Altered Spaces of Mourning: Loss and Grief in Times of Covid-19

I. Modern death and grief

As an effect of the theorizing of the ageing body in the twentieth century, knowledge of the changing attitudes towards death have been differentiated by Philippe Ariès’ studies of the history of death and by Norbert Elias’ investigations into the liminal experience of dying in modernity. With reference to the end of life, Elias has pointed out that “death is further postponed” when “life grows longer”: With the medicalization of death in the secular twentieth century, this also entails its repression, leading ultimately to the isolation and loneliness of the dying (8). As Elias further argues, in modern societies a sense of control over death prevails, making “the dangers threatening people, particularly that of death, … more predictable” (8). This argument about the relative predictability of modern death is central also in Michel Foucault’s influential definition of ‘biopower’. In “Right of Death and Power over Life” (1978), Foucault points to a transition from an embodied existence exposed to haphazard forms of death in premodern societies, either through contagion, plague or the death penalty, to a modern individualized life as an ever more controllable form of existence.

Attitudes toward death and dying have repercussions also for the complex emotion of grief, which—like the ageing process itself—has a universal dimension but has a history also as an embodied experience mediated in its cultural representations. In contrast to the sense of control that has evolved from the theorizing of death, grief has more frequently been regarded as beyond our control. It has been defined as unique, as different in kind from other human emotions, since for grief there is “no remedy provided by nature,” as Samuel Johnson has put it in the eighteenth century (qtd. in Barnes 215). Instead, grief has been opposed to nature or reality, as in Didion’s phrase ‘magical thinking’, since “[i]t requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed, that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled” (Johnson qtd. in Barnes 215). This opposition between a sense of control over death, or of its management, on the one hand, and the dislocating, unpredictable experience of grief, on the other hand, is expressed succinctly by Julian Barnes, who has frequently turned in his work to the topics of death, ageing and grief:

Since in a secular age the experience of grieving tends to be not only private but also isolating, literary responses to grief may constitute a ‘guide’ to fellow sufferers. Literary grief memoirs such as Joan Didion’s may function as books of consolation and guidebooks for coping with loss (Kusek 175). In response to the loss of his wife, Barnes himself has written Levels of Life (2013), a book that combines essay, fiction and memoir to explore grief by considering different measurements of space—height, level, and depth (Hartung 155–158). The traditional genre for expressing grief is elegy, which “began as poetry” and is connected to “a mood rather than a formal mode,” combining the two meanings of “a song of lamentation, in particular a … lament for the dead” and “meditative or reflective verse” (Kennedy 2). In Dying Modern (2013), her book on modern elegy, Diana Fuss points out the attraction of this genre of mourning precisely because of the “investment [of elegy] in reparation, resuscitation, and reclamation,” arguing further for its adequacy “in times of personal and national crisis” (7). Fuss identifies elegy with ethics in the sense that elegy is a form of “speaking, acting, and surviving in the face of loss, no matter how irretrievable those losses may be” (7).

Recent psychological research on grief focuses on the reconstructive aspects of loss rather than on rupture: in its concern with the continuities in the experience of grief, some current approaches depart from the view of mourning as potentially pathological, in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s influential distinction between mourning and melancholia (Freud 243).² If the twenty-first century can be regarded as the “century of grief,” it has also witnessed, according to psychologist Svend Brinkmann, “the reintegration of death into everyday life” with grief theories and practices that emphasize continued bonds with the dead (23). Telling us “that we can never completely master life” (3), the experience of grief may be linked to its literary representation by the ways in which an awareness of impotence and fragility comes together with aesthetic meanings and ethics.

II. Loss and grief in response to Covid-19

Twentieth-century engagements with death have encouraged a sense of control over the end of life, while advances in medical technologies have rendered it possible for many people, at least in the wealthy countries of the world and for the well-to-do classes almost everywhere, to expect to live into a healthy older age. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has shattered these securities. Private death, death concealed from public view, death in the hospital, or as a case for the medical specialists, has been turned frighteningly visible by the daily body counts in the news all over the world in the early days of the pandemic, serving as “a huge and shocking aide-mèmoir about the fragility and finality of the mortal human condition” (Pentaris and Woodthorpe 17). Arguing that the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a new visibility of death which may encourage a long-overdue politicization of death that raises awareness of inequalities between people based on age, ethnicity and disability, Panagiotis Pentaris and Kate Woodthorpe recall that

In addition to the immediate risk of death and of losing a loved one through infection, the implications of the pandemic for experiences of loss and grief have been multiple. Universal losses include “loss of freedom, loss of employment, the loss of contact with family and friends, loss of choice and access to certain services” (Pentaris 3). The grief specialist Kenneth J. Doka argues that “a future pandemic of complicated grief” may follow in the wake of Covid-19, regarding the pandemic as a traumatic event which has “challenged our assumptive world” by which he means that “we no longer see the world as safe, predictable or benevolent” (30). Doka distinguishes between four forms of mourning in response to the pandemic, in which different kinds of complications in grief reactions may occur, “including anxiety and somatic distress, depression and post-traumatic stress” (31). The first category encompasses persons mourning deaths related to Covid-19; the second category refers to persons dying from other causes, highlighting how the pandemic “can create conditions and factors that exacerbate the grieving process” (32). Thirdly, Doka distinguishes grief experienced by medical health personnel, drawing attention to how the nature of Covid-19 related deaths can “create moral distress in staff” (33). The fourth category opens up the broad field of non-death losses incurred during the pandemic. These include the “economic and social disruption” associated with Covid-19 (33), the “unpredictability and inability to plan for the future,” loss of educational, travel and sport opportunities, loss of jobs and income. As Doka points out, even though the death rate of Covid-19 “seems to be under 5%” (34), “the disruption of life caused by the pandemic” means that grieving individuals may be coping with multiple losses (36).

With its apparent return to premodern forms of embodied existence, Covid-19 has disrupted the sense of security in modern industrialized societies, triggered by the crises and multiple losses experienced as pandemic effects. Whereas the new visibility of death may encourage its politicization, it may also affect our ideas of death and dying in response to these pertinent questions asked by Jacqueline Rose:

Turning to early literary responses to Covid-19, I will focus on the generalized experience of loss, addressing mainly the broad category of mourning non-death losses in the context of the overwhelming closeness of death and dying caused by the pandemic.

III. Literary Representations of Loss and Grief in Times of the Pandemic

Literary responses to ongoing crises face the dangers of cliché and irrelevance. If literature is, in Ezra Pound’s definition, “language charged with meaning” and “news that STAYS news” (27–28), the pressures on contemporary writers to be “topical” and write “to the moment” can be hazardous, as Michael LaPointe argues in his critical review of “the literature of lockdown” for the Times Literary Supplement in October 2020. Among the publications that have received positive reviews are the anthologies Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown (2020) published by Penguin in India, and And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020) published by Restless Books in the US, both of which have a global reach and provide “a choral spectrum of trauma and resilience” (Patnaik 72).

Further examples of immediate literary reactions include Zadie Smith’s personal book of short essays, Intimations (2020), in which she ponders over the “absolute relation” suffering has to the individual’s mind (34), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief (2021). Originally published as an essay in the New Yorker in 2020, Adichie’s book is a grief memoir written in response to her father’s sudden death, not from Covid-19, which reads, nevertheless, “like a mourning handbook meant for our pandemic-ravaged world” (Dawoor 70). In its intense focus on Adichie’s physical experience of grief, beginning with her initial “utter unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor” (Adichie 3), the book transcends the spatial distance between her and her father by transforming her own body into a chronotope of grief: “Grief is in her flesh and muscles and organs; she is eyeball to eyeball to it, so close she cannot make out its shape” (Gerrard).³

The anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, one of the more ambitious literary responses to the pandemic, was originally published online. It is edited by Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-Jewish Marxist scholar and founder of the international publisher Restless Books, who teaches Latin American and World Literature at Amherst College, Massachusetts. As Anhiti Patnaik points out in her critique of the book, the editor’s approach emphasizes the “literary eclecticism and multilingualism” of the collection (72), which is characterized also by “a heightened communicability in enforced social isolation, perhaps even a push for translatability and literary border-crossing” (73). As Stavans explains in his introduction to the printed anthology, the contributions by writers from more than thirty countries all over the world were collected as “an antidote” to the initial over-emphasis on numbers in official approaches to the pandemic, chronicling changes by “interweaving words”: “That’s what literature does well: it champions nuance while resisting the easy tricks of generalization” (xiii–xiv).

Exploring how place is affected by loss and how this focus shapes literary representations of loss, it is interesting to note that Stavans, in explaining the structure of the anthology, uses spatial metaphors in three of the five parts into which the fifty-two contributions are divided. Borrowing lines from the Divine Comedy for the title and subdivisions of his book, Stavans calls the first part, “A Mighty Flame Follows a Tiny Spark.” Concerned with the earliest reactions to the evolving pandemic, this section focuses “on the eruption of the plague”—a metaphor which compares the pandemic to the geographical movement of the earth in an earthquake. The second part, “The Path to Paradise Begins in Hell,” is associated with “the need for a roadmap” (xix), while the fifth and last part, “Love Insists the Loved Loves Back,” uses “the door” as a pathway: an image that refers to endings and new beginnings as temporal instances, adding to this the spatial movement through the door to the outside world.

Furthermore, the anthology is designed to serve like a map, printing the country or countries from which each of the writers contributes his or her piece in bold letters next to their names in the contents list, thus emphasizing their role “as a witness firmly located, even trapped at a particular site during lockdown” (Patnaik 82). Contributions bring the Covid-19 crisis together with that of climate change, for instance in Filip Springer’s “Journal of the Kairos,” from Poland, which contextualizes the pandemic with ecological collapse. Challenging the idea that the global health crisis is a universal experience, Khalid Albaih, from Sudan, stuck in Copenhagen during lockdown, in his essay “Our Old Normal” observes the privilege in the “first world” responses to the restrictions it encounters, differing from the situation in his own country:

Turning to two contributions from the anthology, which address intimate aspects of grief in response to the experience of multiple non-death losses occurring during the pandemic, I will explore how these affect notions of space: Jumpa Lahiri’s “Letter to Italy” (9–12), from the United States and Italy, and Arshia Sattar’s “Living with my younger self” (316–320), from India.

Jumpa Lahiri, a British-American writer of fiction and essays, has adopted Italy and its language as her own. Embracing the limitations of this deliberate choice of a foreign language, Lahiri has linked her experience of writing in Italian to her sense of cultural in-between-ness. In her “Letter to Italy,” Lahiri describes how the pandemic has prevented her return to Rome to reunite with her son, who goes to school there. Instead, her son returns unexpectedly to America, briefly before Trump banned travel from Europe.

Lahiri describes her “pain” of not being able to return to Italy by likening it to familial grief: “It’s the same distress a daughter would feel at not being able to run to her gravely ill parent and lend a hand, because she feels compelled to, because she can do no less” (“Letter” 10). In her letter, Lahiri turns the countries Italy and America into personifications, and she contrasts the compassionate attitude of her Italian friends—in an Italy that was early on hard-hit by the pandemic—with the alarmism in America, where she lives at the time, and the scornful attitude of its president. The land Italy, which she addresses, is turned into an intimate friend, which shows her “how to face the coronavirus”: “Italy remains my point of arrival. For me, Italy is still a balm” (11). The spatial metaphor of arrival and the soothing associations of the word “balm” indicate how the familial grief for the country Italy is reshaped in Lahiri’s letter into a form of consolation. The necessity of absence, through travel bans and social distancing, is paradoxically reconfigured into an overwhelming sense of closeness to the friends in Italy, which is encouraged by the global spreading of the pandemic:

In Lahiri’s letter, distance and closeness, the wound of grief and the balm of hope, are introduced as spatial images to traverse the unexpectedness, the distress and fear of the evolving pandemic, portraying as its antidote attitudes of irony, optimism, discipline, even laughter in her personification of Italy. In her statement of compassion and solidarity for Italy, Lahiri draws on similar spatial and physical metaphors, which she has employed in her earlier book of essays In altre parole/In Other Words (2015/2016), written in Italian, then translated by Ann Goldstein into English. In this book, she explores the meanings of her turn away from the more familiar English language:

Using the spatial metaphor of “routes” (“percorso”) and the botanical metaphor of “roots” (“radice”), Lahiri’s analysis of her reasons for choosing the Italian language as a new artistic departure similarly draws on interactions of familiarity and distance, of the paradoxical wish for places of belonging, while cherishing a position on the margins. Her view of language itself is spatial and embodied, when she acknowledges that, for a writer, “language exists in the bones, in the marrow” (93). She employs the spatial metaphor of the “bridge” to describe her view of the foreign language as a hesitant “path,” which leads her to a new place: “Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another. It is an atypical, enticing path” (101).

Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s poetics of reduction, and his attitude towards old age and illness as the forms of creative limitation he courted,⁴ Lahiri embraces failure as the different literary path which the Italian language opens up for her: “I’m bound to fail when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t torment or grieve me” (167). With reference to Henri Matisse, who late in his life, with impaired eyesight and limited mobility, began to develop a new technique that he called ‘painting with scissors’, Lahiri describes her own method. What she observes in Matisse as “a turning point, a radical move” and “a surprising dialogue between negative and positive space” (205) becomes an analogy for her own aesthetic choices: “Writing in another language represents an act of demolition, a new beginning” (207).

Lahiri’s book of essays In altre parole/In Other Words is full of spatial metaphors, and although it is not thematically concerned with grief, in its intimacy, its concern with ‘linguistic migration,’ its shifts between familiarity and distance, searching for places of belonging and embracing the peripheral, its tone appears to be oscillating between feelings of love and loss—an effect achieved also by the “Letter to Italy.” Lahiri considers her book as “a sort of linguistic autobiography, a self-portrait.” She regards it also as a travel book: “It’s a travel book, more interior, I would say, than geographic. It recounts an uprooting, a state of disorientation, a discovery. It recounts a journey that is at times exciting, at times exhausting. An absurd journey, given that the traveler never reaches her destination” (213).

Lahiri’s linguistic autobiography and travel book, which chronicles the losses and failures she encounters in writing in a language foreign to her, but also its gains, its new aesthetic departures, was written before the pandemic. In her book on translation written partly during the pandemic, Translating Myself and Others (2022), which is dedicated to her mother Tapati Lahiri, who died in 2021, Lahiri revisits some of her earlier ideas on language and (self-)translation. A professor of translation at Princeton, Lahiri embarks, together with a colleague in the Classics Department, upon a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a text she has been fascinated with for a long time. In In altre parole, Lahiri had drawn on the myth of Apollo and Daphne, the nymph who is transformed into a laurel tree to maintain her freedom, to explain the duality of liberation and confinement she experiences when writing in her new language: “Now a new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable” (In altre 165). In the later book, Lahiri draws on the Metamorphoses when she learns that her mother’s life is ending:

Lahiri employs reading and translation, in a metaphor reminiscent of the pandemic, as an “antidote” flowing “through [her] veins” (155). She embraces the contradictions of rupture and continuity, of the loss and renewal of death and birth, in her response to her mother’s dying. When Lahiri, in “Letter to Italy”, links her love and grief for the country Italy during the early phase of the pandemic to the image of the gravely ill parent, a similar strategy of translation as transformation is at work. At the close of her letter, she thanks Italy for its “gift of perspective”, which helps her transcend the physical absence and distance from the country during the pandemic (“Letter” 12). In a similar way, she sees her mother’s death as a form of transformation that enables her “to translate her unalterable absence into everything that is green and rooted under the sun” (Translating 155). In both forms of loss, Lahiri finds a way to cope with absence,—the temporary one induced by the pandemic and the unalterable death of her mother—in her focus on transformation. Metamorphoses, as the dwelling in different shapes, and the many spatial and physical metaphors Lahiri employs in all the texts discussed, enable a form of consolation in the wake of loss that draws on and transforms the space for grief.

My second example from the anthology of responses to the Covid-19 pandemic is situated in India, “where one of the world’s strictest lockdowns was implemented” (Kaur 643). In “Living with my younger Self,”⁵ Arshia Sattar, a scholar of classical Indian literature, describes how she manages to catch one of the last flights from Bangalore to Pune, where her ninety-year-old mother lives. In order to keep her mother safe, Sattar isolates herself from her for about five days, keeping on one side of the house while her mother stayed on the other side. Sattar muses on the oddness of this spatial distance and isolation “from the most intimate body of all—the one that birthed you” (317). This idea of distancing from the mother provides the frame for Sattar’s autobiographical exploration. She uses the room, in which she spends the five days of self-isolation to explore “the person I used to be”. Mainly through the books stored in ‘her’ room, she encounters “that younger woman” that she feels to “haunt this room” (317): “As much as these books reveal a history of a young woman finding herself in the world, they also chart a geography of place and person” (318).

Personifying her younger self in “the girl,” Sattar re-enters her world in a form of travel to a time and place in which “the Future meant hope, it meant progress and promised that change was always for the better and for the greater good” (318). The author goes on to say that

Sattar contrasts the idealism and hopefulness of her younger self with the realization of multiple crises in the present, which are exacerbated by the multiple losses and the imminent threat of death incurred by the coronavirus pandemic. Her confrontation with her younger self, furthermore, makes her realize the very potential that has apparently come to (worse than) nothing:

Sattar links the crisis of the pandemic to other crises immanent, to which it adds an additional sense of urgency. The dialogue with the younger self also turns into an internalized intergenerational conflict, which pits the hopefulness of the young woman against the losses experienced by the older woman: “I feel judged by my younger self. Should we sit and talk, one of us so immaculate at the brink of a full life, the other shaped and worn by experience, by loss and grief?” (319). But this moment of despair and depression of the older woman, along with the contrast built up between the two differently aged selves, passes. It is superseded by the more benign spatial image of the “path of our hesitant conversation”.

The ending of Sattar’s autobiographical exploration is inconclusive. However, it reconciles, hesitantly, insights of the younger with those of the older self by both revisiting “the idealism” of the younger days and juxtaposing it with the experience of the older one’s “that our best selves need to be nurtured, trimmed, and pruned regularly” (320). The conversation between younger and older self is, at the end of the text, framed by the figure of the mother as “the other person who lives in the house” and has “always known and cherished the young woman who inhabits ‘my’ room” (320). In this way, the personification and dialogue of the differently aged selves are enveloped by the mother as a third generational figure. If the girl and the adult woman, in their virtual conversation, traverse various positions from youthful idealism, loss and grief to hesitant reconciliation, it is the mother who ‘houses’ this interaction, representing a place of knowing, understanding and appreciation.

IV. Concluding Remarks

Looking for possible connections between spatial images and grief in literary texts which respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, I have presented two different examples from Stavans’ anthology. Jumpa Lahiri’s “Letter to Italy” belongs to the first part of immediate responses linked to the earthquake image of the pandemic. Lahiri uses personifications of Italy and America, likening her grief for the ‘adopted’ country to that of a gravely ill parent. The spatial metaphors she uses of distance and closeness, the wound of grief and the balm of hope, prove astonishingly, even paradoxically soothing in the face of the shock, distress and fear of the evolving pandemic. Placed in the context of Lahiri’s writings on (self-)translation and her deliberate move, as a writer, from the English to the Italian language, it becomes clearer how her spatial—routes, path, bridge, arrival, travel—and botanical or physical metaphors—roots, veins, bones, marrow, bark—serve as forms of consolation. With similar strategies of transformation Lahiri addresses not only the losses incurred by lockdown measures during the pandemic. Even in response to the loss of her mother, Lahiri employs the change of perspective that reading and translating another language affords her to reinforce the bond with her mother.

Arshia Sattar’s “Living with my younger Self” belongs to the last part of Stavans’ anthology with its image of the door to the outside. Told from the perspective of the daughter who visits her ninety-year-old mother during Indian lockdown, it portrays a later stage of the pandemic, focusing on one of its practices of protective self-isolation. A different place, a different stage, using personification of a doubled self in different ages: the places in Sattar’s essay are rooms in houses rather than countries. The grief at stake for Sattar is less eruptive but devastating nevertheless in its evocation of “the death of life as we know it”.

Engaging with these two literary responses to the pandemic, it seems that traversing different spaces of grief, while inconclusive, may lead to paradoxical instances of closeness with absent friends suffering in another country. It may also extend to unexpected ways of understanding the self through the space provided by the distant but close mother.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.