Childhood Bereavement Amidst Multiple Pandemics

ABSTRACT

Childhood bereavements are not new and normal, culturally defined mourning processes have always required social support. Unfortunately, COVID-19 – like other pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and famines – has complicated and disrupted normal mourning in both children and adults. I review some of these complications and disruptions and then go on to describe some of the interventions that may be helpful and supportive to bereaved children and their families. While it is important to avoid viewing mourning processes as evidence of psychopathology, it remains true that a sensitive, psychoanalytically attuned approach to mourning may help identify those people who, because of past or present circumstances, may find their bereavements to be particularly disorganizing. That attunement puts us in a position to help individual children, families, and whole communities find alternative ways to do the work of mourning despite the obstacles imposed by pandemics, wars, and natural disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• multiple pandemics
• childhood bereavement
• normal and abnormal mourning
• individual
• familial
• communal interventions for mourning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The pandemic also highlighted many inequities that were already present (rich versus poor, developed countries versus developing countries, legal residents versus refugees versus illegal immigrants, etc.) and added its own further dimension of inequity – access to vaccines and anti-viral medications.

2. The rapidity of the changes imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic contrasts with the slow-motion – but accelerating – changes in our planet’s climate. Shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, declines in the availability of food and water, and the inexorable rise of the world’s oceans already are forcing vast numbers of people to seek new places to live.

3. Looking beyond the U.S., countries such as South Africa and Tanzania continue to struggle with the deadly impact of the HIV epidemic. Famine is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives in places like Yemen and Sudan. Finally, civil wars in Syria and Libya – and now in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan – are killing many parents. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse – pestilence, famine, war, and death – are leaving their marks on the children of today. COVID-19 is the most recent pestilence, but it certainly is not riding alone.

4. These complications are especially evident when the death results in some realistic improvements in the survivors’ lives (e.g., the end of an abusive relationship, an escape from a war zone to a place of safety, etc.).

5. The author Walter Benjamin (1936) opined: Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died … . Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs. (6).

6. Nonetheless, some reports, both in the media and in professional journals, have suggested that COVID-19 and the deaths associated with it represent a looming crisis in child and adolescent mental health (e.g., Liang, Becker, and Rice 2021; Scharff 2021).

7. In contrast, the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. for those aged 50 and over during the same two-year period add up to about 800,000. These older victims include grandparents, teachers, and others who often are involved in significant relationships with children and whose passing must be mourned.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul M. Brinich

Paul M. Brinich, PhD is a Faculty Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He trained in child and adolescent psychoanalysis at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course and Clinic (now the Anna Freud Centre) in the 1970s and in adult psychoanalysis at the University of North Carolina - Duke Psychoanalytic Education Program (now the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas) in the 1990s. He was a Senior Editor of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child for a decade, an editorial board member of the PSC, and is a Past President of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis and of the North Carolina Psychoanalytic Society.