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We, the Mourners of the Pandemic in Brazil: Relationships between Mourning and Politics Based on the Loss of Mothers or Fathers by Covid-19
Márcio Bruno Barra Valente
Affiliation: Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Belém, Brazil
Keywords: Grief; Covid-19 Pandemic; Policy; Psychosocial Support System.
Categories: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Demetrios Project
DOI: 10.17160/josha.11.5.1004
Languages: Portuguese
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has impacted ways of living and dying around the world. In Brazil, more than 700,000 victims have left millions of mourners in precarious conditions due to the negative impacts of the virus and the federal government's mismanagement during the crisis. The aim was to understand how Brazilian adults experience grief at the death of their parents from Covid-19. To this purpose, we conducted four semi-structured interviews, inspired by Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology. We interviewed two women who lost their fathers in 2020, and a woman and a man who lost their mothers in 2021. Aged between 26 and 38, all have completed higher education, are active professionals, independent and politically positioned between center and left. The research was authorized by the Research Ethics Committee of the Institute of Health Sciences at UFPA (Opinion No.: 5.452.525). The results were organized into thematic axes: (1) the experience of death by Covid-19; (2) the experience of mourning by Covid-19 and; (3) the experience of mourning and the federal government's management of the pandemic. The losses occurred while public health was collapsing: a shortage of beds and professionals in hospitals, a lack of effective medicines, unpreparedness and massive misinformation. The deaths were quick and isolated from family contact, preventing last care, tributes and apologies. There was no opportunity for funeral rites given the preventive measures against contagion, a determining factor in the impoverishment of support networks. However, not having access to the body and the urgency of burial/cremation (up to 24 hours) were decisions taken by the Union without scientific backing and which prevented the bereaved from mourning their loved ones; arbitrary decisions taken in the absence of harmful clinical effects on the bereavement process. The mourners understand their experiences from a feeling of anger not only at the loss, but also at their self-recognition as victims of violence, injustice and state arbitrariness. The catalysts for their suffering are the stances of then-president Jair Messias Bolsonaro in denying the pandemic, refusing emergency measures/policies, spreading fake news, boycotting the purchase of the vaccine, and also the delay in starting vaccination, which turned out to be part of a government strategy to promote mass contamination. Although we are unable to distance ourselves from history to reach more solid conclusions, we can see the mourning for Covid-19 as a new manifestation marked by precariousness and the disruption of expected paths, requiring new professional and political-governmental approaches. We conclude that the mourning of the pandemic in Brazil cannot be thematized only as a private experience, dislocated from the collective and depoliticized and that, in further instance, we need to find ways of validating this mourning through: 1) the production of research and investments in public health and social assistance aimed at those affected; 2) recognition by the State of the crimes committed in the Bolsonaro administration and; finally, 3) the promotion of affirmative and restorative actions that include the bereaved.