Published on 04-Apr-2020
Khushboo Razdan
"Losing someone is hard enough, but not being able to hold your family close when you do is the most gut-wrenching pain I've ever felt in my life," said a sobbing son in a heart-breaking video that went viral on social media recently.
The man identified as Stuart Hamlin from Portsmouth in the UK posted the video on his Facebook account revealing how he lost his mother to the novel coronavirus and was unable to see and hold her for the very last time.
"We can't grieve, we can't comfort each other. We can't hold each other," he cried. Stuart is not alone. As of Saturday, COVID-19 has claimed more than 58,900 lives and infected over a million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. With visitors banned in order to control and prevent the spread of the virus, almost everyone is dying in isolation – away from their loved ones.
Dealing with death and the dead during COVID-19
Heather Conway, professor of Property Law and Death Studies at the School of Law, Queen's University Belfast, says, "At an emotional level it could have a heartbreaking impact on the people who lose loved ones, when that person has died alone. It's one of our biggest social taboos… we believe that people should not die alone."
So, is the coronavirus pandemic changing the way we deal with death and the dead?
"There are two core values, namely respect and decency for the dead and protecting public health. In the current circumstances, it's probably more accurate to say that how we treat the dead is being fundamentally altered these days. The focusing has shifted to safeguarding public health – and by this we mean physical health of the living (against the threat posed by the virus)," Prof. Conway told CGTN Digital.
According to Professor Douglas James Davies, director of the Center for Death and Life Studies at Durham University in the UK, the pandemic has turned death into a matter of fact from being a matter of opinion. "In the current world circumstances, people are talking about the statistics of how many people have died of the virus. So, when we talk about religious and political beliefs, they are opinions and we can dispute them, but numbers are very factual."
"I think that's a really important issue, the role of numbers in bringing out to the surface the otherwise implicit anxiety over death," Prof. Davies told CGTN Digital.