully reverse this horribly destructive trend. We need to have more private conversations about how to end disrespect. We must start being more civil and therefore more compassionate, by recognizing the need for people to accept each other's differences. This trend begins with discussing this tender subject, right here. Civility can become a new national pasttime, right up there with celebrity-watching and waiting for organized sports to fully resume.

We end with remarking how ZLORD podcast's first guest (she's appearing for the third time in the next episode), Dr. Dorothy Israel, is the "very picture of civility." We hope by bringing this remarkable person's oral history to listeners that more people have an inside view of how almost 100 years of living as a Black woman (she's 94!) resulted in such a loving and kind person as Deeh is, even after having faced a lifetime of racial challenges just as any other Black person living in America today has.

We hope you'll share with your friends the in-depth and profoundly important subjects we approach here on ZLORD. And please do send us a note if you have any comments or suggestions. zlordpodcast@gmail.com