This week saw a horrific milestone: As of last Monday, according to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University, the world passed five million officially registered deaths caused directly by the COVID-19 virus. Because most countries undercount coronavirus mortality, that number was probably really exceeded some time ago.
So an astonishing number of people are walking around with burdens of grief, loss and regret on their shoulders. Experts estimate that each pandemic death leaves an average of nine people with serious burdens of bereavement, so there is now a major country’s worth of people paralyzed with a sense of tragic loss, an entire Spain or South Korea of dead-eyed stares. And, in many cases, guilt: How many will spend the rest of their lives believing that they accidentally killed their parents, or their spouse?
On Thursday, the 11th of November, citizens of many countries will pause to remember the victims of one of the few other worldwide tragedies to have taken millions of lives. Our towns have memorials to the victims of the world wars, our politicians and schools still mark the dead. It is part of our public life to keep thinking about them, and appreciating them.
We don’t yet have this kind of commemoration of coronavirus deaths – in fact, for a great many people, the loss has gone completely unremarked, met by officials and leaders who want nothing to do with mass mourning. The world now appears divided between countries where the disease is now a subject of collective grief, and those where it is not to be mentioned at all.
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That’s partly because this pandemic is not like a war, where deaths are explosive and visible. Instead, our loved ones are quietly taken away to die wordlessly and largely alone, concealed by the homogeneity of an ICU ward and a veil of shame. Still, each COVID-19 death takes away an average of 16 years of healthy life, so the losses are as substantial as those of any war.
“Any grief that is hidden for a long time is causing a lot of frustration … Emotions change from one to another, and loss is one of the most ambiguous emotions. It could be changed to anything – to frustration, resentment, anger, rage,” says Karolina Wigura, a Polish sociologist who specializes in the effects of psychology on politics. “And it is probably this sort of grief that was being shown as anger and rage in many of the collective protests in 2020 – from Black Lives Matter, to the marches in Warsaw. I think this anger was the result of unprocessed grief.”
Dr. Wigura, in a paper published last week with historian Jaroslaw Kuisz, found that “COVID bereavement” is a subject open to forms of political manipulation that can be either constructive or frightening. While some governments have brought their citizens together in collective grief – think of the mass requiem in Madrid, the days of remembrance in Italy and Britain, the moving speeches by Italian and German presidents – others have deliberately denied the existence of grief in order to try to benefit from the resulting fear and rage.
“There are still many countries where collective bereavement is not yet voiced,” they write. “Silence reigns, especially in illiberal regimes such as Poland, where the government acts as if the devastating second and third waves did not take place … populists tend to use the pandemic for the sake of further dismantling democracy.” In both Poland and in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the pandemic was used as cover to pass laws allowing rule by decree and stripping away of democratic institutions; in Brazil, Russia, the Philippines and the pre-2021 United States, we saw denial of grief turned into a political tool.
Yet this tactic cannot be called a success. Those politicians who have responded to mass grief with denial or silence have not fared well over the past 20 months.
Dr. Wigura sees this as an opportunity for liberal-democratic politicians. “My argument for several years has been that, for several reasons, liberal politicians are not as good as populists in addressing people’s emotions,” she tells me. “Sometimes for good reasons, because they have many reasons to be skeptical about how emotions might be manipulated by politicians.” But she feels that a resurgence of liberal democracy will require a new connection with voter psychology.
“And one of the dominant emotions today, I would argue, is the emotion of loss,” she says. “Perhaps it’s time to make addressing that emotion not just a national glue, but also a glue for the international community.” If we can come together in our grief and loss and sadness, in mournful acts of togetherness, we might strike a blow against those who seek to drive us apart.
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