Relatives of a COVID-19 victim being shown the body virtually before cremation in New York City. Misha Friedman/Getty Images
“…funerals can simultaneously articulate and configure future or prospective memories, including afterlife journeys, spiritual regeneration, and social continuity, through the choice of matter and things associated with the cadaver. Indeed, the power of mortuary commemoration in past and present societies is such that it can simultaneously draw upon multiple temporalities and scales of memory involving both the past and the future to define death and the dead.”[I]
Referring to the late 5th and 6th centuries AD Anglo-Saxon cremation practices, William suggests that there are various technologies of remembrance including ‘pyre-goods’ that made remarkable imprints of the dead after the cremation. These technologies, often, he suggests were not merely ‘objects of memory’ or artefacts that contained biographical details of the deceased but rather understood as the “commemorative catalyst”, which gave them a unique identity. Following the clue from this passage and recurring importance of death culture, this article focuses on the contemporary nature of death, mourning, and remembrance in times of the COVID-19. The article briefly focuses on two specific contours of death. First, it emphasises on the significance of death, processes, and modes of remembrances in times of the COVID-19. Second, it thinks about how death culture has dramatically changed – removing possibilities of what I call “last rites of passage” to death. In doing so, the article reflects on limited sources and reportage on death in the past few months. It moves away from the confines of defining death as a merely numerical count for tracing trends of the virus to deep emotional imprint, touch, intimacy, and unimaginable scales of loss.
In the case of the UK council regulation, it seems that the bureaucratic structure is widely robust and often lent detailed plans of burial procedure. While, the case of Iran as reported widely raises the impending question of death and visibility – making a cursory observation of the details that underwent in the process of burial beyond satellite visuals. These two examples are limited in the scope to explain the phenomena. In the recent past, we have seen some harrowing content related to the management of the dead bodies in India – raising concerns about how the last rites of the deceased are tossed out with disrespect. Each case speaks volumes about how death has become a matter of management – far removed from grief and mourning.
Unfortunately, these cases inform a worrying impact of the virus on societies. A Virus is transient in making our wounds visible that run deeper. The abysmal trauma which defines the departure during the pandemic is serious than it seems. Deaths are not glossary to a count. It is an intimate loss of those who make our lives seen, heard, and loved. So, in what ways can we imagine developing a “commemoration catalyst” that not only memorialise the departure of loved ones but also offers reconciliation – a passage to attain comfort without their touch and intimacy? In this new age of remembering and forgetting, as Sarah Tarlow, explores in her work, we must think of ‘gravestones as the embodiment of history and archaeology, text and artefact, where they become both deliberately communicative and unintentionally revealing’.[ii]