Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on the ways people bereaved by COVID-19 in Brazil have been reframing rituals of remembrance and grief consolation in everyday life, in the wake of the specificities of pandemic losses, especially the moral economy of contamination and the absence of death conventional rituals.

Paper Abstract:

This paper reflects on how people bereaved by COVID-19 have been reshaping ways of coping with grief in Brazil. I intend to address how the specificities of pandemic losses, especially the moral economy of pandemic deaths and the absence of proper traditional rituals during lockdown bear on the ways people are creating or remaking rituals of remembrance and consolation.

By the moral economy of COVID-19 deaths, I refer to the moral implications mainly related to the contagion of the disease, such as blaming the victims themselves for not having respected the lockdown and other protocols, or for having comorbidities that placed them at risk groups, producing categories of people more worthy of mourning than others.

The impossibility of holding funerals, or even opening coffins to see the body one last time, and the prohibition of visiting those infected with COVID-19 in hospitals during the pandemic were some of the factors that prevented people from saying goodbye to their loved ones properly, considering traditional rituals.

What have mourners done, then, to remember their dead? How can they produce consolation in the face of the deprivation of the community sharing of their pain in the absence of public rituals of remembrance and consolation?

To answer this question, I follow a group of people who lost loved ones during the pandemic in the city of Recife, northeastern Brazil. Finally, I add an autoethnographic perspective to this data, since I lost my father to Covid-19 in April 2022, shortly before vaccination began in Brazil.