I live in China. The pandemic's been casting its shadow here since the New Year's celebrations, or what we managed of them before all events were abruptly cancelled and people began to panic. It was very strange then, speaking to my friends outside of the country and seeing how their normal lives got on, while dealing with this surreal experience of being both in the center of the epidemic and completely isolated from it alone in my apartment.
Now it seems like the situation is reversed. I read news stories about ice rinks being used as morgues and elderly patients being taken off respirators to save young ones because of equipment shortages. Then I go outside into the perfect spring sunshine, with children who are still off from school giggling, biking around, flying kites. Families are getting a rare chance to spend time together, and now that the immediate threat is gone there are more people smiling than not. That doesn't feel real, either.
So it's nice, you know, to have a game that pulls that weird, distant sense of death and panic and loss that's been looming overhead since January, and concentrates it down into something as small and tangible as what gets left behind. It's soothing to play something that reminds me that death is both painful and normal, that we can mourn the loss that the world's going through without turning it into a horror story. It's okay to be scared for the people you love and still find quiet enjoyment in the fact that the plum trees are blooming.
I already considered myself a "death positive" person, though I didn't have a word for it before. My friends humour me when I babble to them about burial methods and drag them to necropolises for sightseeing, but they don't quite get it. I never realized there were communities out there for people who do.
So A Mortician's Tale made me feel less alone during a difficult time, in more ways than one. Thank you.