We are living in a war theatre, an apocalyptic moment of great suffering, sorrow, discomfort, pain and loss. That is what the coronavirus and Covid-19 has brought into our lives, a tragedy implacable, relentless, indifferent, and unforgiving. Waves of loss and grief marauding like ghosts and flowing though households, hospitals, families, communities, and nations; sorrow and suffering immense and immeasurable.
Death of a friend or family member is a painful thing, a disaster best handled through common-shared experience in most cultures and civilizations. I cannot think of a culture that does not mourn or celebrate the dead in one way or the other. Some cultures bury the dead six feet underground. Others place them at on mountaintops to be eaten by other species. Yet, more others place them in family vaults and sepulchres or burn them in blazing pyres of fire. But emotional and spiritual rites and rituals of death both Western and Non-Western cultures are much closer than all these physical practices.
Death is a painful experience and grief is a physical elaboration of that pain, very often an intense and profound emotional, mental and physical botheration; the worst test of personal emotional strength. This is, perhaps, why the traditions of honouring the dead are so strongly engrained in our communities, nations and civilizations.
As we fight Covid-19, and as it continues to take loved ones from us, to disrupt routines of human life and experience, it is becoming clear that strong bonds in our lives are loosening and breaking at the seams in the face of new pressures, daily loses and disasters, including sudden infections, sudden hospitalizations, sudden deaths, and sudden burials; it’s a nightmare and death seems to be everywhere, and the normal response of sorrow and heartache that occurs after we lose loved ones is being denied expression by the very health protocols we have put in place to stop or reduce virus transmission and infection.
The bereaved suffer, in many cases alone or in limited company and support, intense feelings of unmitigated loss, helpless sadness, emptiness. Many find some comfort in the structures and fast pace of workplaces but even here the bonds are loosening as Covid-19 cases invade workplaces forcing millions of people to retreat into the loneliness of homes that cannot be visited.
Many people are beginning to question the meaning and purpose of life. Grief can be complicated, all-consuming and so overwhelming people find it difficult to concentrate or function on the job. When sadness, anger, and despair are persistent and the individual is unable to feel comfort from social support it is unsurprising that daily function is significantly impaired and clinical depression, that terrible emotional darkness, sets in, destroying personality and self-sufficiency.
Sometimes thoughts of death invade, and keep on recurring. Other times a sense of worthlessness invades. Research and some health professionals are already warning due to lack of important traditions that formally honour the dead their greater risk for complicated grief that results in clinical depression and associated social problems like addictions and substance abuse.
The reality is that lockdowns, social distancing requirements of Covid-19, curfews, zoning, and remote working, have fundamentally changed the way we grief. The inability to formally bid farewell to the deceased at their bedsides, or during a funeral, or through a memorial service, makes those left behind feel a sense of ambiguous or delayed grief, puts them in an emotional limbo and many just know how to deal with such feelings and situations on their own. No hosting of a wake. No viewing. No funeral services. No celebration of life.
It’s as if no one has died.
This is compounded by other things like loss of income, or getting quarantined or isolated or retrenched at work of evicted from home right at the time and moment when the person you love dies of Covid-19. The simultaneous hit of these related crisis is something hard to deal when you are grieving. Unfortunately, this is becoming all too common in countries like India, Brazil, even here in Botswana.
In hotspots, healthcare systems are overwhelmed or collapsing. Mortuaries are overflowing. The dead are kept in refrigerated trucks. In some countries they are thrown into rivers. In worse cases the dead are abandoned in their homes, care homes or open streets. Even if a person is not directly bereaved millions of people are experiencing varying degrees of personal, social, economic, and political losses.
There is just too much exposure to high frequencies of trauma. Unfortunately, radical wealth and income inequalities continue to ensure that particular social groups endure the brunt of this catastrophe worse than the rich and powerful; the elderly, racialized minorities, those with pre-existing conditions, those working in health and social care, those working in low-paid gig economy, those living in overcrowded housing, those working in the informal economy with insecure incomes and insecure rented housing, overcrowded shanty towns and slums which lack adequate sanitation infrastructure and services…these are the grieving billions, and the pandemic marauds and devour as it pleases in these social wastelands.
What can the emotional-affective geographies of human compassion and sorrow offer in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? What significant emotional-affective qualities can we best invoke and utilize to negotiate this tragic human experience? What cultural mediation of emotional experiences, public spaces and narratives can we advance and encourage to apprehend the tragic loneliness of death under Covid-19? What collective moods and moral atmospheres can we appeal to if we are to understand and live with these human conditions? What therapeutic services can we use just to cope with each passing day, each pain, and every sorrow? Grief is a complicated thing. And not many people have the philosophic luxury of forgetting the dead. Pre-Covid-19 epidemiology taught us that where you live can kill you. Other people could escape the killer viruses due to superior health infrastructure and scientific advancement.
Covid-19 is reminding everyone, rich or poor, of their immortality. No civilization can remove that worldly vulnerability entirely, human fragility. And grief is a constant reminder, and demonstration, of our tenuous hold on life.
The coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic are changing just about everything human culture and civilization has taught us for generations, everything we hold sacred and dear, and fundamental, and at the heart of this moral and psychological metamorphoses is the profound impact of this pandemic on the rituals of illness, dying, death and burial of family members, friends, loved ones, neighbours and the people we work with, or do business with, even lonely strangers living in our communities.
The pandemic is forcing us to rethink the rites and rituals of death, to revise some aspects of these moral and ontological foundations, to refine some aspects of them, to improve or abandon or ignore some substantial things associated with them, and, in some of the most painful ways to even isolate and ignore the infected and ill, the dying and the dead.
Three things define the moral economy of death, bereavement, grief, and consolation. These are the essentials of human departure from the living world, from human society. Different cultures and religions, of course, mourn their dead differently but these three powerful human emotions are manifest, perhaps even dominant, in most of them.
However, we look at the gamut of emotions that run through human bereavement, human sorrow, and the entire lamentations of death, the loss that humans feel after the departure of loved ones is probably the same for the majority of people throughout the world. Some deaths are so majestic that all people can do is to celebrate them. Other deaths are so unexpected that they pain and torment us. Others are so sordid that we curse and ignore them. But no matter how we receive and attend to the matter of death, all deaths demand, and largely, get, sufficient human compassion to be properly mourned and consecrated.
This is how we have always looked at death.
The coronavirus and Covid-19 health emergence are changing all these things, all these moral and spiritual considerations. This pandemic is inviting far too many things into the moral economy of death, into the geographies of human loss and emotional suffering.
In addition to death and bereavement, Covid-19 has generated varied forms of loss and consolation. We must understand that atmospheres around death, both negative and positive, are vital to human well-being and resilience. What is happening under Covid-19 is that the rituals of death are being held to ransom by not only healthcare protocols and restrictions but also varying bonds of personal and financial precarity.
In many cases neither death nor grief have escaped the mechanics of widespread moral panic and public disorientation arising from the depredations of the pandemic.We have seen elderly people die alone in care homes. Children dying alone in hospitals. Migrants dying on bushes and rail tracks. Patients dying at the gates and doors of crowded and poorly equipped hospitals. Many people have suffered lonely painful deaths alone in their homes. We have seen some health professionals committing suicide out of traumatic afflictions.
But they have also been other painful losses. Mass loses of jobs. Losses of income. Losses of homes, livelihoods, and personal friendships due to isolations, quarantines, and other heath restrictions. There is so much to mourn in the Covid-19 world, and grief is acquiring a new dimension in the face of growing nightmares and a disturbing sense of implacable human tragedy.
It’s the first time in generations since governments and global health institutions introduced new guidelines and procedures that must be in place following a death. These measures severely limit and restrict our normal cultural, spiritual and religious ways of grieving and supporting each other. In the presence of a terrible health crisis that is daily creating more disturbing and ruinous crisis through other mainstays of national and public life; especially in the areas of income earnings and basic livelihoods, we find ourselves bared from buried friends, relatives, family members and associates with freedom and proper mourning and farewells, loved ones who die suddenly, unexpectedly and alone, dying undignified deaths forced on human souls by lack of support, and sometimes, lack of professional healthcare services due to shortages of hospital rooms, Intensive Care Unit beds, ambulances, ventilators, or oxygen.
We live, on real time, in one prolonged moment of profound losses, glaring and painful isolations and limited human contact, a situation that makes it very hard to grief. This increases feelings of sadness, loneliness, and abandonment. Incidents of isolation and restricted access to the dead and grieving processes frequently breed family tensions and arguments that are destroying family bonds and relationships at a time when mourners need such solidarity and cooperation most. Governments have become grief and bereavement coordinators, a thing previously unheard of. It’s often even hard to deal with emotional challenges of getting help with shopping and meals for funerals in times of lockdowns, isolation and losses of income earnings.
Grief is difficult and painful at any time but under Covid-19 conditions we find ourselves presented with unprecedented challenges of emotion process. The experience of normal pain, loss and permanent separation with the dead has now assumed new features and dimensions. The shock, numbness, disbelief and difficult in accepting death is now made worse by the knowledge and realization that you may never see or bid farewell to the dead. This makes it hard to process anguish and despair, to keep the darkness and torments that surround death at bay, and move on with you own life. Common features of grief like anger, physical heartache, restlessness, agitation and the complexity of confronting death and loss are all now more terrifying and appalling feeling to process and accommodate in the painful realities of things.
All these experiences of denied grief and mourning result in great waves of guilt that will take long to overcome. People start blaming themselves, feeling guilty for being alive while loved ones die, or just feeling pain and anguish for inability to say goodbye. They worry and fear what lies ahead for them. Whether they too will die and be buried the same lonely way. They worry and fear the possibility other family members will get Covid-19 and never return home for a proper funeral and mourning.
The other painful side to this situation is becoming manifest in behavioural changes with families. Some people are starting to avoid or alienate other family members and friends. There is reduced desire to talk about the dead, a most irregular and emotionally damaging thing at a time when we are every second bombarded by graphic images and statistics of human suffering and daily deaths in radio, TV, newspapers and social media platforms; information that triggers larger feelings of sadness and overwhelming realizations of helplessness. And it is physical botheration that is making it so hard for people to grief. We are being constantly reminded of death and dying. At the same time access is limited to bury and mourn their passing. This new order of traumatic bereavement in isolation, or under restricted orders, is emotionally and psychological damaging individuals and families.
The bereaved are increasingly finding it hard re-establish routine and functionality after losing loved ones because of these constant reminders and media bombardment, and, worse, the fear they too can get Covid-19 and die. Consequently, they have been reported increases of rush decisions about family estates and possessions and growing dependence on medication, alcohol and drugs.
This cannot be good. It’s just bodes ill for the future. The tasks of mourning are simple enough; acceptance of the reality, the imperial authority, of death, working through the painful grieving process, readjusting to living without the deceased, and finding a balance between enduring emotional connections with the dead and entering on a new life. Human experience encourages us to grief. To express our grief in tears, words or song. To recognize that to live is to die, that death is part of the journey of life, and that it is inescapable. To love is to grief when the loved one is lost, and no matter how painful, grief is normal and healthy.
If you lose a loved one, it is important now that you accept the reality of life and death under Covid-19 disease and the coronavirus. Accept this situation just like you admit the reality of death itself. It is still important to express emotions caused by loss. Find time for this. Private grief is a powerful and emotionally cleansing force because it deeply draws from your inner spiritual being, from your real self, the real you. Find meaning in this loss. Acknowledge the strangeness and hardness of your situation.
Do something to honour the deceased; a small gesture of remembrance and tell family and friends about your action. They will provide support and encouragement. Stay connected to society, family and friends, the church or your local club, and more, important, stay connected to professional support.
