Waves of Grief: Fluctuating Restrictions, Treatments of Corpses and Experiences of Loss during the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, high mortality rates brought to the forefront the importance not only of the gestures performed and practices implemented on and about the deceased, but also, most importantly, of the entire sequence of funeral operations involved. The intensification of the work needed to take care of bodies in their biological component, from a technical point of view, generated uncertainties on the possibility to also adequately take care of the social components relating to families and loved ones. This raises questions about the factors influencing the experience of grief in these circumstances, and the extent to which funerary practices determine the nature and characteristics of grief work. Based on two anthropological research projects conducted in France and Switzerland in the mortuary and funeral realms, as well as with bereaved persons over the first eighteen months of the pandemic, this article aims at answering these questions. It argues that grief trajectories are strongly impacted by the way in which bodies were treated, as well as by whether the funeral was felt to have been conducted in a satisfactory manner. It also sheds new light on a series of factors pertaining to the temporality of the processes involved: dying circumstances; attitudes towards restrictions throughout the entire process of caring for the body, and not merely at the funeral; the period in the pandemic during which a death occurred, i.e., during or between “waves.” In so doing, the article broadens the ways in which we think about temporality and death.