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Where are our rituals of mourning?

This time is devastating.

In the last few months we've seen at least 40,000 people, and probably closer to 60,000 killed by a deadly virus in the UK. Sixty thousand grieving families. Lives torn from this earth. And those who are mourning are unable to receive a comforting hand on a shoulder, unable to have a hug in their grief.

This is awful. But what is almost as awful is the ludicrously blasé, flippant attitude through all this that has come from government, media, and (by extension, it feels) society in general.

Where is our grief? Where are out rituals of mourning? Where are our sackcloth and ashes?

The Prime Minister should be appearing on TV every night beating his chest and saying, "This is terrible, I'm so so sorry."

Instead throughout all of this we've had this "ra ra, cheer up, let's get the pubs open" bullshit from the beginning from this UK government. It's totally sickening. It's a total denial of an unfolding tragedy of epic proportions.

And it's not just the government, the right wing tabloids and the BBC have been terrible too. What would it feel like coming back form the funeral of a loved one (where no one could give you a hand of comfort), and turning on the BBC to see the top story is people shopping in Primark, and have you have to get to minute 15 or 16 before the newsreader says, "oh yeah, also dozens of people were killed today of this virus." Where is our respect for grief?

If ten people died of a terrorist attack we'd all be shocked and our leaders would be stony faced and serious and we would mourn and commemorate. But 60,000 people die of a virus and we just shrug our shoulders and say, "When are the pubs open?" It really feels like the old adage, "the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

We are profoundly sick. We are profoundly in denial. Our society is profoundly emotionally unwell.

I find it genuinely bizarre. Why haven't we declared a national day of mourning? Why aren't we holding a minute's silence for the dead? We have such massive rituals of mourning for war dead every November. Why are we incapable of commemorating the dead falling about us right now? It must feel so strange to have lost a family member in these months. Because everyone around you is actively trying to deny the tragedy, deny your pain.

Why this denial? I tend to think that it's because grief is too close to anger; that if we get upset, we will also get angry and start asking questions of a government that is undoubtedly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands through serious mismanagement.

But it also points to something that is profoundly spiritually wrong with our society. We have lost any ability to properly deal with death, to properly deal with grief, even when it is as present as it possibly could be (the only way death could make itself more obviously in front of our eyes is if bombs were dropping on us every night,  and yet now double the number of people who died in the Blitz have died of coronavirus).

How can we start to grieve? How can we build rituals of grief?

Comments

Yewtree said…
I think the AIDS quilt is a wonderful thing, and there is also a wonderful Instagram account called the AIDS memorial. The gay community created many great rituals of mourning while the rest of society was ignoring the AIDS crisis. I think we should look to that pandemic for examples.

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