Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19

Abstract

Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets of grief, many reported cases of putative pandemic-related grief may appear less plausible. For instance, it might be argued that many of these losses are temporary or minor and therefore unlikely to be grieved, and that the associated experiences are phenomenologically dissimilar to grief. In this article, as well as discussing the more general question about the coherence of the idea of non-bereavement grief, we address these obstacles to taking reports of pandemic non-bereavement grief to be literal and true. In particular, we argue that some may have experienced grief over even apparently minor losses during the pandemic. This is generally so, we suggest, only insofar as experiences of such losses form part of an overarching grief process directed at some broader significant loss. Thus, we cast light on both the nature of non-bereavement grief and the kinds of disruption and loss experienced during the pandemic.

The Trajectory of Depression through Disenfranchised Grief in Young Widows in Times of COVID-19: A Case Report from Rural India

“…Alongside deaths, non-death losses during the pandemic have stricken and made the former more complex. With a loss of a closed one to death, non-death losses and secondary losses are considered too minor to be grieved [ 24 ]. These losses have been unobserved altogether and considered as disenfranchised.…”

Incels, autism, and hopelessness: affective incorporation of online interaction as a challenge for phenomenological psychopathology

“…We suggest that this type of grieving has to do with a “non-death loss,” which refers to cases of mourning the absence of something or someone significant in one’s life without it being identical to bereavement ( Richardson and Millar, 2022 ). It can be experienced in the context of life changes, but also, we claim, when realizing that an assumed or long-wished-for life scenario will not take place.…”