De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning

In the spring and early summer of 2020, mainstream media in the United States announced the “death of ritual” as public officials limited communities from gathering to care for their deceased—whether COVID-19 victims or people who happened to die during this first wave of pandemic restriction. From backlogged funeral homes and crematoria to bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks and families scrambling to find their deceased, headlines seemed to augur an unprecedented condition of interrupted or derailed mourning. But how singular was this moment? On the one hand, funeral directors were telling a different story, reminding us that they’d been here before when the stigma of HIV/AIDS robbed the deceased and their loved ones of expected ritual care. On the other, as scholars of post-conflict societies and missing migrants can attest, COVID-19 was by no means unique in disrupting the pace and order of mourning. This piece challenges the characterization of pandemic death in the United States, especially in the first waves of infection, as exceptional because of what it glosses over: the predictability of which bodies and whose lives routinely pay the highest tolls. Instead, we reflect on the temporality of incomplete and curtailed care by juxtaposing the pandemic’s seemingly singular chronotope—born from the politicized bodies of the living as much as the dead—with the exigencies of uncertain death that surround missing persons of conflicts and borders. Seemingly punctuated events like wars and pandemics that give rise to aberrant death throw timelines into disarray; they also expose what underlies and endures: longstanding inequities to conditions that secure life in the first place. Thus, challenging this notion of presumed exceptionalism, we argue that the US experience of pandemic death and mourning throws into relief—at least temporarily—its systems of domination and invites a closer look at the intertwining projects of memory and political transformation.