Date Posted: Nov 3, 2026
On October 16-17, 2026, Rituals in the Making team members Sarah Wagner and Ruth Toulson traveled to Phoenix, AZ to take part in a two-day conference, Humanitarian Forensics: A Conference, Workshop, and Resource Fair, hosted by Arizona State University.
They were invited to participate in a roundtable exploring lessons learned from COVID-19:
Management/treatment of the Dead during Pandemics: Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic
The ASU roundtable organizers sent a series of questions beforehand, urging the participants to provide three “takeaways” based on their professional experience or academic research. Ruth and I focused on the following discussion topic:
Discussion Topic 3 – Cultural, Social, and Emotional Impacts on Families and Communities
- How have you seen the Covid-19 pandemic disrupt cultural, religious, and family deathcare practices? What specific challenges have you seen (i.e delayed services, isolation, uncertainty)?
- How have you seen communities adapt their memorialization and mourning practices during the Covid-19 pandemic?
- How can deathcare professionals better support these communities and display cultural sensitivity while carrying out their duties efficiently?
Three “Takeaways” focused on discussion topic above.
Ruth and I presented the following three “takeaways” synthesizing input from not only Rituals in the Making, with its US-centered research, but also from colleagues from Brazil, Mexico, and the UK, who participated in the Sept-Oct 2026 virtual seminar, “New Contemporary Death Rituals: Adaptations, Transformations, and Abbreviations in Contexts of Global Disruptive Events and Mass Violence Incidents”:
(1) Dual isolation – of the dying and the mourners who survived them: Pandemic death, for many, was seen as unjust, i.e., uniquely cruel in its conditions of suffering and isolation, with kin prohibited from being at the bedside to care for the dying and witness their passing and the dying unable to receive that care. In the days, weeks, even months that followed a COVID death, mourners were often forced to grieve alone because of pandemic restrictions.
(2) Ritual ruptures: Public health restrictions, especially in the early months, forced the bereaved to make difficult choices about burial, funerary, and memorial care that often resulted in cut-off, suspended, delayed, and impartial rituals. For some, ritual improvisation flourished, as mourners created spaces and objects to ease sorrow and sustain memory. For others, “angry grief” (individual) and “troubled mourning” (collective) ensued, and blame was diffuse, spread across multiple sites, from family to healthcare to local and national authorities. Misinformation played an increasingly prominent role in exacerbating COVID’s politicization.
That said, “rupture” must be contextualized. Historically, economically, and socially, COVID was not an anomaly. We look back to other moments of mass death. We ask: were the changes that happened to the ways we mourn best understood as rupture or acceleration?
(3) Absence of acknowledgment: With discourses of pandemic loss largely focused on economic, education, and social tolls (rather than mass death), the overall lack of acknowledgment/recognition on the state (especially national) level meant that mourners were forced to take memory matters into their own hands. While the pandemic required shifts to virtual platforms (e.g., Zoom funerals, memorial websites, social media posts), the bereaved have repeatedly sought permanent, physical sites of remembrance – locality and materiality matter.