A Tale of Two Deaths
By James Kullander
JamesKullander.com
I’d resolved to start off the first day of New Year once and for all not being angry about the state of the world, like I have been for most of the past three years of Coronamania. But at the end of the day when I crawled into bed, I was still angry. Day after day, and as much as I tried to really make a change—reading about anger management, meditating, doing deep breathing exercises, reciting the serenity prayer—I hadn’t changed. Maybe it was all just a bad dream that I’d suddenly wake up from one fine day. Then finally something happened and something changed. And it was no dream.
Some time ago, I’d decided to no longer try to enlighten my friends and relations who have believed naively or devoutly or both in the trickery of the Scamdemic and in the efficacy and safety of the jabs. I used to present my points in person and in posts on my Facebook page. But after a while, I felt like I was beating my head and fists against a concrete wall that was so hard and so thick—or even something beyond concrete, some impenetrable material from an advanced alien civilization—that my entire arsenal of inarguable logic, deductive reasoning, and faultless evidence could not even put a dent in their thinking. I was either ignored or attacked by people—in some cases friends, or rather former friends now—calling me a conspiracy theorist spreading misinformation, mimicking buzzwords lifted straight out of the cabal’s playbook, just like caged parrots would be trained to do.
It was disheartening. And disappointing. So, after trying from late 2020 to the end of 2021 to expose what I and so many others had come to see is the verifiable truth of the dehumanizing, depopulation, and destructive plot we’re up against, I gave up. I scrubbed my Facebook page of any posts related to the Scamdemic and have posted nothing about anything since then. In my mind I did what I could to forgive so much ignorance. Mostly, though, I grew increasingly angry because there’s really no excuse for any ignorance about what’s been going on. I just didn’t say anything about it to anyone in person or online whom I knew had been jabbed and were mostly true believers in the massive lies flooding the continent like the rains that drowned the entire world in the days of old.
Yet, recently, I was sorely tempted to blow my cover in the most inappropriate of places and times: a funeral. It was for a nephew of my partner. Charles was a 40-year-old man who, from what I gathered just by looking around at all of the grief-stricken faces, was loved by everyone who knew him. He’d been running on a treadmill in a home gym and collapsed while his wife was out doing errands. She’d come back, with the couple’s three-year-old son in tow, to find him dead on the floor. Another sudden death, cause unknown.
My partner, Jane, and I know he’d gotten all the available COVID-19 jabs. At this point, there is so much evidence that these jabs are killing untold millions with myocarditis, strokes, aneurysms, catastrophic lesions, blood clots, thrombosis, cancer, and other often deadly maladies, that Jane and I had little doubt that this vibrant young man was yet one more targeted victim, one more notch in the belt, of the elite’s evil crusade to kill us off one by one.
The church was packed with a tight-knit and well-to-do community among whom Charles was born and raised and had continued to live and thrive. After all the available space in the pews—a capacity of some 900—had been taken, the mourners who kept streaming in had to stand in the aisles along both sides of the church lined with tall, intricate stained-glass windows and then fill the large narthex in the back to the point where the last late-comers had to remain outside the hefty opened doors in the cloudy chill of a New Jersey winter’s day.
It was so tragic to me that it ascended to the mythic realms. It was a funeral from the old days—the forever days—people crammed shoulder to shoulder and only a handful of masked faces almost rudely reminding me of the contemporary insanity in which we are still living. In every other way, it was very sad but gloriously normal. The old kind of normal—an archetypal normal—that’s been long written in our bones and, despite what the fiendish transhumanists have in mind for us, we will never forget.
Being part of the family closest to Charles, Jane and I walked through the crowd to seats reserved for us three rows back from the front pew. From time to time, I glanced around at the enormous heartbroken and shocked gathering from all over the nation who’d dropped whatever they were doing and had planned to do to rush here and mourn a young man cut down way before his time. Odds are that there must have been one or two others among that hushed multitude who also suspected that the jabs killed him. But it was no more comfort for me than the warmth you’d hope to find from a star in the vast night sky.
So, there I sat, in the belly of that sorrowful beast, dizzy from willing myself to remain silent and sane. For the loss of life was not the only thing being mourned. It was also the loss of an explanation for the cause of his death. How in God’s name could this have happened? I felt compelled to tell them. And feared I might.
Just before the mass began, Charles’s wife and her sister and brother and their parents took their seats in the two rows of pews directly in front of me, while Charles’s parents and siblings took their seats up front on the other side of the aisle, much like it had been during Charles’s wedding ceremony that I’d attended nine years before officiated by the same priest who was now about to deliver his funeral rites.
As if being surrounded by these shattered people wasn’t enough to cope with, I then turned to see the coffin being wheeled up the center aisle accompanied by Charles’s lifelong friends, tears flooding their swollen red eyes, and then coming to a stop nearly within arm’s reach of me. A dead man lay in that coffin while his killer was on the loose and I knew who it was. I closed my eyes and prayed to God to keep me from snapping like the frayed, strained, thin thread barely holding me together. I grew faint from the blood rushing from my brain to my heart as it swelled with sympathy and sorrow while I struggled mightily against the reckless impulse to break the silence then and there about the killer jabs.
In his homily, the priest told us that Charles was so generous and kind and compassionate that he held Charles up as an exemplary model of the very best that humanity has to offer. We knew that. And I knew he was healthy and fit because the last time I spoke to him about a month before he was thin as a rail. He never smoked and rarely drank. A photograph of him on the cover of the program shows the smile of man happy with his life.
After the sharing of the peace when everyone reached for others to shake hands with or hug and literally wish them peace, I imagined myself a one-man flash mob from an ancient Greek chorus, rising up in the midst of this tragedy and shouting, “It was the vaccine, good people. That’s what killed him. Open your eyes. The truth is right here before you. Look. Do not let this young man’s death pass in vain. He sacrificed his own life so that you may see what killed him and is killing so many others among us. And each and any one of you may be next. Wake up before it’s too late!’
***
This death came on the heels of the death of another person close to me, one of my younger brothers. Rick died two days before Christmas. I’d received a text message from my cousin, Paul, who owned the house in which Rick rented the basement apartment. He wrote, “Please call me as soon as you can. Very important.” I called him and he told me Rick had died in his sleep the night before. He was 65, four years younger than me.
I cannot directly blame Rick’s death on COVID-19 or on the COVID-19 jabs because he never had COVID-19 and never got the jabs. (Miraculously, all my three brothers have also refused the jabs.) But that does not mean his death was not finally brought on by the entire scandalous charade of Coronamania that he and I often griped about on the phone the past three years. He had depressive tendencies to begin with, smoked a lot, and drank too much perhaps in that vicious cycle of trying to numb the pain of his life and his losses while digging himself ever deeper into a pit of despair that had finally collapsed in on himself.
Many old photos of his I’ve been going through show a cheerful, artistically brilliant, and good-looking teenager and young man. But the letters I’ve found between him and our parents—and conversations I used to have with him that I’ve been recollecting—reveal over the passing years an increasingly grim and conflicted psyche for which he was repeatedly encouraged (by our parents and myself) to get professional help. He never did. He died alone and unloved by any companion sharing his life with him. A loner by choice, by accident, or maybe by some curse he believed he could not outwit, he never married and had not had a girlfriend or lover in at least the past 30 years.
Among my two surviving brothers I lived the closest to Rick—my older brother, Don, lives in Michigan and my other younger brother, Bill, lives in Colorado—and I was also closest to him in years and in our family. Our father had died in 2008 and our mother in 2014. So, it fell upon me to drive the five hours from my home in upstate New York to Portland, Maine and was directed by Waze to the funeral home where Rick’s body had been taken.
After settling all the information for the death notice, signing papers, and handing over my credit card to pay a fee that approached extortion, the lovely young funeral director showed me into a cavernous room designed to accommodate hundreds but was now occupied only by me at the entrance and Rick laid out flat on his back at the far end of the room and covered in a blanket from the neck down. It was unreal to me. It seemed like a mirage. I walked toward him and sat in one of the two plastic folding chairs placed side-by-side before him, and wondered what to say, what to do. I was sad, to be sure. But also annoyed.
It was a gradual and avoidable descent for him to land where he’d landed, I was thinking, having grown up in an upper middle-class milieu much like Charles had. Why did Rick allow this to happen to himself? Why didn’t he seek help? Stop drinking. Give up smoking? Lose some weight. Clean up his act? He had so much going for him. A damned shame, that’s what it was. That’s what I was looking at.
But I was also looking at the remains of a lost and broken soul. Just how lost and broken no one really knew, perhaps not even himself given the subterfuge of the subconscious to sometimes hide our most malignant psychological complications. The world might just have been too hard for him—and hard on him. And my heart went out to him and the life he could have had.
We hadn’t talked in quite some time, so now I wondered if the increasingly insane and incomprehensible and intolerable state of world had pushed him over the edge into a sort of long, unintentional suicide. If not for the Scamdemic, he might have been able to hang on a little longer and finally remake himself. But why bother in a world that had gone completely mad? I get that. I really do. Albert Camus, one of my favorite authors, observed in his 1942 meditation on suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, that when one feels that the world is devoid of order or meaning—or, as Camus put it, “absurd,”—then “there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.”
I stood up to caress Rick’s hard, stone-cold forehead and thinning gray hair. “I’m sorry, Rick,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.” I sat down again, whispered the Lord’s Prayer, stood up to take a couple of photos that I would later text to Don and Bill, then sat down again for a few moments to let the immensity of this loss begin to sink in and to get one more long, last look at him. Then I got up and found my own way out, zipping up my parka against the persistent damp winter cold of coastal Maine.
I drove the few miles to the small, suburban, nondescript house where Rick had lived to join Paul and one of his grown daughters who’d come from Vermont, already immersed in cleaning out his one-room walk-out basement apartment. As I walked down the stairs, I found the place full of crumbled boxes of old papers of this and that, plastic bags stuffed with plastic bags, paper bags stuffed with paper bags, broken lamps, shabby furniture, boxes of glasses and cups and plates and bowls that had been shipped to him after our father died and our mother moved and downsized and were opened but never unpacked, rolled up threadbare braided rugs our mother had handmade decades ago, cobwebs and dust everywhere. And the entire place reeked of cigarette smoke.
Paul told me Rick would spend hours online arguing about the Scamdemic and “wokeism”—sometimes shouting angrily to himself, which Paul heard through his floorboards—and smoking so much that I’d found on the table next to his computer keyboard a volcanic mountain of crushed cigarette butts and ashes that he never bothered to put in any sort of ash tray.
During that gray and gloomy day, we made at least a half-dozen trips to the local dump and recycling center. One of the things we hauled away was his refrigerator filled with molding food and mold coating the inside of its walls formed because the door could not entirely shut due to ice that had formed around the freezer.
It had been a few years since I’d last visited Rick in a previous house he’d shared with Paul. It had not been like this. Far from it. He’d kept his share of the house neat as a pin, meticulous to a fault. This was a total shock. “What the hell happened?” I wondered aloud at some point that day. I had no idea. Neither did Paul or his daughter.
Juxtaposed to this, I found lined up neatly against a wall in the utility room many pieces of his framed art done over the past 40 years all sealed in bubble wrap from that move some years back and also never opened. I unwrapped them all one by one to see what was what. There were pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, oils, and acrylics of wooden ships, portraits, surreal scenes, men lost at sea, a lone man trudging through a blinding snowstorm.
I learned later that the manner of Rick’s death was “natural,” according to the Maine Medical Examiner’s office, which in its death certificate noted that Rick died of “ischemic cardiovascular disease and obesity.” In other words, two preventable conditions had he really wanted to live a longer, healthier life.
***
It was a study in contrasts, the days following the end of Rick’s life and the end of Charles’s life. One of the documents I’d signed at the funeral home was to authorize Rick’s remains to be cremated the next morning at a crematorium way out by the Portland International Jetport. I’d been offered a chance drive myself there to see him off—to “push the button,” as the funeral director said—but chose not to. I was too exhausted. I felt I’d done enough for him at that point, not just those few days but much of our adult lives as I listened to him gripe and offered my suggestions again and again to help turn his life around. I felt I’d had my fill of the entire, distressing drama of his slow, self-inflicted demise.
So, that next morning, in the span of time while I was either in my hotel room packing my bags, having a bite to eat at the hotel’s free breakfast buffet, filling up my car with gas for the drive home, or on the highway speeding past the city limits, Rick’s body was being cremated unattended by anyone who loved or even knew him. And here was Charles in a magnificent, shiny coffin for his ceremonial burial while his praises were being sung in that vaulted church by the decorated priest amidst a gathering of mourners that numbered close to 1,000. And in a final gesture of farewell, the priest swung over the coffin a censer of burning frankincense, whose aromatic billows of smoke wafted up into the heavens.
But what these two deaths had in common was their effect on me. I returned to my everyday world a changed man. I went from being angry to something else.
Beneath anger there is often a deep pool of grief. Grief that is unacknowledged and unexpressed. It’s there, inside us, but we just don’t know it’s there, nor how deep it is. I’ve felt this during these past three years. I’ve been grieving not the death of someone I loved or the disappearance something I cherished. There was no one person or nothing solid to grieve the loss of. Some in the profession of grief work might say I was suffering from complicated or ambiguous grief, the sort of grief you can’t quite put a finger on yet lingers. It’s like living with a ghost that you can’t grasp or get rid of. Only that ghost is inside you.
Up to now, I’ve lost a few friends not to death but because we didn’t see eye to eye on the causes and conditions of the current state of the world, particularly regarding the Scamdemic and the roll-out of the deadly jabs. We parted ways without saying goodbye. We just drifted apart. Plain and simple, sad but true. This is what I’ve been grieving. I’ve been grieving the loss of their friendship, the way we used to be. And could have continued to be if not for their naïve, obsequious, and sometimes zealous compliance. I have previously written about this here, here, here, and here.
Now that I’ve faced the deaths of two people close to me who I believe both directly and indirectly was caused by the crazed COVID-19 world, I’ve found someplace in my mind and heart to distill and focus my grief. And now it’s not anger I feel for those both closest to me and who took the jabs that I’ve felt simmering within. Rather, it is tender sadness for the losses that have happened to them and may continue to happen to them and to others I know and which I cannot even begin to put a stop to no matter what I say or do. Sadness, too, knowing how our government had betrayed their trust.
Among my friends and relations, it all feels like a river whose course I cannot change, a wind I cannot redirect, a rain I cannot stop. The well has been poisoned. I warned them not to gather there and drink its fetid waters. But my words fell on deaf ears. Now, I realized, all I want to do—all I can do—is to join in the grieving of the dead and to be with their surviving kin, to share the very human burden of lifting up their very heavy hearts with the fullness of my presence. As Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes in her poem “For the Living”:
It is the work of the living
to grieve the dead.
It is our work to wake each day,
to live into the world that is.
Time after time as we all wandered in a daze from the church and back to our cars through the cold gray day, people hugged me and shook my hand and thanked me for coming. No one was choosing a side, picking a lane, avoiding contact, defending an opinion. Jane’s immediate family knew that she and I are unjabbed. And from all appearances they could not have cared less.
I thought about the sharing of the peace back in the church. There’s a reason for that moment in any sort of mass. I think it’s meant to get us to us drop our guard and to physically connect with other people in an inescapably corporeal way. And in this way we are one. No duality, no self, no people or parts of the universe separate from the whole. Sometimes there’s nothing more humane or more important in this life of ours than holding someone or shaking their hand and wishing them peace. This was one of those times.
Weeks later, an autopsy revealed that Charles had indeed died from myocarditis. But I decided that day at the funeral that I cannot and will not even hint in some conversation somewhere down the road that the jabs caused it. That hard truth will have to come from someone else, somewhere else—if it ever does come to them at all. If it does, I cannot and will not take any pleasure in telling them “I told you so.” If it doesn’t, then so be it. It is not up to me to try to change their mind. I’d tried and tried without gaining one convert to the grueling yet liberating path of awareness of the deception that’s been played on us. I have made my peace with this mighty struggle within in me. I have, in a word, handed it over to God.
Many of us now walking wide awake among those who remain fast asleep have been challenged to find someplace to stand in this epic war against humanity, some way to leave a legacy of what we did to crush the tyrannical overlords who are killing us off and demolishing the ramparts of Western civilization with nothing more—and nothing less—than the sheer power of the incessant browbeating of their fearsome lies. But I no longer want to contribute to the ruinous division and discord among friends and family while behind the curtain the demonic cabal gleefully cheers us on like ancient the Romans entertained themselves watching the spectacle of slaves and prisoners flighting themselves to the death.
We’re in a civil war with no boundaries, no Mason-Dixon line. This war has spread like a cancer through the fabric of societies all around the world. So, we must choose our own boundaries. Clearly, in public venues such as this, I’ll continue to tilt against the psychopathic elite’s windmills of destruction and death churning and slaughtering untold numbers in their wide and pernicious sweep. And not so much angrily but resolutely and with a sound mind. This is my battlefield in this war for truth and freedom. I will not bring the war home with me. I will not spread strife among my remaining jabbed friends or relations. No more truth bombs at the dinner table. There is simply too much to lose. Truth matters. Transparency matters. But so does love.
With these two arms of mine I will embrace these suffering relations as if I really don’t know what’s up, really don’t understand why so many young men and women and even children are being killed and injured by a bioweapon publicly masquerading as a vaccine against a disease that has taken the lives of hardly anyone but the old and infirm, which is what happens anyway when you are old and infirm: you die.
The past few days an old Cat Stevens song has run through my mind. It was one of my favorites when it came out in 1970 when I was a rebellious teenager. The song is called “Father and Son” and its verses tell a tale of a father trying to pass on some sage advice to his wayward son. In one of the verses the father says:
I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy,
To be calm when you’ve found something going on
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not
Now, 53 years later, I am that father speaking to the young and wayward son who continues to live within me. Yes, it’s hard to be calm these days when I know something’s going on. But I am also thinking a lot of everything I’ve got at this later stage of my life and don’t want to lose, which I surely would if I continued to allow any self-isolating anger to come between me and those I love and who also love me.
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